Since Pressman & Wildavsky’s seminal work (1973), policy implementation has been known as an area that heavily relies on case studies. Identification of “best practices” for a single case or a group of cases resulted in the multiplication of guides and lists of the “best way” of implementing. Despite notable exceptions that focus on successive comparisons across cases in one or more countries, policy implementation still lacks an agenda that advances the development of general theories and, more importantly, that consistently promotes the identification of implementation-specific competencies for policy managers. In fact, the current state of affairs in policy implementation studies create a twofold challenge. Firstly, which core competencies to develop for policy managers and how? Secondly, which general theories and knowledge support the competencies to be developed?
The paper intends to to focus primarily on the first question about identifying the core competencies and how to develop them, which fits the panel’s objective of “(…) impact of social interactions on implementation processes and outcomes”. A brief answer to the second question will be provided in the format of a short literature review, focusing on the fact that the reflection and learning about policy implementation can take place in organizational environments or in the schools of government where policy managers are trained. Mainly drawing from Van Aken et al. (2007) and Barzelay (forthcoming) the main objective of the paper is to discuss the educational strategies and teaching methodologies focused on developing four core problem-solving competencies for public policy managers in Brazil, namely: (i) sense making; (ii) design; (iii) argumentation; e (iv) representation. To do so, the study adopts a broad understanding of the term “competence”, which includes both the personal attributes (knowledge, skills and attitudes) as well as the contextual characteristics related to actor performance. Consequently, the first two competencies are focused on developing cognitive capacity based on knowledge and skills related to problem-definition and control of the results, which is closely related to what Wildavsky defines as intellectual cogitation (1979). The last two competencies are more focused on developing communicative and interactive behavior, such as rethoric, persuasion, symbols and the intersubjective construction of meaning from actors, context and other social objects. The paper intends to use examples from the experience at the Brazilian National School of Public Administration, as appropriate. A considerable challenge in teaching and developing competencies on policy implementation is moving beyond the case study as an emulation of a pre-defined problem whose solution has been previously structured. Policy implementation should be more than a technical exercise to operationalize solutions to pre-defined problems. In addition, policy implementation cannot be considered as a “stage” in a policy “cycle”, once it diregards that implementation is a dynamic social process in which actors interact with pre-existing social symbols and institucional practices to define meaning to their actions. Consequently, the main result of this paper is to present educational strategies to develop a group of competencies that increases the adaptability of policy managers, simulating real world implementation contexts.
