Introduction

Public policy in a democracy is ideally about the successful pursuit of collectively agreed goals and desired outcomes. The democratic policymaking process needs to generate a reasonable level of agreement and clarity about these goals and outcomes. ‘Implementation’ consists of the organisational processes through which policy goals are pursued and realised. In practice, these goals become further refined through the managerial and negotiation processes of implementation, especially in complex programs involving many stakeholders.

The realities of policy implementation in modern governance are far from being neat and predictable. Firstly, policy needs to be understood in a holistic sense as including the program management, monitoring and evaluation processes. Policy is not just the initial ‘idea’ of what needs to be done, but includes the practices that constitute the policy delivery and consequent impacts. Secondly, the mechanisms of implementation are seldom simple, often requiring multi-organisational partnerships or contractual oversight relationships. Thirdly, the interpretive and persuasive dimensions of policy remain very active during ‘implementation’, with service-delivery staff having to deal with emerging uncertainties and managers having to make professionally informed choices during program implementation (Laws and Hajer, 2008). And fourthly, while attempting to address and manage complex or wicked issues, the underlying problems may continue to evolve, and various stakeholders might engage in disputes or reinterpretations of the required actions.

We argue that closer attention should be given to understanding and improving policy implementation, but we also need to identify and absorb the lessons already known. In seeking out these lessons, much can be harvested from studies that do not always bear the label ‘implementation’. For example, there is much value in exploring the relationships between traditional managerial ‘implementation’ literature and the large reservoirs of knowledge encompassed by governance studies and complexity studies. The former emphasise the relational networks underpinning policy design and policy management, while the latter emphasise the evolutionary and unpredictable nature of emerging issues and organisational responses. Implementation processes often encounter governance challenges that were unforeseen, arising from difficulties in the coordination of partnerships or from rapid changes in external events.