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ReviewThis new edition of A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis is a gift to both professors and students. — Renee Johnson, University of Florida US and international students systematically give this perspicacious visual representation of policy analysis fundamental principle high marks for it is clarity and insight. –Robert P. Goss, Brigham Young University About the AuthorEugene Bardach has been instructing graduate-level policy analysis workshop classes since 1973 at the Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley, in which time he has coached a good deal of 400 projects. This book is based on his experience instructing students the principles of policy analysis and then helping them to carry through their project work. He is the recipient of the 1998 Donald T. Campbell award of the Policy Studies Organization for originative contribution to the methodology of policy analysis.

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A Practical Guide For Travelers To Fort Myers Florida Pic

A Practical Guide For Travelers To Fort Myers Florida Photo

Most helpful customer reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
A great little book
By Paul Adams
I have used this and earlier editions of Bardach’s slim text for years in teaching social policy analysis to MSW and doctoral students for whom policy is generally not the part of the curriculum embraced with most enthusiasm. Students are happy with the slimness and low price of the book – in both respects a welcome relief from most texts. After “cracking” the book a few times, however, they realize that it is dense and challenging.

Bardach’s text is demanding of both teachers and students. Policy teachers – especially those who teach social welfare policy to social work students who do not intend to become professional policy analysts, need to provide and elicit concrete examples from the students’ field of concentration and probably supplement this text with readings specific to the field. Students need to wrestle with unfamiliar concepts like rent seeking and commensurability and to apply them to their own analyses. Over the years, I have come to structure the whole course more fully around the book and to “coach” students through each step of the eightfold path, with feedback from other students and the instructor at each step along the way.

What I most appreciate about the book is the way it helps students to slow down and think critically about what they are doing. The tendency is to “know” in advance what the solution to their policy problem is and so to define their job as persuading their putative client that they are right. They start with the conclusion and work backwards. Bardach pushes students to treat the policy problem to be addressed as a puzzle rather than a foregone conclusion. He stresses the need to problematize the problem and avoid smuggling a solution into its definition.

The book is not primarily about the ethics of policy analysis, but nevertheless urges the reader to consider the ethical costs of over-optimism. For those inclined to conflate good intentions with projected outcomes, this is an important caution. Bardach offers several exercises, like the worst-case scenario or the pre-mortem analysis, to counteract this tendency to “unscrupulous optimism,” as Roger Scruton calls it in his book on The Uses of Pessimism: And the Danger of False Hope [Hardcover].

It is important to recognize that the book is a “practical guide” to a problem-solving and decision-making process. The process requires examination of past and current attempts to address the problem through policy, but as part of the process, not as an end in itself. The process includes defining the problem and its background, exploring alternatives (including that of letting present trends continue) according to explicit criteria for assessing their expected outcomes, coming to a conclusion, and making a recommendation that follows from the analysis.

Of all the books I have used in over 30 years of teaching policy, and despite the lack of information about current social policies, this has proved the most helpful in supporting student learning of analytic skills and critical thinking.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Good “quick and dirty” introduction to policy analysis
By Steven A. Peterson
A brief introduction to policy analysis. Well respected author Eugene Bardach lays out what he calls “the eightfold path to more effective problem solving.” This involved steps in the policy analysis process including: defining the proble,m, assembling evidence, constructing alternatives, selecting criteria, projecting outcomes, confronting treade-offs, deciding, and telling your story.

This is a brief book, but serves nicely as a “quick and dirty” introduction to policy analysis.

26 of 36 people found the following review helpful.
A treatise on analyzing policies for any business
By Midwest Book Review
Eugene Bardach’s A Practical Guide For Policy Analysis: The Eightfold Path To More Effective Problem Solving is a treatise on analyzing policies for any business. Bardach offers a very carefully written and informative text, enhanced with extensive suggestions, examples, explanations, footnotes, and in-depth problem-solving plans. Intended to help the reader learn the management skills of an executive, A Practical Guide For Policy Analysis concentrates an amazing amount of versatile wisdom into a mere 102 pages. A recommended guide for anyone who must learn to deal with high-stakes or high-stress daily crossroads.

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