ABSTRACT
Public policy is shown in Chapter 1 to be a multi-disciplinary study closely linked to the social sciences that considers the process of making, legitimating and implementing policy made under the auspices of national governments and their agencies and through the growing array of inter-governmental organisations. It is pointed out in Chapter 2 that policy studies in its infancy was an attempt to develop a more scientific methodology for securing the best outcomes for policy problems. The discipline emerged as a separate sub-field in the social sciences primarily as an attempt to develop rational means to scientifically establish processes and attitudes of mind that could create the optimum solutions to problems that needed to be resolved for the benefit of society. These well intentioned ideas of the mid-twentieth century have never fulfilled their original aims but importantly raised controversies that have produced a more sophisticated understanding of how public policy is formed and processed. However, further advances in understanding and improving policy content and processes must lie in the better development of subjective as well as positivist answers to many continuing problems. This will also lead to a less inward and self-referential approach to the study by connecting to the wider theories of social sciences.
