Squaring the public policy circle
Squaring the public policy circle
Managing a mismatch between demands and resources
This chapter examines the strategies that have been developed to manage the dilemma between maintaining services and constraint. These include shifting responsibility in various areas towards the market and the individual or voluntary sector, target-setting, manifold attempts to manage and restrain public provision, and attempts to change people's behaviour to cut demand. It argues that none of these approaches is entirely acceptable to public opinion and none has been markedly successful in solving the problem. This suggests that the dilemma of spending versus cutting will continue to underlie policy-making, that future policies must combine a range of approaches, and that greater attention to fostering a more informed and genuinely democratic debate is necessary so that new policy directions will be able to gain public support.
Keywords: public services, public spending, cost-cutting, policy-making, public support
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