The Oakland Project and Its Legacy

As I begin drafting my first book project, which examines the War on Poverty, I have been thinking about an earlier generation of scholars who tried to capture the politics of implementation as it unfolded on the ground. One of the most ambitious efforts came out of Berkeley in the 1970s: the Oakland Project.

Most people studying implementation know Jeffrey Pressman and Aaron Wildavsky’s Implementation: How Great Expectations in Washington Are Dashed in Oakland; or, Why It’s Amazing that Federal Programs Work at All… (1973). With its famously long subtitle, it remains a classic in the study of policy implementation. What is less widely remembered is that Implementation was part of a larger University of California Press series, the Publications in the Oakland Project.

The series contained at least six volumes. It began with Arnold Meltsner’s The Politics of City Revenue (1971) and included Frank Thompson’s Personnel Policy in the City (1975). Implementation was the second book. Collectively, these volumes were an ambitious attempt to analyze how War on Poverty programs actually played out at the street level. The project was not just an academic exercise. It was funded by NASA, the Urban Institute, and HUD, and it was structured as an applied partnership with the city of Oakland.

Many of the contributors were colleagues and students of Aaron Wildavsky, the Berkeley political scientist who went on to found the Goldman School of Public Policy. Alongside Wildavsky and Pressman, the roster included Arnold Meltsner, Frank Levy, William Lunch, Frank Thompson, and Jesse McCorry. With the exception of Meltsner, who was Wildavsky’s colleague and a fellow founding faculty member of the Goldman School, most were his students who went on to long and distinguished careers. McCorry, who completed his doctorate at Berkeley, authored the final volume, Marcus Foster and the Oakland Public Schools (1978). Pressman’s career was tragically cut short when he died at only 33 while serving as an associate professor at MIT. Implementation was only his second book.

Others contributed research outside the University of California Press series. Judith V. May, for example, authored Citizen Participation: A Review of the Literature (1971), published through ERIC. Archival records also note graduate students who assisted the project but did not publish volumes of their own.

Wildavsky’s legacy continues today in both academia and practice. The Goldman School hosts the annual Aaron Wildavsky Lecture, with Jamila Michener of Cornell scheduled for 2025. APSA honors him with two major awards: the Aaron Wildavsky Enduring Contribution Award (Public Policy Section) and the Aaron Wildavsky Dissertation Award (Religion and Politics Section). His influence also reaches into today’s civic technology world. Jennifer Pahlka, founder of Code for America (where I once worked as a data scientist) and author of Recoding America, cited Implementation as her favorite book in an interview with Ezra Klein. That moment shows how a study of War on Poverty programs in Oakland, written more than fifty years ago, still shapes how reformers think about the politics of public programs.

What we need now is scholarship that blends political science, public administration, and policy analysis with a sustained focus on the messy realities of implementation. The Oakland Project showed that such work is possible. I hope to continue this mission in my own book project, which examines the War on Poverty. At the same time, I aim to expand the implementation literature by connecting it to the politics of community organizing in race- and class-subjugated communities — stories of the War on Poverty that have rarely been part of the mainstream literature on public administration and policymaking.

The Oakland Project Series by the University of California Press

• Meltsner, Arnold J. 1971. The Politics of City Revenue. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  
• Pressman, Jeffrey L., and Aaron Wildavsky. 1973. Implementation: How Great Expectations in Washington Are Dashed in Oakland; or, Why It’s Amazing That Federal Programs Work at All. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  
• Levy, Frank S., Arnold J. Meltsner, and Aaron Wildavsky. 1974. Urban Outcomes: Schools, Streets, and Libraries. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  
• Pressman, Jeffrey L. 1975. Federal Programs and City Politics: The Dynamics of the Aid Process in Oakland. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  
• Thompson, Frank J. 1975. Personnel Policy in the City: The Politics of Jobs in Oakland. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  
• McCorry, Jesse J. 1978. Marcus Foster and the Oakland Public Schools: Leadership in an Urban Bureaucracy. Berkeley: University of California Press.