Risk Research in Public Policy Analysis: A Policy Rule that Should Not be Ignored

The philosophy and mission of government is to deal with the risks facing the society. The main tools for doing such a special task are public policies, but these policies face a variety of inherent and environmental risks in achieving their goals. While the inherent risks are rooted in the wrong understanding of the problem, policy formulation and design, selection of alternatives, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of policy performance, environmental risks refer to the risks faced by public policies during implementation. Since public policy analysis is considered to be the center of gravity of public policies, one of the main concerns of analysts in this field is to understand, diagnose, measure and manage the risk of such policies. Few studies have dealt with risk research in the field of policy analysis. The ultimate goal of this article is to draw the attention of the scientific community and agents of the country to “risk research” in national policy studies in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Therefore, while analyzing the concept and strategies of coping with risk, a framework for recognizing and managing “public policy risks” is provided. At the end, a guideline for future research in this important field will be suggested.