Handbook of Public Administration, 3rd Edition

Chapter 10Designing Effective Programs

Michael Howlett, Ishani Mukherjee, and Jeremy Rayner

Program design is part of a more general effort on the part of governments to systematically develop or design efficient and effective policies (Bobrow & Dryzek, 1987; Bobrow, 2006). This is typically done through the application of knowledge about policy means gained from experience and reason to the development and adoption of courses of action that are thought to be most likely to succeed in attaining desired goals or aims (Howlett & Rayner, 2013).

Not all policies and programs are designed in this sense, of course, and some emerge from processes such as bargaining or log-rolling in which the quality of the causal or logical linkages between different ...