ABSTRACT
Most of the stakeholders as well as the legal and political fora that evaluate the outcomes of certain policies, projects, or programs will also take the policymaking process into account. They will only consider a negative event to be a problem of policy if it involved well-recognized failures of policymakers. One particularly complicating feature of public policymaking is that crucial functions of any nonroutine policy process tend to be performed by several or many complex bureaucratic organizations. If the ontology of policymaking is characterized by temporal, organizational, and political complexity and ambiguity, analysts and other observers are bound to disagree about the question how it can best be understood. Identifying agents in shaping the course and outcomes of the policy process and putting them into an alleged causal chain can be done in different ways, resulting in different explanations of the events.
