Book Review - Implementation

What I will be trying to do in this review is to examine how different theories have evolved and how they can be used for the development of the society and the country as a whole.

In the book, the authors define ‘implementation’ as “to carry out, accomplish, fulfill, produce, complete”. This definition is a whole loop of activities in itself involving several people in different people – from communities to political parties and from businessmen to civil servants. The book suggests that implementation has to be in the mind of policy makers and decision-makers since the time of policy planning.

The book starts to talk about the ambitious project in Oakland-California where they had several goals to achieve and several promises to fulfill. Even though the beginning looked tremendously in shape and good but the project was declared a complete failure after some years. What went wrong all of sudden if everything looked interesting during the beginning of the project has a lot of lessons for the upcoming decisions for future policy makers.

I)                   Multiple Goals and Decision Paths

The project had multiple goals and several objectives. Similarly, when there are multiple objectives, there are multiple decision paths. For instance – if we take of the major projects like Melamchi Drinking Water Project; the two major objectives were spreading pipe across the city and straying the pipe from the river to Kathmandu but there were simultaneous projects of Drinking Water Corporation and Department of Roads which delayed everything on the whole.

II)                Correlating the Number of Decisions to Program Success

If the number of decisions and the decision makers during the project execution increases, the project is meant to fail. As the number of decisions seeking approval for a program to be implemented increases, the chance for overall program success dramatically decreases.

III)              Focus/Inclusion of Participant

With added decision and decision-makers, the disagreements among the participants increase and there is a lot of time required for the renegotiations. Because of the renegotiations, delay in the projects is meant to happen.

	Preferential Directions	Focus/Inclusion of Participant
		HIGH	LOW
	POSITIVE	Least Delay; Zero Bargaining	Minor Delay; Zero Bargaining
	NEGATIVE	Most Delay; Bargaining Essentials	Moderate Delay; Bargaining Peripherals

IV)             Bargaining

In several multi-purpose projects, where there are many objectives to be fulfilled, bargaining increases and all the people involved in the project want to fulfill the most important action plan which will help support their own objective.

V)                Going Outside the Bureaucracy

The government usually forms a separate committee to administer and look after the project that is to be implemented but the authors claim that it is one of the worst decisions that the government takes.

The major considerations are: implementation should be together thought of while policy planning;

measures and indicators of policy actions should be considered early; successful leadership should

always be planned and simplicity of policies is equally important.