Introduction

Policy analysis in Colombia appears to be a relatively recent trend, both in scholarship and practice. Yet, revisiting policy analysis in Colombia, its approaches, and practices, implies the recognition of key challenges in describing its evolution. First, since the actual development of policy analysis, although short, stretches for more than 50 years of evolution, the act of identifying those milestones is thus far from straightforward. Considering that policy analysis involves a complex and cyclical process made of manifold moments, it has to be able to acknowledge the sociopolitical process of a particular country. Namely, it also needs to recognize the multiple intentions of organizing and rationalizing public actions and decisions in a particular country, even long before the terms “policy analysis” or “public policy sciences” were widely used. It should also take into account the actors involved in enhancing the adoption of a more technical perspective towards public policy.

A second challenge that cannot be set aside while tracing the evolution of policy analysis in the country, and the particular ways in which it has occurred, is the fact that its development has been probably influenced by external forces, such as the evolution of the discipline or field of study abroad; the influence of policy transfer and the transmission of the different narratives from foreign governments and multilateral organizations; and the role of international epistemic communities and networks that have fed policy-making processes in the country. Thus, there are both internal and external factors that need to be taken into account when analyzing the evolution of policy analysis in Colombia.

In this way, this chapter proposes the examination of policy analysis progression in Colombia based on historical and analytical background by identifying key actors, and by defining three essential moments that allow us to better recognize the key, internal and external, actors and the major milestones along the road. Thus, in the first moment, we start by listing the first efforts whereby a “scientific” approach to public policy started to be proposed (and initially adopted) in the Colombian context. In particular, we consider the role of international missions in the second half of the 20th century as defining forces that laid the groundwork for the early institutional and organizational developments in the country's public administration.