Policy Actors

Policy analysis has always tended towards focusing on the role of elite actors – those who write policy – with comparably little attention paid to those who actually enact it, except in cases of policy failure. This book attempts to get inside the process of enacting policy to understand what policy actors really do – how they manage impossible and multiple policy expectations; how they attempt to do policy with limited resources in conditions often unimagined by those who write policy; and how they translate abstract policy formulations into things that are doable, immediate, and relevant. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Education Policy.