This comprehensive Handbook examines public policy evaluation in democracies. Focusing on the political dimension of the evaluation process, it argues that policy evaluation can be an emancipatory tool, reducing social inequalities and exclusion, and offers novel suggestions on how evaluations can be used to improve democratic policymaking. Laying out how evaluation relates to policy design, law-making, performance auditing and policy learning, this Handbook explores how policy evaluation can foster public participation, strengthen governance and enhance democracy. It uses experimental, constructivist and participatory approaches to analyse global case studies, offering epistemological, theoretical, methodological and normative insights. Contributors examine the institutionalisation of policy evaluation in national and international political systems, how to build evaluation capacity, the transformation of evaluation practice through digitalisation, and the challenges posed to evaluators by post-truth politics and artificial intelligence. This Handbook will be an invaluable resource for academic and professional policy evaluators seeking to deliver effective evaluation processes. It will also be essential reading for students and scholars of public policy, public administration and management, and political research methods.

The Public Policy Process is essential reading for anyone trying to understand the process by which public policy is made. Explaining clearly the importance of the relationship between theoretical and practical aspects of policymaking, the book gives a thorough overview of the people and organisations involved in the process.

Fully revised and updated for an eighth edition, The Public Policy Process provides:

Clear exploration, using many illustrations, of how policy is made and implemented;

Examines challenges to effective policy making in critical areas – such as inequality and climate change – including the influence of powerful interests and the Covid-19 pandemic;

New material on unequal democracies, interest groups influence, behavioural policy analysis, global policies and evidence-based decision making;

Additional European and comparative international examples.

This text is essential reading for students of public policy, public administration and management, as well as more broadly highly relevant to related courses in health and nursing, social welfare, environment, development and local government.

Table of Contents

Part 1: Policy Theories

1. Studying the policy process

2. Theories of power and the policy process

3. Interests and groups

4. Institutional theory

5. Comparative policy process studies

6. Integrating theoretical approaches

Part 2: Analysis of the Policy Process

7. Policy and politics

8. Agenda setting

9. Policy formulation

10. Implementation: an overview

11. Bureaucracy: organisational structures and processes

12. Discretion, rules and street-level bureaucracy

13. The policy process in the age of governance

14. Conclusion: evaluation and accountability