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Presman, J. L., & Wildavsky, A. (1984). Implementation: How Great Expectations in Washington
are Dashed in Oakland; or, Why It’s Amazing that Federal Programs Work at All, This
Being a Saga of the Economic Development Administration as Told by Two Sympathetic
Observers Who Seek to Build Morals (3rd ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Reviewed by: Matthew Channing
Abstract
This paper reviews and assess the content, claims, and applicability of the work in
Implementation: How Great Expectations in Washington are Dashed in Oakland; or, Why It’s
Amazing that Federal Programs Work at All, This Being a Saga of the Economic Development
Administration as Told by Two Sympathetic Observers Who Seek to Build Morals on a
Foundation of Ruined Hopes. (Implementation). The first part of this paper will be a summary of
Implementation (1984), relating the events regarding the Economic Development Agency (EDA)
throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, as well as his use of essays to support the claims he
makes for the policy process and how implementation can be improved.
Implementation’s messages will be evaluated against the narrative constructed in this
book to determine consistency within the author’s writing and compared to the existing
material to measure the authors’ external validity regarding their assumptions and assertions.
The use of personal testimony provides a fitting lens to scrutinize Pressman and Wildavsky’s
claims at a micro level, and to see how generalizable Implementation is.
Key words: implementation – the process of carrying-out the terms of a policy; policy – a
directive from a policy-maker; policy-makers – an entity that has authority to compel and direct
the actions of others
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Implementation is foremost a review of the policy and policy-implementation, process.
Although not a broad overview how policy is formed, nor who all the actors are in the policy
arena, it does address aspects of policy making to highlight why implementation of policy needs
to be given more consideration. The first seven of the eleven chapters are dedicated to
exploring the case study of the EDA in Oakland. Chapters eight through eleven reveal ways in
which implementation can be improved, and why improvement should even be undertaken at
all.
The EDA emerged as a successor to the Area Redevelopment Agency (ARA). Following
World War II, the ARA came to fruition as an attempt to bolster the living standards in
predominately rural areas of the country, most notably the Appalachians. In 1962, the Public
Works and Economic Development Act sought to coordinate a broad spectrum of economic
development efforts happening at the federal level, and did so by renaming the ARA and
broadening its mission to include more populated areas with pervasive unemployment. At its
disposal were options to produce direct grant money as well as loans to employers with the
intention of enabling the employers to hire the unemployed.
In 1965, Eugene Foley came to the front of the EDA, impassioned to leverage the
organization as a tool for social change in Oakland. A plurality of factors influenced the decision
to concentrate an agency that typically spread itself across multiple program fronts. These
factors were budgetary in that EDA needed to spend its money to secure more funding next
budget cycle, programmatic, Foley wanted to demonstrate that his program theory could
produce success stories and that the methodology should be replicated, and finally the EDA
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could potentially ameliorate the racial tensions that were contributing to riots around the
country.
Foley, located in Washington, hand selected Amory Bradford to spearhead the Oakland
efforts of the EDA, which Foley prioritized as virtually the only efforts of the EDA. This was a
point of contention horizontally, as those who worked in other program areas previously felt
marginalized, as well as vertically, as those in Washington and at the Seattle regional office
identified Oakland as Foley’s pet project without too much merit.
Because of the urgency Foley and Bradford felt in realizing the goal of produces tangible
results, they partnered with agencies with identified projects, before assessing the projects for
their feasibility. This resulted in a slew of failures, with little to show for it other than high
dollars spend for minor to no gains. Multiple partners were brought on board to each project at
different points and could not always agree on the scope of work, nor accede to EDA’s demands
that certain hiring goals for the hard-core unemployed be met. On top of this, recalcitrance
from Washington, following Foley’s and Bradford’s departures, delayed assistance. EDA, too,
had an internal work philosophy that hampered its own ability to get favorable results. Only
when the EDA decided to adapt its policy to the reality of its operations, and partnered with an
agency that new what it wanted, how to get it did it finally produce a success.
Pressman and Wildavsky continue to uncover the conditions that lead to failure, and
how a greater success rate can be achieved. They point out that opportunities for disagreement
are major contributors to delays. Yet, the only way to diminish these opportunities is to
diminish the partners with whom the EDA must collaborate. While the authors conclude that
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delays, and in many cases, out right failure, in implementing policy is natural, they prescribe
learning opportunities through a plethora of evaluations designed to impact, inform, and guide
implementation for the present and the future.
Implementation has three main themes that breakup the book. These three themes
manifest in the first section of the book which recounts the affairs of the EDA in Oakland during
the second half of the 1960s. One major theme is that delays in policy design and
implementation are a common occurrence. A second theme is that implementation failure can
be reduced by incorporating the details for implementation within the formulation of the policy
itself. Finally, Implementation closes with the theme that implementing organizations need to
be adaptable. Although this text explores federal policy through the EDA, current and past
issues reveal that these themes apply to not only different levels of government within the
same branch, but to all branches of government.
A major example that Implementation cites as demonstrative of how these themes
transcend the federal government, and differing branches, is Brown v Board of Education. In the
essay Implementation as Mutual Adaptation (1983), as produced in Implementation, by Angela
Browne and Aaron Wildavsky, the authors speak about the side effects that occur when
implementing policy. Because not every outcome is conceivable when drafting policy,
inevitably, “the effects of many policies are not foreseen” (p. 220). This is not to say that the
effects are necessarily bad, but rather consequences are simply not known, and may result in
either good or bad effects. The range of control for these consequences can be near or far,
depending on the source of the policy. In Implementation describes Brown v. Board of
Education’ court-ordered segregation as vague in the policy it attempted to expound.
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Inevitably, the effects of the policy were not immediately foreseeable and one result was the
dilemma of increasing “‘court-induced white flight’” (p. 220) at the local level. Evidenced here is
the fact that policies have unintended consequences, but also that the power to ameliorate
these consequences can fall outside of the realm of the policy-making entity.
In this example, although the policy came from the United States Supreme Court, cities
and counties felt the ramifications and had to confront the consequences themselves. Still, this
addresses a major component of why implementation should be a part of policy, and why
implementation so often fails. Because action to implement the Supreme Court’s decision was
relatively swift, not enough time was given to how the implementation should work. In a
rumination on the policy of foreign aid, in Implementation, Pressman and Wildavsky remark
that there is a proclivity to, “engage in short-run expedients to overcome long-run problems”
(p. 136). While taking sufficient time to consider all consequences of acting on policy would be
the ideal, the social severity of the issue may reprioritize the values of the organization.
Confounding this phenomenon is the issue that values are not standard across organizations
that engage with implementing policy, and nor are values uniform within an organization.
Indeed, a primary example of value-divergence comes through organization hierarchy
and those who engage directly with the audience the policy is intended to affect. While
Implementation does not speak much about these street-level bureaucrats as such, it does
identify the myriad actors responsible for interpreting and implementing policy at the contact
level. The role of street-level bureaucrats, detailed more fully in Cops, Teachers, and
Counselors: Stories from the Front Lines of Public Service and Street-Level Bureaucracy:
Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services, cannot be understated in their ability to alter the
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process of implementation. As the point of contact between those afflicted with a problem, it is
up to these people to determine how the policy will provide a solution, if at all. On this process,
Majone and Wildavsky, Implementation as Evolution (1979), as produced in Implementation,
reveal that a high level of consistency in decision-making should not be expected, as
“bureaucrats are notorious for being too busy coping with their day-to-day problems to recite
to themselves the policies they are supposed to apply,” (p. 165). Street-level bureaucrats must
decide the facts of the policy with regard to the unique context of the people they must help,
and to what extent their discretion should stick to the letter of the policy versus solving the
problem at hand, when the two options diverge.
This schism in operations supports the idea of implementation adaptability, as the
implementation is interpreted through the bureaucracy, usually not those that write policy.
Pressman and Wildavsky, in Implementation, readily proposes the notion that the way a policy
is written determines how much adaptability the implementing organization will have. To
become a binding, policies need to be written so as to avoid being blocked and to bypass
delays. Adapted from the essay Implementation as Evolution, from Implementation, is a model
that illustrates the relationship between bureaucracies that must implement, and the policymakers. This touches back to the theme about marrying implementation and policy. One
variable is the terms of the policy, ranging from specific to general, and the other is adaptability
of the implementing organization, ranging from constrained to free. Information on page 176 of
Implementation informed the variables for Table 1.
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Table 1: The resemblance between an implemented and written policy
Terms of the policy
adaptability
Organizational
Constrained
Free
Specific
General
High
Moderate
resemblance
resemblance
Moderate
Low
resemblance
resemblance
This chart yields a few conclusions for implementers of policy. The first is that if policymakers wish to have a policy implemented exactly as it is written, they should make the policy
as specific as possible, and provide the implementing entity with as few options to implement
the policy as possible. Majone and Wildavsky (1979) enumerate several was policy-makers can
control organizational adaptability, “by defining the arena…identify and role of…actors…range
of permissible tools for action…supplying resources” (p. 174). The narrower the scope of these
factors, the more the implementation can resemble the vision stipulated by the policy. Yet,
detailing policy this way, and inevitably the nature of the implementation, does a disservice to
the population the policy seeks to assist. Here, Majone and Wildavsky point out that, “the
solution space undergoes continuous transformations,” (p. 166) meaning that over articulating
how a policy must be implemented can hamper results when the problem requires an
alternative solution. For these cases, a higher degree of freedom allows for organizations to
implement solutions that deviate from the scope dictated by the policy.
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Directly impacting implementation criteria within a policy design is the policy process
itself. Implementation is not a book dedicated to describing a detailed account of how policy
comes to be. It does, however, relate facets of the environmental context that affect the
process. Specifically, the authors explain that delays through blocking and obstruction can be a
routine part of the process. Books such as The Implementation Game: What Happens After a
Bill Becomes a Law, and Rulemaking: How Government Agencies Write Law and Make Policy
expound upon what Pressman and Wildavsky theorize as a simple truth to the policy process:
the more people involved in the processes of policy-making and implementation, the more
delays there are, and the lower the odds of success are. Table 2, adapted from Implementation,
chapters five and six, is a matrix that combines the precepts of the above-mentioned books,
and Pressman and Wildavsky’s own calculations that ultimately reveal: the more decision points
that exist within a process, the more likely the process is to be blocked.
Table 2: How policy process affects acceptability of policy
How political the issue is
Low
High
How many people
Few
Low blocking
Moderate blocking
are involved
Many
Moderate blocking
High blocking
To circumvent blocking, policy-makers need to make policy as removed from decisionmakers as possible and the best way to accomplish this is to make it simple. A simple policy has
less “steps involved in carrying out the program, and fewer…opportunities for a disaster to
overtake it,” (p. 147). The most effective way to make a policy simple and removed from
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decision points is to make it general. Recall from earlier the Supreme Court policy of
desegregating the schools. If the Supreme Court had added stipulations about ensuring equal
funding, and bussing mandates, it is easy to imagine that resistance to the policy would have
been greater. Thus, policies, to avoid being bogged down in procedure, are articulated more
generally, and prescribe an action to be taken, rather than the rules to solve a problem.
On the points of failure, incorporating implementation, and adaptability my own
experiences agree with the claims in Implementation. As an intern with city government, I
witness many examples of how vague policies contribute to vague actions, and the problems
that come with bringing partners on board. Much like Foley with the EDA, I see how
championing, and redirecting resources to a project can foster resentment from agencies who
feel that the agency is creeping on their mission. Similarly, given the rapid nature of change
where I work, I too feel overwhelmed and that my role becomes redefined as my office’s
mission evolves. For someone who seeks to implement evaluation and bring structure and
uniformity to outputs, an evolving scope of work can be difficult.
Thankfully, my office is as accepting of the theory behind the usefulness of evaluation as
Pressman and Wildavsky are. However, prioritizing evaluation so that implementation is more
impactful and congruent to program theory is not always feasible given time and resource
constraints. As with the EDA in Oakalnd circa 1965, my office needs to balance short-term
results with long-term viability. Still, the nature of our office philosophy allows us to be
adaptable and shift our priorities and methods more quickly than other, more entrenched
entities. In the public sector, where public sentiment can be mercurial, our agency’s
adaptability is one reason for our success.
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References
Bardach, E. (1978). The Implementation Game: What Happens after a Bill Becomes a Law.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
Kerwin, C.M, & Furlon, S.R. (2011). Rulemaking: How Government Agencies Write Law and
Make Policy. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press.
Lipsky, M. (2010). Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services. (30th
ed.). New York: Russel Sage Foundation.
Maynard-Moody, S., & Musheno, M. (2003). Cops, Teachers, and Counselors: Stories from the
Front Lines of Public Service. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Presman, J. L., & Wildavsky, A. (1984). Implementation: How Great Expectations in Washington
are Dashed in Oakland; or, Why It’s Amazing that Federal Programs Work at All, This
Being a Saga of the Economic Development Administration as Told by Two Sympathetic
Observers Who Seek to Build Morals (3rd ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press.