From Policy to Practice: The Management of Housing

Abstract

As was argued in Chapter 10, the tendency to equate policy decisions with action or to assume that policy decisions are translated into action without being changed by it is not an adequate representation of the way policy is made or implemented. In this sense implementation is not best conceived as the translation of policy into a number of consequential actions but rather policy and implementation are closely interactive elements in a single process. At any one time policy is likely to be influencing action and action influencing policy. If for this reason alone, a picture of policy-making in housing which referred solely to the way political statements on objectives, programmes and intentions are arrived at would be misleading. The policy itself is still being developed and changed as action is undertaken. Indeed the discussion in Chapter 10 illustrates how misleading it would be to refer to initial policy statements in developing an understanding of policy.