Introduction

Abstract

This book is about how public administrators do their job: what it is they actually do in their daily work which produces a thing called policy. It focuses in particular on what administrators need to know in order to make policy, and how they come to know it.

The two things that civil servants do is write papers and have meetings. Because that’s what we do. From that, things happen. Extraordinary though it might seem.

(Senior civil servant, Department of Health, interview with author, March 2011)