Unraveling the Public Policy Maze

Abstract

Reviews the book, Public Policy: A New Introduction by Christoph Knill and Jale Tosun (2012). This book makes two very different sets of interests and needs—the teacher's and the student's—converge into a single cluster of specialized knowledge. Adding to this main difficulty, a handbook wishing to dissect, analyze, critique, and master the field of public policy will have to synthesize, compose, and re-elaborate an all-embracing spectrum of notions and concepts, so wide as to make this task even harder. The editing and format of the book certainly contribute to its pedagogical purposes. Each chapter provides the reader with comprehension guides, examples from both the actual implementation of policies and unsettled debates on specific topics, and the usual "further reading" lists and links to Internet features. If a handbook is no ordinary book, then this book is perhaps no ordinary handbook. This volume deliberately challenges the conventional way of narrating public policy analysis. The volume disposes of the policy-centered focus and the ambition to "solve problems" by simply collecting information about them. Consistent with this implication, the book stresses the importance of policy change and the rationality underneath it, advocating for theoretical and methodological developments that are able to grasp, measure, and interpret this complexity further. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved)