This text investigates policy as a concept in use - an idea that both practitioners and outside observers use to make sense of public life, and to participate effectively in it. It is concerned to analyze the way that the policy process works rather than to describe particular sorts of policy, and does this by addressing the core questions: what do we mean by policy? who makes it? where is it made?; and what is it that policy workers do? The volume should appeal to those interested in the place of policy in the way we are governed, as well as those concerned with questions like the environment, regional development or social policy.