Governments around the globe cope with critical issues and thorny policy challenges: encouraging economic growth, combating climate change, educating young people, protecting against disease, building and maintaining infrastructure, planning urban communities, providing social security, and a great deal more. Talented policy designers, and the contributions of policy analysts, can render many of these difficult tasks less daunting. Governments can also learn from each other's experiences, so that mistakes do not necessarily have to be repeated in many places before policy learning can occur (Rose 1993). To convert sensible policy ideas into reliable and effective streams of programmatic action, however, much more is needed.

Few policies are self-executing. Typically, public programs require the concerted effort of many people, often coordinated via formal organization, to achieve their intended results. While some policy interventions can avoid the need for substantial coordination – monetary policies and other governmental efforts to shape market conditions, for instance, rely for much of their effectiveness on individuals' uncoordinated responses to reconfigured incentives – the great bulk of policies are delivered into the hands of intended implementers, whose responsibility it is to make policy come alive in patterns of goal-oriented behavior. Indeed, the promise of democracy in advanced nations is fundamentally tied to the ability of representative institutions to deliver regularly on their policy commitments through such processes of converting public intention into action.

Governments typically face these implementation challenges with regard to numerous policy objectives and programmatic initiatives.