Book Review - Implementation Game

What I will be trying to do in this review is to see how the implementation as a process and problem as a whole has evolved as there is more systematic approach provided in the book. Bardach's principal tool is the metaphor of "game," which he uses to summarize the behavior of actors involved in implementation of various policy decisions

The metaphor, he says (p. 56), "directs us to look at the players, what they regard as the stakes, their strategies and tactics, their resources for playing, the rules of play (which stipulate the conditions of winning), the rules of fair play (which stipulate the boundaries beyond which lie fraud or illegitimacy), the nature of the communications for lack of them) among the players, and the degree of uncertainty surrounding the possible outcomes." Using whatever he has tried to draw from his own detailed observation of the implementation of mental health reform in California as well as other published work he believes to be relevant, Bardach has tried to develop a typology of implementation games via which he analyzes the sources of delay in implementation, and offers some recommendations for improving policy design. This book is for sure a source of numerous insights into the operation of public programs. 

The book teaches us a lot about the implementation processes but there is a problem with metaphor itself, and the resulting inability to develop either persuasive general conclusions or practical prescriptions. Focusing on a "game" being played by a large number of different actors discourages a detailed examination of any of the components that structure the game, including the processes that move it from one stage to another. When there are many players involved in a game and all of them are at different places and different positions, it is extremely difficult to create opinions about all of them together. Therefore, only a superficial analysis can be done which contrasts with the author's reports of infighting over one implementation problem or another. Resource diversion games such as "easy life" or "pork barrel" are presented in a few paragraphs, as are goal deflection games such as "piling on" or "up for grabs." A typical treatment is the resistance game called "tokenism" "... an attempt to appear to be contributing a program element publicly while privately conceding only a small ('token') contribution" — which is defined in one paragraph and illustrated by a few more paragraphs drawn from published reports that can be taken to be examples of tokenism. 

Bardach's major recommendation for improving implementation processes is to add analytic staff to bureaucratic and legislative agencies. This is and always has been a popular "reform" idea, but its relationship to the earlier "game" analysis is not very clear, though understandable. Bardach seems to follow one of the famous scholars Pitirim Sorokin (1956), who published the "Columbus" complex and has a little non-refined game. The social cycle theory has a lot to contribute on the whole. One of the major highlights of the social cycle theory would be “Social conflict refers to Sorokin's theory of war. Whether internal to a nation or international, peace is based on similarity of values among the people of a nation or between different nations. War has a destructive phase, when values are destroyed, and a declining phase, when some of values are restored”. 

Bardach also points out about the lack of scholarly attention to implementation by scholars other than himself and a very few others, who have only recently begun to address the problem. There are also few case study literatures of the 1950s and 1960s, that deal responsively with implementation problems and one of them is Banfield's 1961 conceptual scheme for analysis of coordination among independent actors which is very similar to Bardach's "program assembly". 

The independent variables are “government institutions, private institutions, dynamic public policy arena, political environment, organizational environment, technical environment” and the dependent variable is process of making public policy.