The management of policy making and implementation: Conceptualising development

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“The manager is the man who decides among alternative choices. He must decide which choice he believes will lead to a certain desired objective or set of objectives. But his decision is not an abstract one, because it creates a type of reality”, so wrote C. West Churchman [2, p. 17]. Neither, of course, is this decision objective and value-free. In fact, the decisions made, and the types of realities created by them, are liable to depend on the manager’s own reality, whether he acknowledges that fact or not. Among the tricky aspects of a manager’s reality are his assumptions – not those that are explicitly formulated, but those that Gouldner called “background assumptions” [5]. These assumptions are usually taken for granted, yet they decisively affect a manager’s choices, especially inasmuch as they determine the perspective from which a problem or situation is viewed. This point has far-reaching implications for the management of development. Today, much policy making in the developm

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