ABSTRACT
The policy process is the means by which particular policies emerge and are pursued by governments and government agencies. Policy is best understood as the consequence of the interrelation of ‘actors’, the wider context, the process by which policy is made and the content of the policy itself. A common-sense approach would equate public policy with the formal decisions or explicit proposals of governments or public agencies. Descriptions of the policy process as a system have been dominated in recent years by two opposing schools of thought - the ‘rationalists’ and the ‘incrementalists’. ‘Rational’ models of the policy process describe it in terms of a series of linked, but distinct, phases and types of activity that together produce ‘a policy’. In the rational models of the policy process described, implementation features as a distinct phase that occurs once the formal ‘policy’ has been created.
