Policy Development

Policy Development in Context

The notion of policy development is intimately linked to the stages approach of public policies. This approach is crossed by many debates on the number of stages constituting the concept of policy development. Harold D. Lasswell, in 1956, was the first to elaborate such a distinction. His dichotomy was based on seven stages (intelligence, promotion, prescription, invocation, application, termination and appraisal). Nevertheless, the most frequently adopted scheme was defined by Charles O. Jones in 1970. This scheme is based on five stages with their own logics of action: agenda setting, which consists of the integration of a public issue by a political agenda; program development, when a problem is converted into a policy; program implementation, when government physically organizes the solving of the problem; program evaluation, which is an a posteriori analysis of the whole process; program termination, which supposes the end of the process and the beginning of another policy development.

The principal interest of these analyses is to introduce an order into a chaotic situation by dividing policy development and implementation into clear and logical stages. In reality, each policy involves frequent feedbacks and reformulation of political issues during its development. That is why many authors prefer an explanation of policy development in terms of cognitive process, focusing on the collective elaboration and diffusion of interpretations of policy issues.

Related Concepts

Notions such as policy cycle or implementation are related to the concept of policy development. However, the latter conserves its own identity vis-à-vis the former. The main difference between the notions of policy development and policy cycle is that a cycle is an analytical tool of public policies that proposes a complete view of the policy process. In turn, the notion of policy development only constitutes the beginning, the first stages of the whole process. For example, drawing on the model defined by Charles O. Jones, this means that the addition of the stages of policy development, implementation, evaluation, and termination constitute a whole policy cycle.

This also means that the concept of policy development depends on the analytical framework adopted to study the evolution of state governance. As an essentially descriptive notion, policy development is interpreted in different ways by state theorists. Thirty years ago, it was commonly assumed that the most important actors of policy development were those who worked for public institutions. Elected people, civil servants and state experts were more legitimate to act at the global level than the rest of society. However, this elitist conception of policy making has been under attack since the 1970s. Many authors demonstrated that the [Page 692]erosion of borders between state and civil society allowed the involvement of a growing number of actors into the policy development process. Pluralists stressed the integration of many participants, such as private advocates, companies, lobbies, and media. A new perspective was opened up during the 1980s through the success of the literature dedicated to the study of policy networks in policy making. Beyond the opposition between elitism and pluralism, policy networks analysts focus on the links between public and private actors (horizontal dimension) at different tiers of governance (vertical dimension).

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