Within public management, the topic of policy implementation has a complex intellectual history (deLeon & deLeon, 2002; Klijn, 2005; O’Toole, 2004).  On the one hand, public administration long had explored public organizations’ operation as they implement government policies in terms of their human resources or budgeting practices, performance measurement or privatization mechanisms, often in relation to public governance values (Brown, Potoski, & Van Slyke, 2006; Fredrickson & Fredrickson, 2007; Moynihan, 2008).  Yet, the advent of a new generation of public policy schools in the 1970s proclaimed implementation as a “new” topic of scholarly exploration; rather than starting from the organization as the unit of analysis, this stream of scholarship started within a specific policy context, isolating the managerial dimensions of policy or program implementation in relation to other causal factors (Bardach 1977; Mazmanian and Sabatier 1989; Pressman and Wildavsky 1984). 

Within APPAM, there was significant attention to trying to develop a generalizable model of policy and program implementation within APPAM during the 1980s and 1990s.  However, scholarly accounts of implementation have faded in the last ten to fifteen years.  At the same time, policy and evaluation firms continue to conduct implementation studies, often explore the degree to which conditions of randomized controlled experiments hold in the field.  And, as significantly, researchers in areas other than policy studies continue to find implementation analysis important.  A recent scan of the literature (Saetren 2005) found that 72% of the nearly 2,500 scholarly publications referencing policy implementation during the period 1985-2003 were published in journals outside of public administration, policy and political science. Instead, studies of policy implementation were concentrated in other fields such as health (16%) and education (14%), as well as other areas such as law, environment, and economics. 

Yet, the advent of major federal and state policy efforts health care, homeland security, and economic recovery and other areas necessitate combining an in depth understanding of organizational behavior with an implementation perspective in a specific policy context. Further, new public affairs scholarship can advance an understanding of underlying (sometimes unintended) structural mechanisms that contribute to policy effectiveness, drawing new insights from behavioral economics (e.g. Kahneman 2003; Thaler & Sunstein 2008), community psychology (e.g. Flixsen, et al 2005; McGrew et al 1994), and design (e.g. Brown 2009). 

This paper both updates Saetren (2005) meta-analysis about the state of the field and offers a new a multi-level framework for the study and practice of policy implementation.  From this review and model development, we posit a set of propositions useful for a new generation of public affairs research focused in public policy studies.