Bottom-Up Approach

The bottom-up approach takes the view that policy and action cannot simply be separated; hence, policy implementation is an essentially political process. It is concerned with the dynamism that bureaucrats and street-level service providers bring to the policy process.

Bottom-up approaches to governance emerged as an antidote to rationalist, prescriptive, top-down models where policy is devised by elites and mechanically implemented by passive bureaucrats and service providers. Bottom-up approaches examine the active impact of public servants on whether a policy is successfully realized and demonstrate that policy making does not stop once a policy is approved because it is continually being remade as it is administered. Conflict and bargaining, previously seen as dysfunctional, are embraced as inevitable features of the implementation process. Challenging traditional notions of a strict demarcation between politicians and bureaucrats in decision making and execution, implementation is thus understood as another form of politics within the sphere of unelected power.

This approach can be understood as a backward mapping of policy and problems from the end point of implementation. With an emphasis on cooperation rather than command, the actions of bureaucrats are understood as choices between conflicting or interacting demands. These actors are involved in a multiplicity of reciprocal, interdependent relationships, which they manage through resource sharing and dialogue aimed at mutually beneficial goals. Street-level bureaucrats, such as teachers and social workers, who encounter the public in service delivery, have a high level of discretion in how a policy is applied. Implementation is directed by the interests of these professionals, and may produce different outcomes to those originally desired by policymakers.

Successful implementation is judged in behavioral or human terms, and the role of political science is to focus on the nature of these interactions. One approach is to produce game theory models of self-interested people seeking to maximize their own power or influence. Alternatively, policy and action are dynamically linked and subject to interpretation, adjustment, and even subversion, which begs an interpretative approach to understanding how policies are enacted. Different actors view implementation from multiple standpoints, so interpretations of policy language or responses to dilemmas posed by the demands of competing programs introduce a decentered approach to analysis.

Bottom-up theory is criticized for removing traditional barriers between elected representatives and public servants in policy formulation and enactment, raising questions about democratic accountability and legitimacy. What counts as successful implementation? Is it legitimate for policy to be shaped by unelected bureaucrats? Does accountability entail responsibility to drive prescribed outcomes or trust to execute policy using discretion? If there is no clear policy path, then who is accountable? Can politicians shift responsibility for policy failure to those involved in implementation?

More recently, bottom-up approaches have been used in network analyses of actors and organizations focusing on policy networks and communities, steering, and network management, continuing the trend of decentralizing hierarchical approaches to implementation.