Implementation of policy can make or break a government– failure can quickly become a major political issue and an example of government incompetence (Althaus et. al, 2018:180). This can happen at all levels of government.
Many disciplines and policy areas such as education, health and transport, document the significance of implementation to policy outcomes and have developed certain theoretical aspects concerning implementation in their analysis over a long period from the 1940s (Saetren 2005). Surprisingly, however, the diversity in scholarship on implementation emanating from multidisciplinary analysis is not reflected in the existing canon of public administration, which instead frames implementation as starting in the 1970s with Pressman and Wildavsky’s seminal work and is constrained to an intra-public administration focus.
There is a problem with this lack of attention to what other disciplines are saying about implementation. Public administration is trapped at a brick wall, in dead-end discussions around top-down, bottom-up approaches. While some effort has gone to developing an integrated synthesis of implementation theory, this analysis remains unwieldy and unproductive, containing too many variables and a lack of generalisability. As a corollary, public policy implementation is missing out on the benefits of key insights to inform implementation practice and theory moving forward.
The theme of the 2018 IRSPM conference and this panel is concerned with value co-creation in public service delivery to improve policy effectiveness. Co-creation of value in public service implementation requires us to consider theory and practice that bridges non-government actors, many disciplines and the insights of other theories such as the policy process. Paying attention to these boundary spanning efforts this paper poses the research question: what can public policy and public administration learn from other disciplinary perspectives on implementation?
We build off Saetren’s (2005) survey of the field to critically evaluate the development of implementation theory from a multidisciplinary perspective. We use comparative case methodology to analyse two cases of congestion charging in Canada and Building the Education Revolution in Australia to argue that implementation literature has not fully utilised lessons from other disciplines that can make for more effective implementation action in policy practice.
We conclude with observations about how theory and practice of implementation can be usefully progressed beyond existing conceptual frameworks that constrain public administration thinking about implementation.
