IMPLEMENTATION AS COMMUNICATIVE ACTION - AN INTERPRETIVE UNDERSTANDING OF INTERACTIONS BETWEEN POLICY ACTORS AND TARGET GROUPS

Many social problems can only be solved through some form of governmen tal involvement. In this article, a model is formulated for policy imp lementation. The various criticisms against a top-down model of implem entation can be taken into account by conceptualizing implementation a s communicative interaction between policy actors and their target gro ups, each characterized by distinct rationalities (section 4) with imp ortant consequences for the likelihood of learning and behavioral chan ge (section 5). As explained in section 3, 'communicative action' is b eing used to underline that we go beyond the top-down vs. bottom-up di stinction, thus doing justice to empirical findings and adopting a pos t-positivist epistemology. Normatively, this expresses a critical appr oach to 'implementation as the continuation of politics with different means.' The need for such an approach is illustrated by two case stor ies (section 2), one about fresh dairy packing in the Low Countries, t he other one about nuclear missiles in the United States. Examples fro m these stories are used in sections 4 and 5 to clarify our model.