Public Policy

Abstract

This introductory chapter gives an overview of the essential components of public policy. Starting from the quest for evidence-based policy-making in twenty-first-century states, the chapter introduces this book’s fundamental understanding of ‘how to do (good) public policy’. The core argument is that doing public policy requires the skills and capacities to understand the policy problem at hand and expertise regarding past and present policies related to this problem—what has been tried and tested, what failed, and what worked. But policy-makers and supporting analysts also need an understanding of the political process of getting to good policies. On the basis of a brief survey of the intellectual foundations of policy analysis, the chapter introduces an ‘interactive’ approach to policy analysis and how it relates to other branches of policy analysis. Finally, the chapter identifies the constituent components of how to do public policy, which structure the book: process, policies, and capacity.