Specialist is Needed in Analysing Policy-Making

Policy analysts tend to have chosen their approach for analysing policy-making before starting their study because they often consider their chosen approach must be ‘always best' or ‘universal'. However, every policy approach indeed has both strengths and deficiencies and they can play an effective role in a certain circumstance. Policy approaches are namely not ‘Superman' who can help researchers anytime and anywhere but ‘Specialist' who can help researchers in a certain time and in a certain place. This paper seeks to justify this proposition by examining currently most dominating approaches for policy analysis and policy-making process of emission standards for automobiles in Japan as a case study.