Policy-making and public management

The conventional division of labor between policy-making and public management has been challenged, more or less explicitly, by scholars working on parallel research trajectories. This chapter attempts a stock-taking exercise by, first, identifying the boundaries between policy-making and public management, and then arguing why these boundaries are and should be blurred both for pragmatic and for theoretical reasons. After problematizing the so-called stagist approach, the chapter reviews the mainstream theories of policy-making by looking at the role they have attributed to public management. It then presents the intellectual foundations of institutional processualism, an event-centric method to explain policy choice, discussing how this approach helps situating the role of public management in the policy process—namely, one that especially relates the function of public management to social mechanisms.