From Evidence to Implementation: Closing the Gap Between Policy Research and Public Management

Abstract

Evidence about what may work is indispensable to public policy, but evidence does not implement itself. Public programmes are translated into practice through organizations, budgets, administrative routines, intergovernmental relationships, frontline discretion, monitoring systems, and local interpretations of policy purpose. This editorial argues that the persistent gap between policy research and public management should be treated as an implementation problem rather than as a simple deficit of evidence. Implementation quality depends on both the credibility of the underlying evidence and the institutional capacity to interpret, resource, adapt, coordinate, and sustain action. The analysis connects policy-implementation research, street-level bureaucracy, evidence-informed policymaking, implementation science, organizational learning, and programme evaluation. Particular attention is given to fragmented responsibilities, resource constraints, implementation fidelity versus adaptation, frontline discretion, stakeholder resistance, and weak monitoring. Priorities include comparative implementation evaluation, administrative-data use, adaptive implementation, implementation-cost analysis, organizational learning, and systematic examination of why similar policies produce different outcomes across settings. Public-management scholarship should therefore evaluate policies as operating institutional systems, not merely as formally designed interventions.