The pursuit of better government is unquestionably a noble pursuit, and one which springs, at least most of the time, from the better angels of our nature to which Abraham Lincoln once referred. Noble intentions do not necessarily guarantee good results, however, and so we find that many bright ideas for improving government processes and operations only barely see the light of day before fading into obscurity. My colleague Bob Gregory (2004) has called the roll of these now-forgotten innovations – zero-based budgeting, management by objectives (MBO), total quality management (TQM), and planning programming and budgeting systems (PPBS), for starters – and reminded us that current and future innovations of the same ilk are likely to suffer the same fate, despite their creators’ good intentions.

The analysis presented here begins by acknowledging this important lesson of history, but then looks beyond it to see whether a more stable core of knowledge, insight, and common sense might lie below the surface of fluctuating public management fashions and political tastes for public sector reform. If such a core exists, and if it has the potential to contribute to long-term progress in government performance, then it is worthwhile trying to unearth it. One place to start doing this is with a disparate set of good-practice methods drawn from the fields of public policy, program evaluation, and public management, all of which reflect a common set of basic propositions about the nature of policy and policymaking.

This chapter has two main purposes: (1) to identify and describe a common core of common sense wisdom that unites recent developments in the areas of policy design, public management, and program evaluation, and (2) to plead the case for focusing our limited attention on developing, nurturing, and applying this core of ideas across the public sector, rather than perpetuating competition among new policy and management ‘innovations’ and their acronyms.