Making Implementation More Democratic through Action Implementation Research

Public administration scholars often associate increased publicparticipation in policy implementation with the advancementof democratic values. Likewise, scholars engaged in the variousforms of action research (AR) promote their efforts as a meansto democratizing the research process or contributing to improvedsocial outcomes. Despite these common interests in participationand democracy, there have been few attempts to apply AR methodsto policy implementation problems. Drawing on Matland's conflict-ambiguitymatrix, we develop a framework for matching particular AR methodsto specific policy implementation contexts.