B. Towards a concept of bounded rationality
Governmental policy is a deliberate intervention in social life. It attempts to set in motion a sequence of events expected to result in the achievement of pre-stated goals. These events and the sequence itself are deliberately chosen because it is expected that there is a causal relationship between them and the goals they are used for. If a policy is unsuccessful in reaching its goals, two kinds of reason can be found. It is possible that the implementation of the program failed in setting in motion the planned sequence of events. It is also possible that the sequence of events was there but did not result in the attainment of the selected goals, because the expected causal relationship does not exist. To distinguish between these two categories of explanations, Carol Weiss [14] has introduced the concepts of program failure and theory failure. These concepts are powerful tools in explaining why policies are not successful in reaching their stated goals. There is much need for such explanations as ineffectiveness of govemmental policies (and of organizational strategies as well) is a frequently observed phenomenon that feeds an extensive enduring debate amongst policy analysts. Valid explanations will have a large added value for future policy development. Program failure focusses on implementation processes as a source of program ineffectiveness. If the actual employment of human, financial and material resources does not result in the intended chain of events the conditions are not met to reach the stated goals. In this case careful analysis of the implementation process is needed to get the information to develop a more effective program. So it is not surprising to see how from the early seventies on the issue of improving effectiveness of policy programs has induced a lot of research on implementation processes. Partially this research draws attention to the need of improved policy instruments. In addition there is much attention for organizational control issues and for the way in which operational decision making shapes and alters policy programs [2,9]. In the same period the theory failure approach has not gotten much attention, maybe because it confronts policy makers with a challenge to their theoretical and/or ideological assumptions. Theory failure questions the validity of policy choices as such. It turns to the stated causal relationships between means and goals and investigates their scientific justification. Chen and Rossi [3] point out that in many cases policy makers justify their selection of means in terms of causal relationships that have no or inadequate scientific ground. In their view