Bardach taught us that the key test of any public policy or program is whether it can withstand implementation.
Eugene Bardach, who passed away on April 24, 2026, was one of the most creative and influential policy scholars of his generation. I was incredibly fortunate to be his student at the University of California, Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, where he taught from 1973 until 2017. I met Gene in 1987, when I was just 22—a first-year master of public policy student, fresh out of college, and, like Gene, raised in Baltimore.
Over the nearly 40 years that Gene was in my life, I learned so much from him: not only about how to study public policy, but also about how to be both a productive researcher and a dedicated teacher, how to draw on insights from many different disciplines while keeping one’s own scholarly voice, and, most importantly, how to balance professional commitments and family life while maintaining a sense of humor. For me, Gene was the ideal role model.
Although Gene was trained as a political scientist, he was an unusually broad thinker. He cared about good ideas about how to make government work better, no matter their disciplinary origin. He read widely—in economics, in psychology, even in evolutionary biology. The “big” topics that dominate the modern political science discipline—elections, parties, public opinion—never quite held him. What he was most interested in was the micropolitics of governance: the official implementing a new human services policy, the inspector assessing whether a factory is safe, the network of agencies seeking to share clients without waging turf battles, the public manager attempting to determine whether a program that worked well in another town might also work in hers.
Gene’s work bridged academic theory and on-the-ground practice with rare facility. He was optimistic about using smart practices to improve government performance, but realistic about the political and institutional obstacles in the way. Throughout his career, he returned, again and again, to a single, hopeful conviction: that political resources—above all, political skill and the insight gained through policy analysis—could be deployed to navigate the American political system and actually solve problems.
That theme appeared in his first book, The Skill Factor in Politics: Repealing the Mental Commitment Laws in California, published by the University of California Press in 1972. The question he explored was how a reform coalition that had been dismissed as virtually a lost cause managed to overhaul California’s involuntary commitment system. Skill, in Bardach’s reframing, was not a personality trait possessed by a powerful few. He did not believe in the “great man” theory of politics. Rather, skill was a quality of action—the timely, efficient, sometimes creative use of political resources to perform critical tasks, including drafting a proposal, building a coalition broad enough to enact change while cohesive enough to hold, and defending a position from counterattacks.
His next major book, The Implementation Game, came out in 1977—at a moment of growing disappointment that some well-intentioned Great Society programs had not achieved their goals. Gene’s focus on what happens after laws are passed was one of the inspirations for my 2008 book Reforms at Risk, which examines why some general-interest reforms stick while others unravel after enactment. Gene reframed implementation as a set of games played by parties pursuing their own ends in an unfolding strategic context—games all too familiar to advocates who watch their victories fail to deliver: “Diversion of Resources.” “Massive Resistance.” And the favorite game of blame-avoiding actors—“Not Our Problem.” Crucially, Gene argued, planners can anticipate these games early—by writing implementation scenarios that walk through how a policy will actually unfold and be exploited. And he drew attention to the indispensable role of fixers—actors who, when things go wrong, step in to repair a policy and build a more hospitable environment for it.
In 1982, Bardach joined his Berkeley colleague Robert A. Kagan to write Going by the Book: The Problem of Regulatory Unreasonableness, published originally by the Temple University Press. Based on interviews with businesses, agency officials, and field inspectors, the book argued that inflexible, legalistic application of regulations often produces outcomes neither efficient nor just, generating unreasonableness in enforcement that discourages responsible behavior by regulated entities and erodes the legitimacy of regulation itself. While Bardach and Kagan were not anti-regulation—they recognized a real need for measures to protect the safety and health of workers and consumers—they made the case for a more flexible, problem-solving posture by inspectors, one that distinguishes “good apples” (who are concerned about their reputations and are predisposed to comply with regulations) from “bad apples” (whose behavior is guided only by narrowly financial, short-term interests) and who uses regulatory enforcement discretion to solve problems rather than simply write citations. The book helped seed the now-substantial literature on responsive and cooperative regulation.
Gene’s core insight that the real test of a program is whether it can survive implementation has rarely felt more vindicated than in the past several years, when historic legislation on electric vehicle chargers and broadband ran into precisely the delays and frictions he taught us to anticipate. And the fixers Gene wrote about have been in short supply—with precisely the consequences for government performance that his scholarship predicts.
If those books made Gene’s reputation as a scholar, A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis—better known as The Eightfold Path—made his insights an indispensable presence in policy school classrooms. Translated into multiple languages, adopted in graduate and undergraduate programs across the United States and around the world, the slim volume distills what Gene had learned from coaching more than 500 student field projects at the Goldman School. The eight steps sound deceptively simple: define the problem, assemble the evidence, construct the alternatives, select the criteria, project the outcomes, confront the trade-offs, decide, and tell your story. What has made the book endure is what fills out those steps: practical insights on how to think clearly and creatively about hard problems.
About 15 years ago, Gene gave me an unexpected gift. He invited me to coauthor subsequent editions of The Eightfold Path with him. We published three together. Before he passed, Gene sent me many suggestions and edits for the next edition—which I will be working on this coming academic year.
It is a privilege to have the opportunity to keep the Eightfold Path franchise going. But Gene’s enduring legacy does not lie in any publication, or even in any single concept or finding. It lies in a sensibility he transmitted to generations of practitioners: that through analysis and political entrepreneurship, we can move the world a few inches toward where it ought to be. Most of all, Gene taught us that public policy is about asking good questions. What is the problem we are trying to solve? Is there another way to define that problem—one that leaves more room for fresh thinking and effective interventions? And if our preferred solution is not feasible, what is second best?
For me, Gene was not just a mentor and coauthor. He was a treasured friend—a constant source of support and wisdom. And he was always willing to help, no matter how busy he was. Back in the mid-2000s, when I was teaching at the University of Virginia, the provost asked me to co-lead an effort to design and launch a new policy school. It was a challenging assignment. Some key stakeholders opposed the effort, and many practical hurdles remained. Gene generously spent a week in Charlottesville, interviewed all the key faculty and administrators, and wrote an excellent consultant’s report that helped get the Batten School off to a great start.
Gene had so many endearing qualities: his boundless curiosity about new ideas, his intellectual playfulness, his warmth and generosity, his wonderful sense of humor.
Gene and I were constant email companions. We would write each other about something in the news or share thoughts about books or blogs we had read. So many times since his passing, I have come across something and wanted to email Gene to ask him what he thought. I will miss him deeply—and I feel so lucky to have had the chance to learn from him, write with him, and be his friend.
This essay is part of a series titled, “Bardach’s Path to a Better World.”
