Bardach’s Path to a Better World

Over the last half-century, Eugene Bardach gave regulators key tools for charting a path to a better outcomes.

This past spring saw the passing of one of the world’s most influential scholars of public policymaking and implementation: Eugene Bardach, a much-beloved professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley.

Bardach, trained as a political scientist, wrote or edited more than a half dozen major policy-oriented books throughout his career. In addition to his most influential work, A Practical Guide For Policy Analysis: The Eightfold Path To More Effective Problem Solving—which has been updated and published across seven editions—his major books have included: The Implementation Game: What Happens After a Bill Becomes a Law; Getting Agencies to Work Together: The Practice and Theory of Managerial Craftsmanship; and The Skill Factor in Politics: Repealing the Mental Commitment Laws in California.

Bardach’s scholarship spanned widely across all facets of public policy and public administration of government programs, including major contributions within the field of regulation.

The director of the Penn Program on Regulation, Cary Coglianese, once observed that “Bardach’s classic guide to policy analysis—A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis: The Eightfold Path to More Effective Problem Solving—remains the most accessible treatment of how to think systematically about problem-solving in a public policy context.” Coglianese added that “every regulator needs to know how to solve problems.”

Among his work directly within the field of regulation, Bardach co-edited the volume Social Regulation: Strategies for Reform with Robert A. Kagan and Lawrence A. Bacow. With Kagan, he also wrote Going by the Book: The Problem of Regulatory Unreasonableness, another must-read book for anyone interested in regulation, according to Coglianese, who is the Edward B. Shils Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania and a faculty advisor to The Regulatory Review.

“Although written in 1982, Going by the Book is a timeless treatment of how law interacts with businesses—and the managers and workers within those businesses. It’s as relevant today as it was when written more than four decades ago,” explains Coglianese.

Coglianese also remembers that, when he was leading the Penn Program on Regulation’s major research initiative on regulatory excellence ten years ago, he was honored that Bardach agreed to serve as one of the peer reviewers of the project’s final report. “Gene visited with us at Penn and generously gave us the benefit of his incisive, analytical mind,” Coglianese said. “His engagement with our work was such a gift for us—and it also gave me such a deep appreciation for how much value he passed along to his students over the years.”

Bardach was widely recognized as a leader in the field of public policy. He received the Donald T. Campbell Award of the Policy Studies Organization “for creative contribution to the methodology of policy analysis.” He served as the president of the Association for Policy Analysis and Management. He was an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In a tribute published after his passing, Berkeley’s Goldman School recognized how, “for more than five decades, Bardach shaped the field of policy analysis with a rare combination of intellectual rigor, practical wisdom, and genuine compassion for everyday people.” An obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle noted how “he pushed students relentlessly to sharpen their thinking, strengthen their writing, and, while maintaining an intent focus on improving the lives of everyday people, confront the hard tradeoffs inherent in many policy decisions.”

In a movingly personal tribute to her father, Rebecca Bardach wrote about how much “he loved teaching and mentoring his students, helping them grow into their best selves, as people, and as policymakers and practitioners.” She also noted that “he never lost sight of the end goal: the responsibility we carry to make people’s lives and communities better.”

“I hope that all of us—staff, alumni, and readers of The Regulatory Review—will remember that same end goal in all that we do,” commented Coglianese. “If the goal that drove Gene Bardach can guide all of us in our collective work, that will be the most fitting tribute of all to a scholar who dedicated his life’s professional work to understanding how to make sound policy decisions and see them implemented in ways that make the world a better place.”

The Regulatory Review and Penn Program on Regulation offers this series of essays to celebrate Bardach’s many academic and practice-oriented achievements, especially in the field of regulatory policy. This series features essays from four leading scholars who engaged closely with Bardach over the course of his distinguished career and were themselves deeply influenced by his efforts “to make people’s lives and communities better”: Michael Barzelay, London School of Economics and Political Science; Robert A. Kagan, University of California, Berkeley; John Mendeloff, University of Pittsburgh; and Eric M. Patashnik, Brown University.