What happens on the ground: Persistent issues in implementation research

Abstract

Since the demise of what has been labelled as the policy-implementation paradigm, the heyday of implementation research appears to be over. This suggests that the issues going back to the ‘top-down/bottom-up’ controversy have been resolved. Central in this article is the exploration of how these issues are being dealt with in contemporary implementation studies. An issue like the one of the ‘too many variables’ seems to have been settled, especially in quantitative studies. Other issues, however, like the theory/practice relationship, the multi-layer problem and the policy/politics nexus appear to have remained relatively unsolved problems. Solutions are explored how to deal with them when doing implementation research.