Font Size:     

The paper deliberates on the issue of public policy making process and strategies in the specific context of Pakistan in view of the universal call for good governance, efficient service delivery, accountability, participation and sound public policy making through empowering people and leveraging their potential in the process of governance. It emphasizes on the need for revisiting the public policy making process and strategies with a renewed interest at a time when strategy and policy instruments are being intensively debated in the wake of a plethora of economic, social, political and governance problems triggered by the tragic wave of terrorism, militancy and corruption in the country. The paper argues that existing process and strategies of policy making are quite generic, linear and mainstream which provide an overly simplistic and general understanding of the approach in which public policies are formulated. These define policy formulation merely a solution generating process which in turn solves some problems. This procedure consists of sequential steps which begins with identification of a problem, and completes with a set of actions to resolve the problem. Nevertheless, evidence suggests that real world of policy making is much more complex and intricate. Some notable competing approaches in this regard include the “advocacy framework” (Sabatiaer and Jenkins-Smith, 1999), “multiple stream framework” (Kingdons, 1984; Zahariadis, 2003), “rational-choice analysis” (Sharpf, 1997), “policy network approach” (Borzel, 1998; Thatcher, 1998; Howlett, 2002), “policy transfer perspective” (Dolowitz and Marsh, 1996), and “network governance” (Cross, Hesterly, and Borgatti, 1997). While all of the above competing frameworks offer competing explanations they are largely concentrated on pluralist cultures and the way policy choices are made. Therefore, it is challenging to elucidate by what means such frameworks explain policy making where the decision making is done in dictatorial settings i.e. in those countries which are politically independent but economically dependent on international financial institutions, who have elected governments but without people centric democracy, who gained independence from colonial rule but are still well-entrenched in colonial traditions, and whose intellectuals are highly educated and well- read but have captive mindset. To address the issue the paper suggests utilizing a network governance perspective with decentralized/bottom up approach for effective policy making in Pakistan and recommends ways towards effective public policy based on a realistic, context specific, collaborative and participative approach.