Implementing Public Policy: An Introduction to the Study of Operational Governance

"The second edition of Implementing Public Policy builds on the extremely useful first edition, and is an excellent and timely contribution to the literature on implementation.  This volume represents the most extensive and useful treatment of implementation available."
―B. Guy Peters, University of Pittsburgh


This Second Edition of Hill and Hupe′s popular textbook introduces students to the major themes in the study of public policy implementation and relates them to contemporary developments in thinking about governance.  Fully revised and updated, the book stresses the continuing importance of a focus on the implementation part of policy processes. Hill and Hupe suggest strategies for future research on implementation and identify modes of managing implementation as operational governance.

Intended Audience
Designed for an international audience, this is a core text for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students studying or conducting research in public policy, social policy, public management, public administration, and governance.

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Michael Hill is Emeritus Professor of Social Policy at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and Visiting Professor at the Department of Politics, Queen Mary University of London, UK.

Peter Hupe teaches Public Administration at Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands.  In 2007 he also was Visiting Professor at the Public Management Institute, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium.

Michael Hill is Emeritus Professor of Social Policy at the University of Newcastle, UK.  Before entering academic life at the University of Reading he was a street-level bureaucrat in a local social assistance office. He later worked on research at the Universities of Oxford and Bristol on the implementation of social policy. Since retiring from Newcastle he has held part-time visiting professorships in London University at Goldsmiths College and Queen Mary College and also in the London School of Economics and the University of Brighton. His long-standing text The Public Policy Process reached its eighth edition in 2021 in a joint version with Frédéric Varone of the University of Geneva. In 2020 he published Exploring the World of Social Policy with Zoë Irving of the University of York.

Peter Hupe is Visiting Professor at the Public Governance Institute, KU Leuven, Belgium. He is also Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the School of Social Policy, University of Birmingham, UK. While teaching Public Administration at Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands, he had academic affiliations in Leiden, Leuven, London, Oxford and Potsdam. The major part of his research regards the theoretical-empirical study of policy processes, particularly implementation and street-level bureaucracy. He discovered the relevance of the latter during an earlier career as a policymaker in the Dutch national civil service. Publishing regularly in journals like Public Administration, Public Policy and Administration and Public Management Review, in 2019 he composed the Research Handbook of Street-Level Bureaucracy: The Ground Floor of Government in Context. With Tony Evans he edited Discretion and the Quest for Controlled Freedom (2020).