Policymaking is of its very nature a people-centered business-a good reason why highly effective policy analysts display not only superb technical expertise but excellent people skills as well. Those "people skills" include the ability to manage professional relationships, to learn from others about policy issues, to give presentations, to work in teams, to resolve conflict, to write for multiple audiences, and to engage in professional networking. Training programs for policy analysts often focus on technical skills. By working to enhance their people skills, policy analysts can increase their ability to produce technical work that changes minds. Fortunately, this unique book fills the gaps in such programs by covering the "people side" of policy analysis. Beyond explaining why people skills matter, this book provides practical, easy-to-follow advice on how policy analysts can develop and use their people skills. Each chapter provides a Skill Building Checklist, discussion ideas, and suggestions for further reading. People Skills is essential reading for anyone engaged in public policymaking and public affairs as well as all policy analysts. Completely changing how we think about what it means to be an effective policy analyst, People Skills for Policy Analysts provides straightforward advice for students of policy analysis and public management as well as practitioners just starting their professional lives.

Topics covered include meeting agenda and evaluation, project time line, conflict analysis matrix, external and internal evaluation template.

Updated in a new 5th edition, this book lays a strong conceptual foundation to understanding the rationales of and limitations to public policy. It gives practical advice about how to do policy analysis while demonstrating the application of advanced analytical techniques through case study examples. Policy Analysis: Concepts and Practices is a comprehensive, accessible, and rich introduction to policy analysis for readers in public policy, public administration, and business programs.

The world of policy represents the confluence of a number of intellectual strands in which the clinician brings science together with intuition, and uses his or her experience to interpret the evidence and make recommendations for treatment. This important volume brings together leading scholars to explore the "how" of thinking about policy - the questions, values, judgments and experience the analyst brings to bear.

Often described as a public policy “bible,” Weimer and Vining remains the essential primer it ever was. Now in its sixth edition, Policy Analysis provides a strong conceptual foundation of the rationales for and the limitations to public policy. It offers practical advice about how to do policy analysis, but goes a bit deeper to demonstrate the application of advanced analytical techniques through the use of case studies. Updates to this edition include: A chapter dedicated to distinguishing between policy analysis, policy research, stakeholder analysis, and research about the policy process. An extensively updated chapter on policy problems as market and governmental failure that explores the popularity of Uber and its consequences. The presentation of a property rights perspective in the chapter on government supply to help show the goal tensions that arise from mixed ownership. An entirely new chapter on performing analysis from the perspective of a public agency and a particular program within the agency’s portfolio: public agency strategic analysis (PASA). A substantially rewritten chapter on cost–benefit analysis, to better prepare students to become producers and consumers of the types of cost–benefit analyses they will encounter in regulatory analysis and social policy careers. A new introductory case with a debriefing that provides advice to help students immediately begin work on their own projects. Policy Analysis: Concepts and Practices remains a comprehensive, serious, and rich introduction to policy analysis for students in public policy, public administration, and business programs.

Policy analysis in Canada brings together original contributions from many of the field’s leading scholars. Contributors chronicle the evolution of policy analysis in Canada over the past 50 years and reflect on its application in both governmental and non-governmental settings. As part of the International Library of Policy Analysis series, the book enables cross-national comparison of public policy analysis concepts and practice within national and sub-national governments, media, NGOs and other institutional settings. Informed by the latest scholarship on policy analysis, the volume is a valuable resource for academics and students of policy studies, public management, political science and comparative policy studies.

This Handbook presents the first comprehensive study of policy analytical practices in comparative perspective. It explores emerging developments and innovations in the field and advances knowledge of the nature and quality of policy analysis across different countries and at different levels of government by all relevant actors, both inside and outside government, who contribute to the diagnosis of problems and the search for policy solutions. Handbook chapters examine all aspects of the science, art and craft of policy analysis. They do so both at the often-studied national level, and also at the less well-known level of sub-national and local governments. In addition to studying governments, the Handbook also examines for the first time the practices and policy work of a range of non-governmental actors, including think tanks, interest groups, business actors, labour groups, media, political parties and non-profits. Bringing together a rich collection of cases and a renowned group of scholars, the Handbook constitutes a landmark study in the field.

This book offers a novel, refreshing and politically engaged way to think about public policy. Instead of treating policy as simply the government’s best efforts to address problems, it offers a way to question critically how policies produce “problems” as particular sorts of problems, with important political implications. Governing, it is argued, takes place through these problematizations. According to the authors, interrogating policies and policy proposals as problematizations involves asking questions about the assumptions they rely upon, how they have been made, what their effects are, as well as how they could be unmade. To enable this form of critical analysis, this book introduces an analytic strategy, the “What’s the Problem Represented to be?” (WPR) approach. It features examples of applications of the approach with topics as diverse as obesity, economic policy, migration, drug and alcohol policy, and gender equality to illustrate the growing popularity of this way of thinking and to provide clear and useful examples of poststructural policy analysis in practice.

Ethics is a vigorously contested field. There are many competing moral frameworks, and different views about how normative considerations should inform the art and craft of governmental policy making. What is not in dispute, however, is that ethics matters. The ethical framework adopted by policy analysts and decision makers not only shapes how policy problems are defined, framed and analysed, but also influences which ethical principles and values are taken into account and their weighting. As a result, ethics can have a profound impact, both on the character of the policy process and the choices made by decision makers. PUBLIC POLICY: WHY ETHICS MATTERS brings together original contributions from leading scholars and practitioners with expertise in various academic disciplines, including economics, philosophy, physics, political science, public policy and theology. The volume addresses three main issues: fist, the ethical considerations that should inform the conduct of public officials and the task of policy analysis; second, the ethics of climate change; and third, ethics and economic policy. While the contributors have varying views on these important issues, they share a common conviction that the ethical dimensions of public policy need to be better understood and given proper attention in the policy-making process.