1. The communication and use of policy-relevant knowledge are central to the practice and theory of policy analysis. Only when knowledge of the policy-making process is communicated in that process can policy stakeholders use knowledge to improve public policies.
2. The methodology of policy analysis is a system of standards, rules, and procedures for creating, critically assessing, and communicating policy-relevant knowledge. The methodology of policy analysis has several important characteristics: a concern with formulating as well as solving problems, a commitment to descriptive as well as value-critical inquiry, and a desire to improve the efficiency of choices among alternative policies.
3. Knowledge is defined as plausibly true belief rather than certainty. Statistical probability plays a secondary and supportive role in establishing the plausibility of knowledge claims.
4. The evolution of policy analysis over the past 50 years has produced broad consensus on an appropriate methodology. This is evident in historical changes in the conduct of research on social problems, the dissatisfaction with logical positivism as a theory of knowledge, and responses to lessons learned from research conducted on social programs during the Great Society.
5. Based on these and other experiences, the methodology of policy analysis has been transformed from a series of individual social science disciplines into a multidisciplinary synthesis called critical multiplism. Critical multiplism is based on the principle of triangulation and several important guidelines or rules: multiple operationism, multimethod research, multiple analytic synthesis, multivariate analysis, multiple stakeholder analysis, multiple perspective analysis, and multimedia communications. All guidelines need not be observed in every policy analysis.
6. Five types of information are produced by policy analysts: policy problems, policy futures, policy actions, policy outcomes, and policy performance. These five types of information are obtained by means of five policy-analytic procedures: problem structuring, forecasting, recommendation, monitoring, and evaluation. These policy-analytic procedures are related to particular methods and techniques helpful in producing specific types of information. Information is the basis for knowledge claims that become knowledge (plausibly true belief) when they withstand criticisms, challenges, and rebuttals offered in the course of policy debates.
7. Policy analysis is an intellectual activity carried out within a political process. This process can be visualized as the policy-making process, which has five major phases: agenda setting, policy formulation, policy adoption, policy implementation, and policy assessment. Particular policy-analytic procedures are appropriate for creating information in particular phases of the policy-making process.
8. Policy analysis is the beginning, not the end, of efforts to improve the policy-making process. Before policy-relevant information can be used by intended beneficiaries it must be converted into policy-relevant documents and communicated in presentations of different kinds. The entire process of policy communication has four stages: policy analysis, materials development, interactive communication, and knowledge utilization. Skills needed to develop policy documents and give oral presentations are distinctly different from skills needed to conduct policy analysis.
9. The utilization of knowledge by policy stakeholders is a complex process involving interdependencies among three dimensions: composition of users, effects of use, and scope of knowledge used. The intersection among these three dimensions provides a basis for assessing and improving the role of policy analysis in the policy-making process.
10. Policy analysis does not seek to replace politics by establishing some kind of technocratic elite. This aim is not only undesirable in democracies; it is also unlikely to occur in present-day institutions characterized by various forms of cognitive impairment, disjointed decisions, tangled systems of interpretation, and organized anarchy.
11. In promoting the utilization of policy-relevant knowledge, policy analysis seeks to facilitate individual and collective learning, including improved policies, through communicative interaction and public debate.