Informing Policy Decisions

Abstract

One constant theme of the previous chapters is that public managers at all levels of government help to shape, interpret, and inform the policy process. But many policy analysts who will help inform your agency’s policies have been trained traditionally to think and act as if the bureaucracy is a “black box” in which resources and demands are “inputs” to agencies, which then produce policy “outputs.” What happens in between inputs and outputs within an agency are left to others to understand and consider.