3A1-00-Identify the area of public concern that you plan to focus on for your final project

Exercise 5.1. Thinking About a Public Problem

Nonprofit and for-profit hospitals and clinics treated patients and offered their own health education programs. Universities conducted medical research and operated teaching hospitals. Journalists specialized in health reportage; think tanks analyzed health policy.

Clearly, the system embraced a host of organizations (business, government, and nonprofit) and organized and unorganized constituencies (from newborns to cancer patients, from hospital associations to mental health support groups). It could accommodate problems that fit existing categories and required minimal reallocation of resources. Physicians, gay activists, and public health officials concerned about the emerging AIDS crisis realized after some initial effort that the new disease could not be dealt with through existing policy subsystems. These policy entrepreneurs began insisting that the local and national health policy makers put the new disease on their agenda and substantially redirect resources to investigate, treat, and prevent it.

The founders of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development were confronted with multiple policy systems and subsystems at the global, national, and industry levels. For example, the U.N. Development Programme and a multitude of nonprofits, national governments, and businesses were engaged in a development policy system that included subsystems focusing on specific aspects of development, such as farming. Other pertinent policy systems aimed at environmental protection or market regulation. None of these systems, however, were marshaling adequate business support for combining economic development and environmental protection.

The organizers of the African American Men Project (AAMP) had to deal with state and local policy systems related to education, criminal justice, housing, health care, and families. Within a given policy system, they called for changes in particular subsystems—such as physician education—that had an impact on the well-being of African American men. Jan Hively, Hal Freshley, and Darlene Schroeder created the Vital Aging Initiative to shake up the aging policy system of Minnesota and the United States. The system overlaps with health policy systems, education policy systems, and employment regulation systems; it embraces numerous policy subsystems, such as the Medicaid program.

To call policy subsystems into question, policy entrepreneurs present compelling ideas or explanations of the problem that concerns them. Marcus Conant, Michael Gottlieb, and Linda Laubenstein emphasized the idea that the disease affecting gay men was a medical problem, to be dealt with through the accepted protocols of epidemiology and infectious disease. Thus they redefined the mysterious as something familiar. They also defined a problem affecting a large number of gay men as a public responsibility. Change advocates also engage in other types of redefinition:

• Something previously thought of as good may be redefined as bad (for example, nuclear power is redefined as a threat to human health, or productive factories are redefined as contributors to global warming).

• Something previously thought of as bad is redefined as good (old age is redefined as productive maturity).

• The familiar is redefined as mysterious (the previous understanding of what causes a public problem is disproved, and the problem again becomes a mystery to be explored).

• Something thought of as a personal failure is redefined as a public, or communal responsibility (as with the switch from defining smoking as a personal choice to making it a public health issue).

If you are concerned about a public problem, you might use Exercise 5.1 to sort out your own ideas about the problem. What are the causes of the problem? What potential remedies should be considered, given the hypothesized causes? Which policy subsystems might be expected to deal with the problem? What redefinitions of the problem might be necessary to change existing subsystems or establish new ones? What opposing policy ideas am I likely to encounter? What is the “ideal” outcome of a change effort, and what does it imply about the problem? For example, does my desired outcome help me see that some other problem is more important?

In addition to problem definition, the policy change process may also be driven by “problem finding.” In other words, change advocates may be vested in a preferred solution and seek connections to problems that need solving. The solution may have resulted from a policy system that was designed to remedy some other problem that has now been resolved or diminished in importance. The advocates promote ideas that forge new connections between their preferred solution and one or more public problems.

Exercise 5.1. Thinking About a Public Problem.

Focus on a public problem that concerns you.

1. What are the causes of the problem?

2. What potential remedies should be considered, given the hypothesized causes?

3. What policy subsystems might be expected to deal with the problem?

4. What redefinitions of the problem might be necessary to change existing subsystems or establish new ones?

5. What opposing policy ideas am I likely to encounter?

6. What is the “ideal” outcome of a change effort, and what does that imply about the problem?

As you become involved in efforts to remedy the problem, you may wish to revise your answers from time to time.

Analyzing and Managing Stakeholders

Any ideas about how a problem should be understood and remedied must be developed and refined in concert with an array of stakeholders, since successful navigation of the policy change cycle requires the inspiration and mobilization of enough key stakeholders to adopt policy changes and protect them during implementation. Recall that a stakeholder is any person, group, or organization that is affected by a public problem, has partial responsibility to act on it, or has resources needed to resolve it. Key stakeholders are those most affected by the problem (regardless of their formal power) and those who control the most important resources needed to remedy the problem.

A stakeholder group consists of people who generally share an orientation to a problem and potential solutions. Specific individuals, however, may have weaker or stronger ties to the group. Indeed, individuals are likely to belong to more than one stakeholder group. Moreover, as philosopher Hannah Arendt has pointed out, it is important to remember that each citizen has a unique view of a public problem. She argues, “For though the common [i.e., public] world is the common meeting ground for all, those who are present have different locations in it, and the location of one can no more coincide with the location of another than the location of two objects…. Everybody sees and hears from a different position” (Arendt, 1958, p. 57).

(Crosby 163-167)

Crosby, Barbara C., John Bryson. Leadership for the Common Good: Tackling Public Problems in a Shared-Power World, 2nd Edition. John Wiley & Sons P&T, 08/2006. VitalBook file.

The citation provided is a guideline. Please check each citation for accuracy before use.