Jeffrey L. Pressman and Aaron B. Wildavsky,

This chapter comments onImplementation, a book by Jeffrey L. Pressman and Aaron Wildavsky. It traces its roots to the Economic Development Agency’s Oakland project, designed to promote economic development in cities by increasing employment opportunities for minorities. It considers Pressman and Wildavsky’s account of why the Oakland program failed, as well as their central argument with regards to the role of politics and policy-making in implementation. It discusses the decline of implementation studies as the dominating subfield of public policy research and highlights some key concerns raised by Pressman and Wildavsky that continue to be influential. The chapter concludes by looking at debates about the merits of non-hierarchical coordination, informal interaction, and emergent networks.

Aaron Wildavsky,

This chapter comments on Aaron Wildavsky’s seminal work,The Politics of the Budgetary Process, an in-depth look at the norms and rules of budgeting in the United States and the stable patterns of interaction between the various actors involved. Considered a classic of public administration scholarship, the book uses a simple yet fundamental theoretical framework for analyzing budgetary decisions. After summarizing the basic elements of Wildavsky’s theory of budgetary incrementalism, the chapter discusses challenges to incrementalism that arose mainly in the context of economic and fiscal crisis that influenced the way the federal government made budgetary decisions. It then considers the relevance and importance of Wildavsky’s work on the politics of the budgetary process by highlighting several elements that have had profound implications for scholarship on budgeting.

The Cop21 Agreement: A Giant Illusion?

<p class="Standard"><em>The policy sciences, enquiring into the making and implementation of public decisions, has made several stunning findings that are highly relevant to the COP21 Agreement or Treaty if you so wish. They constitute the so-called “implementation gap” or the “hiatus of policy implementation”, analysed by late American Aaron Wildavsky and also Paul Sabatier. The enormous enthusiasm for the COP21 framework must be dampened when confronted with the lessons from policy implementation, especially in such an extremely decentralised approach taking place over so many years. But the signatories have to decide now how to halt the increase in greenhouse gases (GHG), especially the CO2:s in order to start decreasing them, hopefully (naively) to zero in 80 years. As the emergence of economically viable renewable energy is slow, the only quick solution is to remove coal as an energy source. That would resolve the star economist Jeffrey Sachs dilemma that decarbonisation would result in negative economic growth.</em></p>