Book Review: A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis

Engene Bardach has done a good job of providing in depth description and analysis in his book.

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Eugene Bardach, a professor of public policy in the Richard and Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, has done a good job of providing in depth description and analysis in his book: A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis. His book provides useful information and practical skills on how to analyze public policies in a more effective way by following the eightfold path. 

The eight steps of analysis starts from step 1, define the problem in public policy, and followed by assembling some evidence, constructing the alternative policy options, selecting the criteria for the alternative policy option outcomes, project the outcomes, confront the trade-offs, deciding what to do, and the last step, in step 8, is to tell your story—tell the story to the leaders and people on what you care about and thinking of.

Eugene describes these eight steps in a sample way that everyone can easily understand. Additionally to that step, he also wrote another two important parts, which illustrated how to assemble evidence and the understanding and making use of what look like good ideas from somewhere else. His book, in overall, has included a lot of examples that you could find helpful to reflect on your own problem in your society that you want to address.

I have a comment on this book as the author talked about the model like logical construction, matrix analysis, cost-benefit analysis, and other important models that we are able to use for analyzing policy issues. As my suggestion, it would be good, if the author can add a brief of these models or frameworks in the appendix section. This will help us to know some basics of this framework before we decide to look at it in detail with other books or reference resources. 

My final words here, recommend you to read it. I think it may be one of the best books in public policy analysis.