"This book provides a wise and engaging how-to guide that meets the central challenge of policy analysis: combining scientific evidence and social goals to craft practical, real-world solutions." —Thomas S. Dee, Barnett Family Professor of Education, Stanford University Drawing on more than 40 years of experience with policy analysis, best-selling authors Eugene Bardach and Eric M. Patashnik use real-world examples to teach students how to be effective, accurate, and persuasive policy analysts. The Sixth Edition of A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis presents dozens of concrete tips, new case studies, and step-by-step strategies for the budding analyst as well as the seasoned professional.

In the Fifth Edition of A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis: The Eightfold Path to More Effective Problem Solving, Eugene Bardach and new co-author Eric Patashnik draw on more than 40 years of experience teaching students to be effective, accurate, and persuasive policy analysts. This bestselling handbook presents dozens of concrete tips, interesting case studies, and step-by-step strategies that are easily applicable for the budding analyst as well as the seasoned professional. In this new edition, Bardach and Patashnik update many examples to reflect the shifting landscape of policy issues. A new section with advice on how to undertake policy design in addition to making policy choices makes the book even more engaging. Readers will also appreciate a sample document of real world policy analysis, suggestions for developing creative, "out-of-the-box" solutions, and tips for working with clients.

Over the last twenty or so years, it has become standard to require policy makers to base their recommendations on evidence. That is now uncontroversial to the point of triviality--of course, policy should be based on the facts. But are the methods that policy makers rely on to gather and analyze evidence the right ones? In Evidence-Based Policy, Nancy Cartwright, an eminent scholar, and Jeremy Hardie, who has had a long and successful career in both business and the economy, explain that the dominant methods which are in use now--broadly speaking, methods that imitate standard practices in medicine like randomized control trials--do not work. They fail, Cartwright and Hardie contend, because they do not enhance our ability to predict if policies will be effective. The prevailing methods fall short not just because social science, which operates within the domain of real-world politics and deals with people, differs so much from the natural science milieu of the lab. Rather, there are principled reasons why the advice for crafting and implementing policy now on offer will lead to bad results. Current guides in use tend to rank scientific methods according to the degree of trustworthiness of the evidence they produce. That is valuable in certain respects, but such approaches offer little advice about how to think about putting such evidence to use. Evidence-Based Policy focuses on showing policymakers how to effectively use evidence, explaining what types of information are most necessary for making reliable policy, and offers lessons on how to organize that information.

Public policy making -- Communication in the process -- Definition : frame the problem -- Legislative history : know the record -- Position paper : know the arguments -- Petitions and proposals : request action or propose policy -- Briefing memo or opinion statement : inform policy makers -- Testimony : witness in a public hearing -- Written public comment : influence administration -- Continuity and change.

Known for encouraging step-by-step problem solving and for connecting techniques to real-world scenarios, David Ammons’ Tools for Decision Making covers a wide range of local government practices—from the foundational to the advanced. Brief and readable, each chapter opens with a problem in a hypothetical city and then introduces a tool to address it. Thoroughly updated with new local government examples, the second edition also incorporates chapters devoted to such additional techniques as sampling analysis, sensitivity analysis, financial condition analysis, and forecasting via trend analysis. Numerous tables, figures, exhibits, equations, and worksheets walk readers through the application of tools, and boxed features throughout each chapter present other uses for techniques, helpful online resources, and common errors. A handy guide for students and an invaluable resource and reference for practitioners.

Recognizing that complexity calls for innovative, conceptual, and methodological solutions, Dealing with Complexity in Development Evaluation by Michael Bamberger, Jos Vaessen, and Estelle Raimondo offers practical guidance to policymakers, managers, and evaluation practitioners on how to design and implement complexity-responsive evaluations that can be undertaken in the real world of time, budget, data, and political constraints. Introductory chapters present comprehensive, non-technical overviews of the most common evaluation tools and methodologies, and additional content addresses more cutting-edge material. The book also includes six case study chapters to illustrate examples of various evaluation contexts from around the world.