What Bardach Was Always Asking

Throughout his career, Eugene Bardach sought to understand how policy endeavors could fulfill their purposes.

Eugene Bardach died on April 24, 2026, at the age of 86. He had spent more than five decades at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. The tributes that followed his death were right to note his influence on how scholars and practitioners think about policy analysis, regulatory implementation, and public management. But admiration without vocabulary is incomplete. What the field has lacked is an account of what he was actually doing—what question he was always asking, what intellectual tradition he was working in, and why his most original ideas remain, at his death, less fully received than they deserve. My own tribute to him in this essay is an attempt to provide that account, in the hope that it might help scholars who come after him find ways to carry the work forward—and, in its specifics and details, to surpass it.

Across his career, Bardach was working on a single animating question, although he never stated it quite in these terms. For any given kind of endeavor—implementing a regulatory program, designing policy solutions, building collaboration across agencies, learning from the practices of others—how could the tasks and contexts of a particular such endeavor together possibly be responsible for attaining the system behavior patterns that allow it to fulfill its purposes? This is not a question about why things happened as they did, nor a question about what practitioners ought to do. It is a question about how endeavors could possibly work.

In Going by the Book: The Problem of Regulatory Unreasonableness, the book on regulatory implementation that Bardach wrote with Robert A. Kagan, the question is most directly on display for this journal’s readers. The received understanding of that book—a framework for responsive regulation—is accurate but incomplete. The deeper achievement is an account of how the endeavor of implementing socially protective regulation could possibly work: how specific tasks of the inspection encounter could activate the latent cooperative potential in the relationship between inspector and regulated enterprise, and channel it toward the program’s purposes. The “good inspector” is the concept that crystallizes this—not a prescriptive ideal, but a model of what the endeavor looks like when it functions well enough to fulfill its regulatory purposes.

The same question runs through the rest of his career. A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis: The Eightfold Path to More Effective Problem Solving, coauthored in later editions with Eric Patashnik, poses it for the endeavor of policy analysis itself. Getting Agencies to Work Together poses it for interagency collaboration. And smart practice analysis, developed in his 2003 presidential address to the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM), published in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management in 2004, poses it for the endeavor of case-based learning from practice: How could a researcher, following determinate commitments and heuristics for case analysis, recover how a particular endeavor attained its functioning in ways that provide usable knowledge to those who can appreciate its relevance to their own situations?

For Bardach, what makes an endeavor admirable is that it attains system behavior patterns that allow for fulfilling its purposes. Explaining how that has occurred means addressing how the endeavor’s tasks and contexts together produced those patterns. And theorizing that explanation means drawing on ideas about kinds of social, psychological, or economic phenomena that function as mechanisms: conceptual resources that help articulate, in more abstract terms, how those behavior patterns came to be attained. In that address, Bardach described these mechanisms as tapping into reservoirs of potentiality in social nature—free gifts available to any design intelligent enough to harness them. The mechanism is interesting not because it explains why something happened, but because it can be put to work.

This three-level architecture—system behaviors, how-explanations of the tasks and contexts responsible for them, and mechanism-like theoretical concepts—belongs to the tradition Herbert Simon identified in Sciences of the Artificial: disciplines concerned not with explaining natural phenomena but with understanding how artificial things could be designed to serve purposes. Simon’s paradigm cases were technical artifacts. Bardach was working in the same tradition but with a categorically different object: endeavors—that is, programs, regulatory systems, analytical practices, interagency arrangements. These are artificial phenomena in Simon’s sense, but their mechanisms are social rather than physical. Simon named the territory; Bardach populated the part of it that matters most for public policy and management—implicitly, without dramatizing it, and without invoking Simon by name.

That explains why his most original work was too original to be received on its own terms. I was once at a conference of the International Public Management Network where Bardach delivered a keynote on smart practices to an audience that should have been sympathetic. Colleagues came up to me afterward asking what he had been talking about. This was not a failure of communication. It was a failure of available framework. The concept of endeavor-centered sciences of the artificial—disciplines concerned with how endeavors of given kinds could possibly work—now provides that framework, along with the intellectual genealogy that connects Bardach’s contributions to a broader disciplinary tradition.

Something like this recognition arrived, belatedly, in the last year of his life. In autumn 2024, after a decade away, Bardach returned to the APPAM annual conference to receive the Peter H. Rossi Award—recognition from precisely the community where his ideas had faced the most sustained resistance. A colleague who attended described it as a triumphant return in old age, invoking Verdi’s late Shakespearean comeback. Bardach closed by announcing Bardach’s Law: Hope persists until chipped away by relentless skepticism and a last straw. The hope, and the work, remain.

My forthcoming book, Public Management: Recovering Designs through Case Study Research, is dedicated to Bardach and three other scholars whose original thinking was the origin of my work. My book provides the vocabulary and research practice that allow the question Bardach was always asking to become a framework for sustained scholarly work—work that can, in its specifics and details, surpass what he accomplished in his long and extraordinary career. That is the tribute his work deserves: not a monument, but a continuation.