Abstract
A collaborative approach to public management is critical in an era of governance that depends upon networks more than centralized bureaucracies, yet public affairs education has not adequately responded to the need to develop new tools to support analysis of complex settings. Policy field analysis is one tool that can help professionals-in-training learn to act purposively within complex policy environments. Policy fields—public and private institutions, in a substantive public policy or program area, in a particular place—shape how state and local actors work to solve public management problems, and their pursuit of programmatic goals in turn shapes the policy field. Using a well-known teaching case, the authors present a series of analytical questions and mapping tools that help clarify the structure of complex policy environments; the institutional and interorganizational relationships involved; and the resources that influence interactions in the policy field.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 129-148 |
| Number of pages | 20 |
| Journal | Journal of Public Affairs Education |
| Volume | 14 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Sep 1 2008 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Teaching Others to Analyze Policy Fields In the classroom, policy field analysis involves the systematic application of a series of questions to a particular situation. Through this application, visual representations of the actual policy field are created (Anderson et al., 2005; Dobel and Day, 2005). These representations allow people to understand the structure of the institutions and the nature of their relationships. They also provide a mechanism whereby students can communicate with others about the results of their analysis; the visuals may function like boundary objects that help with the sharing of complex, practice-based knowledge (Bechky, 2003; Carlile, 2002). In this paper, we are specifically concerned with exploring how this construct can be taught to master’s students in management, policy analysis, and topical courses offered in schools of public affairs. In our experience, policy field analysis can be undertaken in two ways. The first involves students identifying policy areas of interest and conducting supervised field-based research to fully investigate each of the analytical questions. In addition to visual maps, more detailed memoranda can be created to document dimensions of the analysis difficult to reduce to visual representation. For more limited application, faculty may also utilize a written teaching case. These cases typically paint vivid pictures of the management and leadership dilemmas embedded in contextual detail. For the remainder of this article, we will pursue this second strategy to better illustrate the analytical steps. We will draw upon a widely available teaching case, “Integrated Housing and Social Services,” from the Electronic Hallway case series, focusing on segment A.3 We chose this segment because it provides a description of local context that is important for the protagonist to understand in order to act effectively; any teaching case with such characteristics could be used in the classroom for policy field analysis. The Integrated Housing and Social Services case highlights a nationally honored local housing authority that has worked collaboratively with nonprofits and local government agencies to develop an innovative program, Project Self-Sufficiency (PSS). The program has successfully graduated 400 motivated families from public assistance. The case begins with the main protagonist, Steve Holt, needing to respond to a new national mandate from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Suddenly, PSS must provide universal access to all welfare families rather than just those the program operators define as motivated. Program operators believe strongly that the use of motivation as a selection criterion has led directly to the overall success of PSS. (See Appendix 1 for a more detailed summary of the case). In our policy field analysis, we will take the perspective of Steve Holt, the director of the Housing Authority of Snohomish County (HASCO). Because the contours of policy fields often vary by institution setting, it is important to initially identify from whose perspective the analysis will originate. The following questions, built from the research and theory surveyed earlier, comprise the essence of the policy field analysis. They are summarized in Table 1. What policy domains are the actors working within? What are the large public problems they are working to solve? In this case, the primary policy domain is public housing. However, because the PSS initiative involves providing a range of social and community supports to participants, it also involves other policy areas: mental health, family support, education. The PSS collaborative focuses on creating more stability for low-income families so that they can successfully use public housing subsidies to transition off public assistance. In the case, Steve Holt is now grappling with how to respond to mandated change in program implementation. What laws and regulations, national programs, and funding streams are being used to solve the problem? Where does administrative authority lie? This policy problem is not contained within any particular public agency. At the local level, many laws and regulations, national programs, and funding streams come into play. From Steve Holt’s perspective, the laws, regulation, and funding coming from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) are central. The unique component of PSS was its ability to leverage Section 8 housing certificates for families in poverty. These valuable certificates offer publicly funded vouchers that people can take to access rental property in the market. Many communities, including Snohomish County, have long waiting lists to access these vouchers. Additional funding for PSS, however, comes from the Community Services Block Grant program of the federal Department of Health and Human Services and is administered locally by the county’s Division of Community Services.
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