Social policy is defined as a course of action or inaction chosen by public authorities to address an issue that deals with human health, safety, or well-being; public authorities can include, but are not limited to, those who work directly with service users, bureaucrats working in international organizations, and elected officials of all levels of government. A number of theorists believe that social policy is concerned with the public administration of welfare services, that is, the formulation, development, …show more content…
In the residual welfare model, people who are able to provide for themselves should pay for themselves, unless they are unable to do so then social welfare intervenes. Welfare is not intended to be permanent income, but it exists to help provide until you can once again provide for yourself. An example of this would be workers compensation policy; when an individual is injured and cannot work, they are still provided with a basic living income. The industrial achievement performance model states social needs should be based on incentives, in which increasing performance and effort yields a greater reward. Another way of looking at is that welfare should be provided to the workforce. An example is the Canadian pension plan where those who “contribute” more to society are given more. The institutional redistributive model argues that social welfare should be adapted into society. In other words, welfare is based on the principle of need and should be provided as a basic public service. The Canadian health care system is considered an example of this since citizens have basic health needs paid for through taxation to the federal government, which is then distributed to the various provinces to provide essential services. Another example is the education system, where basic …show more content…
However, there is no single approach to develop policy and many frameworks have been devised. The earliest example is the stages heuristic approach. It divides the policy process into a series of stages: The agenda setting, policy formulation, policy adoption, policy implementation and policy assessment. As an early ‘theory’, it divided a complex policy process into discrete stages and stimulated research into specific stages. However, by the 1980s, it became increasingly criticized for a number of limitations such as not identifying the causal drivers that govern the policy process within and across stages. It also offers little insight into the policy change process with an absence of causal mechanisms. It is therefore not a theory with hypotheses than can be tested. Some advantages are offered by the stages heuristic. It is accessible and intuitive to the non-specialist and disaggregates the policy process into manageable segments. Overall, while the stages heuristic does not provide insights into the mechanisms of policymaking, it potentially aids practitioners to ‘get their bearings’ and to begin to