What is public policy? Concepts, trends and issues

In recent years, three distinct fields of enquiry have developed that contribute to our understanding of public policy. The first of these is the field of policy sciences that grew in response to a call by Harold Lasswell in the 1950s, to overcome the weaknesses of conventional disciplines in understanding the poor record of development policy. This evolved as an inter-disciplinary field, drawing on several disciplines. Contributions to this field came to be organised around the journal Policy Sciences. The second was the field of policy studies, that emerged as a sub-field of political science; contributions to this field of enquiry were organised around the journals Policy Studies Review and Policy Studies Journal . The third was the field of policy analysis, further developed by a Ford Foundation grant in the 1990s, which began as a group of institutions doing applied micro-economics, later broadening under the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management . Policy analysis was an applied extension of microeconomics to the study of public policy. Each of these fields retains a distinct approach to the study of public policy. However, they suffer from several weaknesses in terms of their applicability to a context beyond the one in which they developed. Policy sciences, in particular, emerged as a very inter-disciplinary field, drawing on several concepts across disciplines. However, the large bulk of this literature is rooted in western contexts and has been developed by western scholars. There remains a question of whether these terms and concepts can be used to understand public policy processes in the global South. Within the international public policy scholarship, there is a burning question of whether tools, theories and concepts that explain policy change developed in the north can be used to understand policy processes in the South. In general, efforts to understand the relevance and application of these concepts and theories to a Third World context are lacking. There remains a critical challenge of integrating public policy literature developed in the global North with the policy experience of the global South. The large number of books on public policy available to Indian students are written by western authors and cater to a western context; they use examples and cases from Britain and the USA. This is of little relevance to Indian students, who need something tailored to or drawing upon an Indian context.