EPA-06 Page - 1Section I

Ans 1: In any society, governmental entities enact laws, make policies, and allocate resources. This is true at all levels. Public policy can be generally defined as a system of laws, regulatory measures, courses of action, and funding priorities concerning a given topic promulgated by a governmental entity or its representatives.

Individuals and groups often attempt to shape public policy through education, advocacy, or mobilization of interest groups. Shaping public policy is obviously different in Western-style democracies than in other forms of government. But it is reasonable to assume that the process always involves efforts by competing interest groups to influence policy makers in their favor.

CHARACTERISTICS OF PUBLIC POLICY

1. Only a few people usually designated by virtue of their offices are empowered to make decisions on behalf of others.

2. It is a complex act because of the large number of institutions and interests, which compete for attention in the democratic system.

3. It is an incremental affair involving a large number of junior to middle ranking officials who take decision on the basis of guiding principles.

4. It is made within an organizational context. The organization may be complex or simple, but there is bound to be an organization. This means that policy making in a hierarchical or structural affair and that decision-making is an authoritative action involving someone or groups with the final stamp of authority on policy choices.

5. policy making usually entails interaction with a variety of external interest groups, such as political parties, economic interest groups, religious groups, etc. the content, closeness and timing of these interactions is an important subject for impirical investigation.

6. Policy making is made up of various components or parts. The sub-structures mostly involved in public policy making constitute the political institutions of a society.

7. Public policy making is directed at the future and because the future is so uncertain, actual policy making tends to formulate policies in a vague and elastic term to be continuous so as to adjust policy to whatever the new fact may be; to seek defensibility and therefore to adopt policies that will probably not have unforeseeable results.

8. Policy making is a dynamic process which changes with time and actors. What is regarded as a public policy at a point in time may not meet the requirements of public policy at another time. This is because the system of value and behaviour which characterizes a public policy changes continually in content and process. Its actors and manipulators are subject to change as well. This dynamism and fluidity are essential and common attributes of all policies.

9. Finally, a good public policy must always be in the public interest, must not favour any group, section or individual intentionally.

Ans 3: When it was originally developed as a field of inquiry, research on policy implementation was marked by the emergence of a top-down approach in the scholarly literature. The theoretical and

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EPA-06 Page - 2empirical assumptions of this approach were immediately criticized as excessively mechanistic and unable to do justice to the realities of policy delivery in democratic societies. The critics who espoused a bottom-up approach were unified by their effort to examine the politics and processes of policy implementation, starting from the frontlines of public administration, where street-level public officials often interact with organized societal interests. The debates on the relative merits of the top-down and bottom-up approaches were grouped under the label of “first-generation implementation research”.

A consequence of the normative schism between the two traditions was the theoretical impoverishment of first-generation research on policy implementation. A new generation of scholars emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s – a second generation of research – who synthesized the insights of the top-down and bottom-up approaches into a conceptual framework that consisted of a set of theories of implementation. This synthesis approach, however, has its own problems – especially its tendency to be little more than a combination of variables from the two perspectives, which leaves the reader with a long list of variables and complex diagrams of causal chains.

A third generation of researchers, who distilled the large number of variables into a manageable framework, eventually emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They hoped to develop more elegant theories that could lend themselves to broader generalizations and more longitudinal inquiries. As Laurence O'Toole Jr. (2000) opens in new window notes, however, this effort proved too ambitious, because very few scholars have so far been willing to undertake such inquiries. In the 1980s, moreover, the process of policy implementation was influenced by structural changes in public administration towards decentralization, devolution of responsibilities, partnerships, and the restructuring of accountability relationships in service delivery. As a result of such transformations, public policies are increasingly being implemented in concert with non-state actors in cooperative or collaborative partnership arrangements. These new inter-organizational partnerships are not merely a passing fancy but are likely to be permanent features on the landscape of policy implementation.

The central concern shared by perspectives on policy implementation, organization and governance is to understand how government organizations interact with their external environment in the delivery of policies.

As a result of transitions towards complex and multi-actor policy processes, the focus of research on implementation shifted from trying to build meta-theory towards explaining concerted action across institutional boundaries. Thus, one notices the broadening of the approach to research on policy implementation into a multi-focus perspective that looks at a multiplicity of actors, loci and levels. In federal systems, for instance, the different levels of policy action consist of federal, provincial or state and municipal jurisdictions and their agencies. The loci of policy action often consist of constellations of ideational and interest coalitions within and outside the state within a policy subsystem.

Section II

Ans 10: Policies may be evaluated according to a number of standards. They may be informally evaluated according to uncritical analysis, such as anecdotes and stories. Policies may also be

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EPA-06 Page - 3substantively evaluated through careful, honest feedback from those affected by the policies. More formal research can provide empirical evidence regarding the effectiveness of policies. Finally, scientific research provides both comparative and statistical evaluations of whether policies produce clear causal results.

Policy evaluation can take place at different times. Administrators seeking to improve operations may assess policies as they are being implemented. After policies have been implemented they can be further evaluated to understand their overall effectiveness.

According to the criterion of the purpose of evaluation, it is classified into the following categories:

1. Strategic evaluation (with the purpose to assess and analyse the evolution of NSRF and OP with respect to national and Community priorities);

Strategic evaluation concerns mainly the analysis and assessment of interventions at the level of strategic goals. The object of strategic evaluation consists of the analysis and appraisal of the relevance of general directions of interventions determined at the programming stage. One of the significant aspects of strategic evaluation consists of the verification of the adopted strategy with respect to the current and anticipated social and economic situation.

2. Operational evaluation (with the purpose to support the process of NSRF and OP monitoring).

Operational evaluation is closely linked to the process of NSRF and OP management and monitoring. The purpose of operational evaluation consists of providing support to the institutions responsible for the implementation of NSRF and OP with regards to the achievement of the assumed operational objectives by providing practically useful conclusions and recommendations.

Ans 8: Impact evaluation assesses the changes that can be attributed to a particular intervention, such as a project, program or policy, both the intended ones, as well as ideally the unintended ones. In contrast to outcome monitoring, which examines whether targets have been achieved, impact evaluation is structured to answer the question: how would outcomes such as participants’ well-being have changed if the intervention had not been undertaken? This involves counterfactual analysis, that is, “a comparison between what actually happened and what would have happened in the absence of the intervention.” Impact evaluations seek to answer cause-and-effect questions. In other words, they look for the changes in outcome that are directly attributable to a program.

Impact evaluation helps people answer key questions for evidence-based policy making: what works, what doesn’t, where, why and for how much? It has received increasing attention in policy making in recent years in both Western and developing country contexts. It is an important component of the armory of evaluation tools and approaches and integral to global efforts to improve the effectiveness of aid delivery and public spending more generally in improving living standards. Originally more oriented towards evaluation of social sector programs in developing countries, notably conditional cash transfers,

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EPA-06 Page - 4impact evaluation is now being increasingly applied in other areas such as the agriculture, energy and transport.

Ans 11: The work done by the Parliament in modern times is not only varied in nature, but considerable in volume. The time at its disposal is limited. It cannot, therefore, give close consideration to all the legislative and other matters that come up before it. A good deal of its business is, therefore, transacted by what are called the Parliamentary Committees.

Ad hoc and Standing Committees

Parliamentary Committees are of two kinds: Ad hoc Committees and the Standing Committees. Ad hoc Committees are appointed for a specific purpose and they cease to exist when they finish the task assigned to them and submit a report. The principal Ad hoc Committees are the Select and Joint Committees on Bills. Others like the Railway Convention Committee, the Committees on the Draft Five Year Plans and the Hindi Equivalents Committee were appointed for specific purposes. Apart from the Ad hoc Committees, each House of Parliament has Standing Committees like the Business Advisory Committee, the Committee on Petitions, the Committee of Privileges and the Rules Committee, etc.

Other Committees

Of special importance is yet another class of Committees which act as Parliament’s ‘Watch Dogs’ over the executive. These are the Committees on Subordinate Legislation, the Committee on Government Assurances, the Committee on Estimates, the Committee on Public Accounts and the Committee on Public Undertakings and Departmentally Related Standing Committees (DRSCs). The Committee on Estimates, the Committee on Public Accounts, the Committee on Public Undertakings and DRSCs play an important role in exercising a check over governmental expenditure and Policy formulation.

Ans 12: Organizations like Oxfam, Greenpeace, Amnesty International and thousands of others serve the public on a national and international scale. Known variously as "private voluntary organizations," "civil society organizations," and "citizen associations," they are increasingly called "NGOs," an acronym that stands for "non-governmental organizations." The United Nations system uses this term to distinguish representatives of these agencies from those of governments. While many NGOs dislike the term, it has come into wide use, because the UN system is the main focus of international rule-making and policy formulation in the fields where most NGOs operate.

Today, NGOs address every conceivable issue and they operate in virtually every part of the globe. Though international NGO activity has grown steadily, most NGOs operate within a single country and frequently they function within a purely local setting. Some, such as legal assistance organizations, mainly provide services. Some such as chambers of commerce, concern themselves with narrowly-defined interests. And some, such as neighborhood associations, promote civic beautification or community improvement. But many important NGOs, such as those working for human rights and social justice, campaign for broad ideals. At the international level, thousands of organizations are active. According to one estimate, some 25,000 now qualify as international NGOs (with programs and affiliates in a number of countries) – up from less than 400 a century ago. Amnesty International, for example,

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EPA-06 Page - 5has more than a million members and it has affiliates or networks in over 90 countries and territories. Its London-based International Secretariat has a staff of over 300 which carries out research, coordinates worldwide lobbying and maintains an impressive presence at many international conferences and institutions.

Section III

Ans 15: In the United Kingdom, delegated legislation (also referred to as secondary legislation or subordinate legislation or subsidiary legislation) is law made by an executive authority under powers delegated from a legislature by enactment of primary legislation; the primary legislation grants the executive agency power to implement and administer the requirements of that primary legislation. It is law made by a person or body other than the legislature but with the legislature's authority. The power to create delegated legislation is limited to making regulation that is incidental to administering the primary legislation. Otherwise it will be considered as invalid or ultra vires.

Ans 13: A state and a society are both comprised of people. “Society” and “state” are interrelated. They depend upon each other, and the progress of one influences the progress and livelihood of the other. People belonging to one society may belong to the state, and the majority of the state may comprise people of the same society. They complement each other and are dependent on each other. The social customs, traditions, philosophies, and actions of a society directly influences a state and its work ethics. No matter how complimentary they are, the basic difference between a state and a society is that in society everything happens due to voluntary actions, and there is a vast limit for flexibility and acceptability. In a state there are rules and regulations; the actions are mechanical and rigid.

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