Pub Ad Optional Daily Brief – 29 – August – 2026

Keyword of the Day | Policy Termination

Policy termination means the deliberate ending, abolition or substantial withdrawal of an existing government policy, programme or institution when it is no longer effective relevant or legitimate.

Peter deLeon is strongly associated with the study of policy termination, highlighting that ending policies can be politically more difficult than creating them because of organisational resistance, beneficiaries and vested interests.

Thinker of the Day | Merilee S. Grindle

Works – Politics and Policy Implementation in the Third World Despite the Odds: The Contentious Politics of Education Reform

• Grindle challenges the assumption that once a technically sound policy is formulated, implementation will automatically follow for e.g. Land reforms may be legally enacted but resisted by powerful landholding groups, producing weak implementation.

• The success of a policy depends partly on its content Who benefits? Who bears costs? How much behavioural change is required? What resources are required? Policies creating high costs for powerful groups are often harder to implement.

• Implementation is shaped by Political + Economic + Social + Institutional context This complements F.W. Riggs’ ecological approach.

Grindle shifts development administration from the question of ‘What is the best policy?’ to ‘What makes a policy implementable in a particular political and institutional context?’

Pub Ad PYQ Vault | Day 35 | PYQ (2005)

“Development Administration is starved for theories, and theories are starved of facts.” Comment.