Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

After a social policy is enacted, public and nonprofit professionals play many vital roles in the implementation process. Through decisions and negotiations during implementation, public and nonprofit actors influence how the policy affects and is experienced by the target population. Yet implementation theory has followed a diffuse intellectual path and pragmatic theories to inform implementation practices remain elusive, in spite of calls for integration (deLeon & deLeon, 2002; O’Toole, 2004; Sabatier & Jenkins-Smith 1993). Emphasizing how public and nonprofit managers influence implementation process through their management practice, this paper focuses on the agency of actors in policy implementation systems.

To address the need for a better understanding of the practical skills and behaviors that public and nonprofit professionals exhibit, this paper compares the implementation practices carried out through a federal legislative block grant and a federal judicial mandate. The first policy field focuses on the implementation of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, a federal block grant enacted in 1996 with additional changes and alterations enact over the years. The second policy field focuses on the implementation of the Olmstead Decision, a court ruling out of the Supreme Court that orders states to place people living with disabilities in less restrictive settings, specifically transitioning more people out of adult foster care and into more independent living environments.

The analysis builds upon the strategic action field framework for policy implementation analysis (Moulton & Sandfort, 2015). We sampled individuals in one U.S. state who implement either programs and are recognized by their peers as particularly effective actors within their work contexts, at various levels within either implementation system. We then conducted two rounds of semi-structured interviews with each informant (TANF case n=32; Disability case n=25): the first established foundational knowledge about the individuals’ work experience with the program and assessment of the implementation context; the second asked them to select three significant stories from their practice and recount the narrative in great detail. In this way, their selection of stories highlights significant implementation issues in their contexts (Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2003). The inductive analysis of these data identifies patterns related to the causal mechanisms at the heart of implementation practice within a complex system (Fairhurst & Uhl-Bien, 2012; Ospina and Dodge, 2004; Steele, 2004).

By means of a rigorous examination of actors’ implementation stories, this paper brings forth better understandings of social skills and decision making used by actors at various levels in implementation systems. It is one empirical approach to developing a better understanding of how in the implementation practices of socially skillful actors shape the results in implementation processes.