What is a policy, and what is a government program? A simple question with no clear answer, until now

Abstract

The difficulty of defining and distinguishing what is a public policy and what is a government program is a crucial problem with practical and important consequences for the design, efficiency, and effectiveness of policies and programs. However, public servants are taught to live in this Babel without paying much attention to it. The article extracts this evidence from a methodology that combined a qualitative experiment and in-depth interviews with more than 350 Brazilian Federal Government employees, over the past 5 years. The article proposes a new approach to the design of policies and programs as a basic criterion for ex-ante analysis to contribute to making such latent inconsistencies even more glaring and evident and to overcome the most common failures, as soon and as easily as possible, before programs take their first step.