GREAT POLICIES

Strategic Innovations in Asia and the Pacific Basin

Exceptional problems, where the issues transcend the conventional boundaries of public administration, inspire great policies, as governments and other large organizations adopt positive and innovative programs designed to advance their condition. These “great” policies, being rarities, transcend the conventions of government or of public administration in four respects: (1) they depart from incrementalist solutions to new problems and stretch across sectoral or ministerial boundaries; (2) they require new procedural or organizational devices for their implementation; (3) they generate new expectations that give them special visibility in the framework of public action; and (4) in time, they define new models of policy responses and suggest new paradigms of policy initiatives. The US Marshall Plan was a prototype of “great” policy-making: it was designed in the wake of World War II and the context of victory, but was not really part of the military or diplomatic action; it employed techniques familiar to conventions of government (economic reconstruction and development, diplomatic relationships among states, disarmament with security objectives, and democratic participation), but its objectives and its operations transcended each of them and were frequently cited in dealing with other great problems.

Although all great policies have made use of familiar techniques to serve their objectives, they had molded them in unfamiliar combinations, merging existing programs with imaginative new projects to observe new priorities and offering a transforming vision of future benefits that could overflow from existing vessels of government action.