Public policy theory, practice and skills: Advancing the debate

Abstract

Debates about the need for developing better policy capacities and skills in government gained momentum in the 1950s and 1960s. At this time, there was a proliferation of interest in ‘policy sciences’ thinking and systemic approaches, popularised primarily by US scholars and ‘pracademics’. Much of the policy theory–making emanating from the US was a legacy of the New Deal planning agendas of the mid-1930s and later strategic planning approaches developed by public and private organisations that helped to plan and strategise the war effort in the 1940s and the subsequent Cold War. Cognisant of calls for administrative reform in