Policy Implementation and Evaluation-Free-Samples for Students

Question: Discuss and reflect on one Significant Issues raised by the speaker in the Audio-Visual resource. Answer: In the video, Katherine Cape, mentioned that policy making is messyprocess. It is not easy to satisfy all the stakeholders involved in the policy making, some of them have different priorities and interests. Policy cycle is not a straight forward process as it looks in paper, if the policy is not working well then the stakeholders go back to planning phase and decide different intervention plans. Prioritizing the problem for making a policy is based on the social issues available data and the context of the problem. It is often difficult for the policy makers to analyze the many social determinants, in order to understand the urgency of the social issue so that the most crucial and urgent issues are ranked higher than any of the other social issues (Bulmer, 2015). Power of stakeholders is an important factor to influence the policy making. For example, Governments often use their powers to influence the policy process according to their agenda, or political mandate (Weimer Vining, 2017). Election promises put certain issues ahead of others by neglecting the priorities of the general community. The governmental influence on other policy research means that the government of the day often has power to alter the research into the particular social issue depending upon the promises made to citizens during and after the election campaigns, which in turn can influence those resear ches and developing appropriate policy responses. There are great numbers of challenges which affect the identification process of a crucial problem in policy making process. A very good example can be provided by the Policy for Domestic violence for Women and children in Australia. In order to identify the problem of domestic violence, it is very necessary to have sufficient data that would suggest the need of urgency of the issue. However, it has been seen that reports of domestic violence are not present in huge number as many victims do not report their cases. Often victims have been heard to say that they do not report because they have fear for the perpetrator, fear of not being believed by others or being blamed by others. Some are also seen to face confusion, shame as well as embarrassment, fear of psychologically reliving the incident. They may also have a reluctance to acknowledge the incident that may had taken place. Therefore, a social concern which has not been reported and does not contain proper facts and statistical figure often becomes a concern for the policy makers (Chappell Curtin, 2013). Although they know that this problem needs to be attended but they fail to influence the government due to absence of proper reported numbers of the cases. It has been argued by many that integrating responses and implementing initiatives across all the communities are often difficult as it involves victims who remains affected in various ways and may not want to clarify any details of personal lives. Hence often identifying the problem and representing them to political powers become difficult. Moreover although many politicians are supporting the cause but others state that more refined laws will be enough to control the orders without any policies. Hence debates are ongoing that make policy making difficult to pursue. References: Birkland, T. A. (2014).An introduction to the policy process: Theories, concepts and models of public policy making. Routledge. Bulmer, M. (2015).The Uses of Social Research (Routledge Revivals): Social Investigation in Public Policy-Making. Routledge. Chappell, L., Curtin, J. (2013). Does federalism matter? Evaluating state architecture and family and domestic violence policy in Australia and New Zealand.Publius: The Journal of Federalism,43(1), 24-43. Weimer, D. L., Vining, A. R. (2017).Policy analysis: Concepts and practice. Taylor Francis.