ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews a tools-based approach to exploring the substantive, procedural, and temporal aspects of policy advice in relation to how governments generate and evaluate policy options and make decisions. It focuses on the partisan-political and nonpartisan aspects of how policy advice, as a tool, impacts the substance of policy matters but also the processes by which policy is developed and used by policymakers. The chapter explains that the emphasis on procedural information-based public information campaigns can be broadened by recognizing that policy advice, as a tool, has inward- and outward-facing roles at various stages of policymaking. Government advisory activity can and does move markets and impact citizen and firm behavior and has major implications for the supply and demand of internal policy work of governments. A series of illustrative examples are used to demonstrate the breadth and diversity of policy advice, as a policy tool.
