This book assesses a range of contemporary scholarly approaches to public policy. Bringing together leading scholars in policy studies, each chapter addresses a different theoretical approach to policy design and implementation, drawn from the fields of political science, economics and behavioral science. These include the advocacy-coalition framework, discursive approaches, institutional analysis, punctuated equilibrium theory, multiple streams approaches, behavioural models, and the use of instruments. The book examines how these approaches were born, their limitations, and the theoretical and research problems they pose. This newly revised edition also considers how the field of policy studies has evolved over the last decade, and includes two new chapters examining narrative policy framework and policy transaction approaches. It concludes with a discussion of fundamental issues of democracy in public policy. It is an essential resource for all those involved in teaching, researching and studying in public policy. B.

Guy Peters is Professor Emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh, USA, and President Emeritus of the International Public Policy Association. Philippe Zittoun is Research Professor of Political Science at LAET-ENTPE, University of Lyon, France and Secretary General of the International Public Policy Association (IPPA). He is a member of the editorial board of several important journal of public policy and he is the co-editor with B. Guy Peters of the international book series of Public Policy for Palgrave . He has published several books and articles on the policy process and its political issue with a constructivist and pragmatist perspective. Among these books, he has published with Sebastien Chailleux, The Politics of Meaning Struggles (Elgar, 2022), with Frank Fischer and Nikolaos Zahariadis, The Political Formulation of Policy Solutions (2021, BUP), with Emily Saint Denis, Handbook of Teaching Public Policy (Elgar, 2024), The Political process of Policy-Making (Palgrave, 2014).