Ministries of Health and the Stewardship of Health Evidence

This chapter describes how Ministries of Health have been mandated to act as stewards of populations’ health according to the World Health Organization. We argue that this mandate extends to them having (at least partial) responsibility for ensuring relevant evidence informs policy decisions. Yet this requires consideration of the evidence advisory systems serving Ministry needs, particularly whether or how such systems work to provide relevant information in a timely manner to key decision points in the policy process. Insights from our six cases are presented to illustrate the structural and practical differences which exist between evidence advisory systems and how, at certain times, key health decisions may in fact lie outside ministerial authority. These divergent experiences highlight a range of analytical challenges when considering the provision of evidence to inform health decisions from an institutional perspective

Studying implementation beyond deficit analysis: The top-down view reconsidered

__Abstract__ Contemporary researchers of policy implementation make a plea for explaining variation in policy outputs. At the same time still much implementation research, dispersed across the social sciences, entails studies of single cases in which a perceived gap between the intentions and the results of a public policy is analyzed. In this article a case is made for the lasting relevance of studying single policy processes, seen ‘from the top’, provided that the multi-dimensional character of these processes is taken into account. Empirical material from a study of educational inclusion policy in the United Kingdom shows how public policies may refer to different values (normative dimension), imply ongoing policy formation between a variety of actors, each with particular stakes (political dimension), while policy goals seldom speak for themselves (practical dimension). By consequence, in implementation research the issues of, respectively, what needs explanation (the explanandum), locus specification, and the appropriate unit of observation and analysis need attention

The rise and fall of a policy: policy succession and the attempted termination of ecological corridors policy in the Netherlands

Policy termination, Policy implementation, Policy succession, Interpretative policy analysis, Nature conservation policy, Ecological corridors,