just choose

1. Micro Policy: THE POLICY CYCLE
CHOOSING

2. INTRODUCTION:
The policy-makers perceptions and thinking,
guided by his/her values, culminate in
decisions to act or not to act.

3.  To make up one’s mind.
 To engage deliberately in choosing one alternative
from the other in the hope, expectation, or belief
that the actions envisioned in carrying out the
selected alternative will attain certain desired
goals.
 It is goal directed.

4. “The seed of a decision rest in the deciders
initial awareness of dissatisfaction”
• Dissatisfaction:
~ stirs the decider to
seek out alternatives
toward exerting
degrees of control over
the environment to
attain the desired
future.

5. • Decision-making is the most critical of critical
junctures. It either ignites action, which may succeed
or fail, or choose to forego it.
• The deficiencies and uncertainties of decision-
making, the imperfect attacks it levies on public
problems and the partial results it commands, and its
serial progression from one step to the next
underscore the value of longitudinal studies of policy
development to demonstrate that the ingredients of
decision emerge and come together gradually and
disconnectedly.

6. “ A ready illustration of the utility of the longitudinal
approach is provided by land-use policy”.
Land is intertwined with everyone’s life.
1. It gives sustenance.
2. shapes the quality of neighborhood and
community.
3. Provides a foundation of human sovereignty,
embodying one’s right to use it for one’s
owned determined purpose.

7. What is Land-use Policy?
• It is where the needs of the community clash
with those of the owner, necessitating choices
between their respective rights and interests.
~The thing about Land-use policy:
It is seldom settled definitively all at once
but is a dynamic, continuously evolving
process.

8. CASE STUDY: THE ADIRONDACK PARK
BACKGROUND:
The Adirondack Park of New York State is the largest
of its kind in the country.
Larger than New Hampshire and Massachusetts.
A paradox of grand forest, 2,000 lakes, and 6,000
miles of rivers and streams.
Created in 1892, subsequently enlarges by the New
York legislature.
Land Area: 6 million acres.
It is both privately (3.7 million acres) and publicly
owned.

9. “What follows is a longitudinal account of
efforts to adjust a public policy concept to
changing circumstances.”

10. STAGE ONE: THE CLASH OF CONCEPTS
BACKGOUND:
o By mid-nineteenth century, the status of the Adirondacks as a
pristine forest was in jeopardy.
o Ruthless plundering of lumbermen had become common
place.
o Swaths of clear-cutting lay waste to thousands of acres, and
the remaining limbs and brush invited fires.
o The rising demand for paper made wholesale timber cutting
for wood pulp irresistibly profitable.
o Flooded by vacationers, hunters, and fishermen and
increasingly they were becoming a resort for notables, with
estates and luxurious camps owned by New York's wealthiest
financiers and industrialists.

11. PROBLEM(Proposals):
 Preservationist:
Envisioned a park where wilderness or natural forest
would be kept intact.
 Competing proposal:
Adirondack should be managed essentially as a farm for
raising and cutting of timber, scientifically planted and
harvested to obtain optimal yields, while preserving the
earth and its riches for future generation
VS.
Preservationist: Natural forest could no longer remain a
wilderness with its unique values if it were over to
selective cutting and replanting

12. STAGE TWO: THE EXERCISE OF CHOICE
BACKGROUND(Choice-making conveyed is crucial):
o In the convention to revise the Constitution (1894),
the preservationist groups combined to approve a
proposed amendment to the constitution mandating
that the park and forest preserves “shall be forever
kept as wild forest lands.”—mightiest argument was
for the safeguarding of the water supply where the
other parts of the state depended.

13. PROBLEM (Hostile opinion by the Adirondack counties):
“When we consider the amount of employment
afforded by the lumber industry, the thousands of
saw mills, tanneries, pulp and paper mills and
factories of all kinds of giving labor to hundreds of
thousands of poor people and that all this is to be
stopped to afford a deer par and fishing ground for a
few wealthy pleasure-seekers to air their smoke-
dried anatomies is an injustice, the boldness of
which is astonishing.”

14. STAGE THREE: CONTEXTUAL CHANGE
NECESSITATES NEW CHOICES
BACKGROUND:
o Advent of automobiles—enabling thousands upon
thousands of people to visit the Adirondacks.
o The “forever wild” amendment changed rapidly and
drastically, consequently the wilderness concept had to be
adjusted in accordance to the new realities.
o The flood of humanity imperiled wealthy landowners
whose estates were situated within the wilderness and
whose privacy and enjoyment would presumably be
protected by the wilderness concept ,accordingly they
joined in common defense by organizing Association for the
Protection of the Adirondacks.—became the most efficient
watchdog of the region.

15. • Because of a destructive floods in 1902, legislature
created a Water Storage Commission, which urged that
dams be constructed throughout the state.
• Scientific forestry enthusiasts joined this cry.
• A constitutional amendment was promoted to permit
flooding of portions of the forest reserve for the
storing of the water to bolster the drinking supply of
downstate cities and as a step toward exploiting its
power.
• The lumber, pulp, and paper industries, because of its
dependent on water for their activities and acting
through the Empire State Forest Products Association,
an alliance was formed between them and the
scientific forestry groups.

16. STAGE FOUR: ADAPTIVE CHOICES
Forces generated by changes in the policy
environment, by the alignment of interest
groups, and by the advent of fresh problems
necessitated the making of new adaptive
choices to bring the wilderness concept into
harmony with changing realities and their
politics.
See Table 5.1 p 126

17. STAGE FIVE: PERSEVERING WINNERS,
RESURGING LOSERS
BACKGROUND:
o Periodic resurgence of losers has been a common
phenomenon in the experience of major public policy
developed and revised for many years. “One battle does not
win a war”
o For the Adirondack ark:
 contextual change
 the shifting needs of the communities and their economies,
vulnerabilities in the political armor of the victors
 the emergence of new leadership in the enemy camp
 the presence in the policy -making processes of many
decisions- or choice-making points
>>>>>>>>>>>>These encouraged those who lost a policy battle or two to
resurge another day for further combat.<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

18. STAGE SIX: PROMETHEAN LEADERSHIP:
THE AGE OF ROCKEFELLER
BACKGROUND:
o A new testing faced the preservationist juggernaut with the
ascendance to the governorship of Nelson Rockefeller—
whose wealth and ties in the world of business and a
formidable electoral appeal quickly established him as a
powerful chief executive.
o His governorship coincided with the proliferation of cars and
highways which expanded visits to all parks.
o The ceaseless human stampede both imperiled the
wilderness concept and raised the paradoxical question of
“how can wilderness areas be preserved in the face of ever
expanding human visitation?”
o Rockefeller took a giant step toward reassessment when he
appointed a Temporary Study Commission on the Future of
Adirondack with Harold Hochschild as chairman.

19. • Having a true appreciation of Adirondacks historic beauty,
Hochschild nudged Rockefeller away from his inclination to open up
the region to massive recreation opportunities.
• The commission’s 1970 report stresses that local communities,
occupying large areas with small populations, lacked resources to
formulate comprehensive planning . As a result, the commission
envisioned a partnership between the latter and a new state agency
called the Adirondack Park Agency (APA).
• Governor Rockefeller fell into line with the commission report, a
luminous milestone in the progression of policy triumphs by the
preservationist. Where once, through public policy, they told the
people WHAT THEY COULD NOT DO ON STATE LAND, they would
now tell them WHAT THEY COULD NOT DO ON THEIR OWN LAND.
PROBLEM:
Most upstaters were outraged by this seemingly brazen grab of power.

20. STAGE SEVEN: IMPLEMENTATION
BACKGROUND:
o The creation of the APA, brought a new testing of the “forever wild”
concept. The agency’s mission to tell the local people of what they
could and could not do with their own property ignited problem
previously unknown to the park and its protectors.
o In its task of implementing and planning, APA had problems with
simplifying and speeding its application procedures.
o The APA legislation created the Local Government Review Board to
reduce citizen resentment.
o In the 1980 Adirondack poll showed 81 percent of local citizens
favored the abolition of the agency, and 95 percent favored its
replacement by a local commission of elected officials.

21. THE NATURE AND CHARACTERISTICS
OF DESICISION-MAKING
“Decision making encompasses a wide spectrum
of human behaviors and their interaction.”

22. Decisions are made through a process of
several basic facets:
1. Power
- the capacity to focus on selected public problems, to
deal with their essence, and to overcome obstacles and
eliminate irrelevancies.
2. Gathering Information (empirical and intuitive)
- quantity and quality sufficient for the demands of the
problem being addressed.
3. Design
- the capacity to formulate plans and models responsive
to the problems being confronted and susceptible to
effectuation.

23. Through the basic facets a subset of other
elements are made:
• Idealism
- the ability to select and promote a set of values.
• Implementation
- the capacity to direct the execution of a plan of
action.
• Adaptation
- readiness to recognize the existence of a
problem and to resolve them.
• Analysis
- continuing adjustment for the information
collected and the formulation of decision.

24.  Conflict model of choice depicts decision-making as a
battleground that determines not only the policy but
also the fate and fortunes of policy makers.
 A theory of rational choice under conditions of
uncertainty is readily applicable to policy makers and
their circumstances of limited information and control
over a public problem’s environment.
 Principle of rational choice – each judgment should be
independent of the other: policy-makers must not
allow what they think might happen to be influenced
by what they would like to happen.
 Rational decision-making is directed toward attaining
optimality, that is, toward producing decisions that
maximize an explicit, measureable criterion.

25. 2 TYPES OF DECISION:
Programmed decisions
- are repetitive and routine, follows
established rules, precedents, and strategies
and focus, on tasks rather than on problem.
Non-programmed decisions
- is largely novel, addressed to a problem not
previously encountered/experienced, and is
typically important.

26. Varieties of Decision
“Public Policy decisions differ in structure and
scope.”
Some varieties encountered include:
 Single-valued
- directed toward achieving only a single
objective.
 Multivalued Decision
- requires the ordering of values and determining
the distribution of resources for their support.

27. “Decisions may be produced by individuals and
groups and organizations.”
The group, which is characteristic of
bureaucratized societies, has access to more
resources than does the solitary decider.

28. Patterns of Decision-Making:
Democratic Elitism
• According to democratic elitism: those endowed with
experience and influence make policy.
~ From one perspective, Adirondack Park policy
exemplifies policy-making by a democratic elite
Consequently: “forever wild” was not a policy or concept
that the elite conservationists alone could define
conclusively. At a succession of intervals they had to
convince the public of the worthiness of their
contentions.
The likelihood: the elite prevailed less because of their
own prowess than because their messages were
attuned to sentiments and forces ascendant in society.

29. Policy making is confused with incremental
change because of such constraints as imperfect
knowledge and information, limited human
ability to conceive all the possibilities in a
complex social problem.
Policy Choice as a Commitment
Whether a particular policy choices will be made
or implemented effectively depends on the
degree of commitment to their respective goals
of political leaders, bureaucracies, group
representatives and all those participating in a
choice-making process.
Policy Choice as a Conflict
The act of policy choice is an act of managing
conflict.