Public Policymaking in India

6

Decision-making and Implementation in Government

Allison’s Models

Unlike the conventional policy analyst, the policymaker cannot treat the government, his operating environment and the external environment in which the government is embedded, as black boxes. He needs to open up the boxes and acquire a detailed understanding of the structure of the government as well as of the environment, the processes that underlie decision-making in the government, and the environmental impacts upon those processes. It is, therefore, necessary for the praxis of policymaking to move beyond the rational actor model that had dominated conventional policy analysis and discourse. This model presumes the government to be a monolithic, unitary, rational actor, ...