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Book Reviews 131 Politics and Policy Implementation: Project Renewal in Israel, by Frederick A. Lazin. Albany: State University ofNew York Press, 1994. 201 pp. n.p.l. In the early 1970s Pressman and Wildavsky pointed to the implementation stage of a policy system as having a significant impact on the outcome of policy. Since then, student~ of public policy have been attempting to clarify the necessary rules of this component ofthe policy process. One inviting laboratory for inquiring into this question is domestic policy implementation in Israel. A student of the policy process can look at Israel as a Western industrial democracy within a pluralist liberal tradition. For the Israeli political system the important question is how to achieve policy changes, "changes on the ground," within a very short time. It is within this framework that Frederick Lazin analyzes the important 1977 program, ProjectRenewal, to answer the implementation questions. For implementation scholars, an important question is how implementation can best be explained. In trying to understand the relationship between politics and policy outcomes, policy theorists have been debating whether policy implementation constitutes a "top-down" or "bottom-up" phenomenon. The "top-down" perspective focuses on upper-level officials to understand what motivates them in order to determine whether and why policy goals were attained during implementation. On the other hand, the "bottom-up" approach argues that the significant players to understand are the "street-level" policy actors who actualize policy implementation. This debate is the starting point for Lazin in this study ofthe Israeli "Great Society" program. LaZin's goals in this study are twofold: first, to describe and evaluate Project Renewal's success and the resulting consequences to the Israeli political system, and second, to adjudicate the ongoing debate between "top-doWIi" and "bottom-up" perspectives on policy implementation. Lazin is much more successful with the first goal than he is with the second. He does an excellent job of describing and dissecting project renewal and its affects on slum conditions and on the Israeli political system (constitution as he calls it). On the dichotomy of "top-down" versus "bottom-up" implementation, Lazin's conclusion is that implementation is somewhere in between the two. Project Renewal initiated a comprehensive American-style "Great Society" program in Israel. As the first major domestic program for the new Likud government, it represented a recognition ofthe Sephardic community for their electoral support of Prime Minister Menahem Begin and the Likud party. Project Renewal was a combination ofAmerican urban renewal, model cities program, and the war on poverty. Its goal was the eradication ofslum living conditions and poverty in the Israeli Jewish sector. In this book, Lazin adopts the methodological perspective of a case study with 132 SHOFAR Summer 1997 Vol. 15, No.4 a "top-down" approach. He argues that he utilizes the "top-down" approach because of his interest in the fonnal policy goals that defmed the original program, and he further argues that his is a modified ''top-down'' approach because he does not recognize a strict division between policy adoption and implementation. Lazin's case study looks at six of the towns involved in Project Renewal: Ashkelon, Beer-Sheva, Beit Shemesh, Herzliya, Ofakim, and Yavneh. These towns ranged from new development towns to veteran, relatively well-to-do towns. As Lazin discovers, it is the very Israeli political system that created roadblocks in realizing the goals of Project Renewal, but significantly, it was also Project Renewal that changed how policy was selected and implemented in Israel. Some. of the characteristics ofthe Israeli political system which affected the transition from Program Renewal's adoption to results were the fragmented nature ofthe power centers of the national government (the Ministry of Housing and the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs), powerful political parties, coalition governments made up of independent parties, the existence ofquasi-governmental entities like the Jewish Agency, and Israel's highly formal and hierarchical government from the national to the local level. From Prime Minister Begin's initial idea of Project Renewal in 1977, it took until January of 1979 for the Government, by a 6 to 4 vote, to pass the fmal Project Renewal agreement. To underline the difficulty...

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