In trawling through budget documentation for a variety of countries recently, I came across the following definition for policy.
Policy: "The actions or strategy that a government takes to achieve its objectives. A policy can be summarized into a sentence, but it should be backed up by longer analyses and descriptions to more fully describe the strategy. The policy may be quantitative or qualitative. In practice, people often use the term “policy” to refer to the objective, and omit the action or strategy. If needed, one can clarify between “policy actions” and “policy objectives”. In some cases, there may be ambiguity between what is an action and what is an objective, but in other cases it is clear that the action has been omitted, which is often a sign that the actions have not been selected yet, or that the actions are not attractive and thus aren’t publicized."
Just thought colleagues might be interested to read this.
