Implementation: How Great Expectations in Washington Are Dashed in Oakland; Or, Why It's Amazing that Federal Programs Work at All, This Being a Saga ... Who Seek to Build Morals on a Foundation

This is a great book, a cornerstone of implementation studies for every student or scholar.Indispensable and a good reading book too!

If only every policy maker and every voter would read this book! Pressman and Wildavsky dig in and show how the best of intentions, and even seemingly great plans, fall apart when it's time to implement them on the ground. They show the difficulties in coordinating the many stakeholders that governments have to bring together, in synchronizing steps carried out by an array of public and private organizations, and of keeping everybody on board over the course of time it takes to execute plans. They show that even if each step in the implementation of a policy seems like a no-brainer, a long series of steps almost certain to succeed can be almost certain to fail! The human mind sees a series of steps that have a 95% chance of success and thinks that the process is likely to work... we rarely appreciate that if there's a 95% chance of each of 15 things working, there's a less than 50% chance that they all work. And when you need to coordinate them to all work on a tight timeline, forget about it! Pressman and Wildavsky's Implementation shows, in both human and theoretical terms, how these miscalculations caused government policy in Oakland to fall apart.

This is for my MPA class!

This is a groundbreaking work to studying policy implementation

I bought this book for my daughter and she needed it for school and this purchase really saved us a lot of money!!

Goood condition and great value