2. History and Origin of Public Policy
18th Century BC (Code of Hammurabi)
15th Century-Church-State Relations
Writings of Machiavelli (1469-1527) and Francis Bacon
(1561-1626).
Montesquieu’s “Spirit of Laws” (1748) and Rousseau’s
“Social Contract” (1762)
Adamsmith “Wealth of Nations” (1776)
David Ricardo’s works on agriculture and free trade
policies
Woodrow Wilson’s “The Study of Administration”
(1887)
3. John Dewey’s (1859-1952) theory of pragmatism
Policy Science as a Social Science Discipline
emerged with the publication of Harold Lasswell’s
essay “The Policy Orientation” in The Policy
Sciences in 1951.
Robert Merton (Sociologist)- Inter disciplinary
approach to Public Policy.
4. Meaning and Nature
Whatever governments choose to do or not to do.. (Dye,
1972)
Dimock, et. al. (1983) sees public policy as “deciding at any
time or place what objectives and substantive measures
should be chosen in order to deal with a particular
problem”.
Chandler and Plano (1988) define public policy as “the
strategic use of resources to alleviate national problems
or governmental concerns”.
Robert EyeStone terms public policy as "the relationship of
government unit to its environment.
5. From these definitions, it is clear that public policies
are governmental decisions, and are actually the
result of activities which the government undertakes
in pursuance of certain goals and objectives.
It can also be said that public policy formulation and
implementation involves a well planned pattern or
course of activity.
It requires a thorough close knit relation and
interaction between the important governmental
agencies viz., the political executive, legislature,
bureaucracy and judiciary.
6. Thus the nature of public policy includes:
Public Policies are goal oriented. Public policies are
formulated and implemented in order to attain the
objectives which the government has in view for the
ultimate benefit of the masses in general. These policies
clearly spell out the programmes of government.
Public policy is the outcome of the government's
collective actions. It means that it is a pattern or course of
activity or the governmental officials and actors in a
collective sense than being termed as their discrete and
segregated decisions.
7. Public policy is what the government actually decides or
chooses to do. It is the relationship of the government
units to the specific field of political environment in a
given administrative system. It can take a variety of
forms like law, ordinances, court decisions, executive
orders, decisions etc.
Public policy is positive in the sense that it depicts the
concern of the government 'and involves its action to a
particular problem on which the policy is made. It has the
sanction of law and authority behind it. Negatively, it
involves decisions by the governmental officials
regarding not taking any action on a particular issue.
8. Furthermore, a policy may be general or specific, broad
or narrow, simple or complex, public or private, written
or unwritten, explicit or implicit, discretionary or
detailed, and qualitative or quantitative.
From the viewpoint of public policy, activities of
government can be put into three categories:
First, activities that are attached to specific policies.
Second, activities which are general in nature; and third,
activities which are based on vague and inconsistent
policies. However, in practice, a government rarely has a
set of guiding principles for all its activities.
