Anne Newman - Between Movement and Establishment: Organizations Advocating for Youth

Research into policy issues, most particularly in education, taught that usual debates about top-down or bottom-up policy change largely misunderstand differences between macro level influences and levers and micro level opportunities for action (McLaughlin 1987, 2006; Scott & Meyer 1991). Differences among scholars typically center on which level of the system is more importantwhich has moral primacy and legitimate authority for action and is substantively prior (Lawlor, Ridgeway, & Markovsky 1993; Munch & Smelser 1987). These academic debates, primarily among sociologists, obscure two important points. One is that macro and micro levels of action are mutually contingent. Macro level policies both influence and depend on what happens on the ground. A second essential point is that micro is not a small macro. So-called backward mappers, policy analysts who followed policy trails and consequences from the bottom to the top of the implementing system, framed their investigations in macro terms of policy tools and expectations. But macro and micro level actors have different keyboards at their disposal. Macrolevel tools are the relatively blunt technical tools of policy; micro-level tools are adaptive and shaped by their specific contexts. Further, at the level of practice, important elements shaping implementation include those outside the formal policy systemsuch as community-based organizations, civic leaders, and community activists. Consideration of how policy choices are made and carried out at the local level requires a broader lens, one that looks beyond formal policy instruments and mandates to a view that better captures the nonsystem actors responsible for local preferences and implementation choices.