Learning From Comparative Public Policy

Step 4

Finding out how a programme really works there

When assessing the reliability and usefulness of information, officials tend to place the greatest reliance on their own senses – what they saw or heard, particularly informally and particularly from people or sources they trusted.

Harold Wolman and Edward C. Page, Learning from the Experience of Others

If you want to learn how a programme works, there is no substitute for seeing it in action. Studying laws, organization charts, budgets, and quantitative indicators of output are necessary but not sufficient. Within national politics, policymakers take for granted the desirability of talking to officials elsewhere about programmes of common interest. To understand how a foreign programme ...