Understanding Policy Fiascoes

Abstract

In many respects, the last decades of the twentieth century have had the air of a fin de siècle for the theory and practice of government. During the 1980s especially, the state of governance was paradoxical. Neoconservative critics of government intervention in the economy rose to positions of political and bureaucratic power. This chapter attempts to dissect the various dimensions of this complexity, and challenges its readers to face up to the many conceptual, empirical, and normative dilemmas of contemporary policy evaluation and analysis, as it attempts to understand the public controversies through which policy fiascoes and their roots are constituted. It illustrates some major analytical challenges and dangers inherent in the study of policy fiascoes that prompted these questions. The chapter attempts to understand policy fiascoes by analyzing what happens when people label events as fiascoes, speculates about their causes, and draws lessons from them.

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