Luke Fowler, associate professor and faculty director in the School of Public Service, had his article “Strategies for dealing with policy ambiguities” published in the journal Public Administration. The piece explores the almost universally-experienced challenges faced by public servants as they balance the political, legal and technical requirements of policies against their functionality in practice.
Fowler uses a grounded theory approach to identify themes in how practitioners cope with policy ambiguities and argues that ambiguity is a key theoretical and practical challenge that impacts the quality and character of democratic governance.