The Public Sector in Hong Kong

8. The Policy Process

8 The Policy Process Definitions of policy are often recognised to be inadequate to cover the range of practical and analytical difficulties that the term encompasses.1 Policy may involve debates over values, establishing an agenda to determine priorities, consultation with the public, negotiations between politicians and stakeholders, and deciding authoritatively on which course of action should be followed. It will also involve the use of state power, interactions between institutions and organisations, both inside and outside the governmental structure, strategies to ensure successful implementation, assessments of the impact of the policy on citizens and much more besides. It is difficult to find a definition which will cover this complex interaction between values, agendas, institutions, groups, and the impact that policy has on people. Some analysts seek to avoid the complexity by defining policy simply as the output or decisions of any public sector organisation. The difficulty with this approach is that it may miss the substantively important political issues in the process of arriving at decisions. It also fails to distinguish between different types of policies: a decision to raise the fines for illegal parking, for example, would fall into the same category as government policy on education. Our definition of public policy takes it to be a broad course of action, a set of related decisions rather than random choices, involving “the selection of goals and the means of achieving them within a specified situation when these should, in principle, be within the power of these actors to achieve.”2 Even with this definition we have some conceptual problems. Not all elements of the process can easily be incorporated within the dynamics of policy-making and there are, moreover, important debates among scholars about the degree of rationality in policy formulation and the extent to which goals can be realised by employing rational means. It would be helpful if we could escape from some of these conceptual difficulties by analysing policy-making as a sequence. We might begin with the observation that policy is, first, a debate about values. There has been a continuing debate over values in Hong Kong, for example, between the government and schools and education pressure groups over the extent to which the medium of instruction should be Cantonese or English. Government officials, pressure groups, political parties and anyone else who chooses to join the public debate are all policy actors in this process although clearly not everyone 176 The Public Sector in Hong Kong has the same degree of influence on the final decision.3 The debate may be about whether the value is of such importance that it should reach the policy agenda or, if it is agreed that action should be taken, about the means to be used to ensure that it is achieved. The government itself will also have goals which may require some discussion to ascertain whether they have sufficient public support. Relatively few values reach the institutional agenda which is composed of those items up for active and serious consideration by the policy-makers.4 Policy-makers usually come from inside the political and administrative system. In Hong Kong, they would consist of the Chief Executive, the Chief Secretary for Administration, the Financial Secretary, Directors of Bureaus, senior civil servants and members of the Executive Council. Legislative Councillors and advisory committees may also be involved. The next stage is for policy to be implemented, a process fraught with problems and unrealised expectations. In seeking to realise their values — to translate words into action — policy implementers use public institutions, principally government departments and quasi-governmental agencies, but also groups, voluntary organisations and people outside the government framework, to achieve their goals. If these stages are completed successfully, we should be able to arrive at some judgment on the type of output, the policy content. Finally, the success or failure of the action must be evaluated to see whether its objectives have been realised and whether public funds have been properly spent. The idea that policy might begin as a debate over values, proceed through agendasetting to formulation, and emerge as a tangible policy, which is then implemented and evaluated, provides a convenient analytical map from which we can follow the stream of policy from its formulative stages to its final conclusion. Unfortunately, it may also be an idealised, unrealistic and misleading view of policy. As Kingdon remarks, while “there are indeed different processes, they do not necessarily follow one another through time in any regular pattern.”5 This is...