Description
Defence and security reviews are important public manifestations of British national strategy. Commentary on these reviews focuses on the preparation and content of outcome documents but pays very little attention to implementation. The structures of accountability for many reviews are opaque. Personnel changes, shifting policy agenda and bureaucratic reorganizations, make tracing the extent and efficiency of implementation difficult. Many of the reviews perceived most favourably are those with the weakest mechanisms for implementation. This carries the risk that our perception of whether a review was a ‘success’ or not may be inversely related to how far it actually brought about tangible changes in practice.
Using data collected from 3 workshops and over 60 interviews with senior officials involved in defence and security reviews since 1998, the authors chart how implementation operates in practice. They then compare this with existing theories of implementation in the literature on organizational strategy. The paper will thereby offer both empirical insights into how strategy is implemented, and nascent theorization on the range of possible systems of implementation available to policymakers and how far strategic failures are attributable to the specific ones adopted in the UK defence and security field.
