Public policy analyst

Policy analysis is a technique used in public administration to enable civil servants to examine and evaluate the available options to implement the goals of elected officials. It has been defined as the process of "determining which of various policies will achieve a given set of goals in light of the relations between the policies and the goals." Policy analysis can be divided into two major fields:

The areas of interest and the purpose of analysis determine what types of analysis are conducted. A combination of two kinds of policy analyses together with program evaluation would be defined as policy studies. Policy analysis is frequently deployed in the public sector, but is equally applicable to other kinds of organizations, such as nonprofit organizations and non-governmental organizations. Policy analysis has its roots in systems analysis, an approach used by United States Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in the 1960s.

Various approaches to policy analysis exist. The analysis for policy (and/or analysis of policy) is the central approach in social science and educational policy studies. It is linked to two different traditions of policy analysis and research frameworks. The approach of analysis for policy refers to research conducted for actual policy development, often commissioned by policymakers inside the bureaucracy (e.g., senior civil servants) within which the policy is developed. Analysis of policy is more of an academic exercise, conducted by academic researchers, professors and think tank researchers, who are often seeking to understand why a particular policy was developed at a particular time and assess the effects, intended or otherwise, of that policy when it was implemented.

There are three approaches that can be distinguished: the analysis-centric, the policy process, and the meta-policy approach.

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