According to Gerston (1997), public policy is a purposeful activity of state authorities to address social problems, the achievement, and implementation of universally valid goals of the company or its separate spheres. It is a tool that allows the state to achieve certain goals in a specific area, using legal, economic, administrative methods of exposure, based on the resources at its disposal. The policy should be open, competitive and results-oriented.
Public policy, in its theoretical meaning, is a set of goals, objectives, priorities, policies, programs and strategic planning activities that are designed and implemented by state or municipal government with the involvement of civil society institutions.
A serious attention is paid to a consideration of the nature and content of the elements of public policy in contemporary political and sociological literature. Public policy is a political process of managerial influence mainly of the institutions of the state executive power on the main sectors of society, based on the direct application of state power in both the design and the implementation of the strategy and tactics of governing and organizing effects on all components and aspects of the functioning and development of the economics, social sphere and other subsystems of society through resource allocation, distribution, redistribution of public goods and other measures. Public policy is developed and implemented primarily by public institutions of power such as the government, president, etc. This does not exclude the possibility of participation of the legislative institutions in the development of political strategy and monitoring of its implementation, but parliament is not an organ of execution of public policy because it acts as a public institution of the legislative and representative government. Equally, this applies to all other political organizations, including institutions of political participation and civil society.
To explain, the system of public policy is not a simple sum of certain items, but it is a holistic totality, where the dialectical interaction of the latter is able to create new integrated quality. We does not mean the simple sum of the components of public policy’s parts under the system of public policy because it is an integral and integrated part of their unity in a given system, the presence of which turns it into an independent object of study. To highlight the named properties of the system of public policy, it is appropriate to give a classification of the elements of its content.
Summarizing the meaning of public policy, we can add that procedural components that reflect the structural relationships of social actors and institutions of state power over the political and administrative impact on society have a significant role in the development and implementation of public policy. Diverse set of relationships between them, related to the management of economic, social and other processes, implementing, and streamlining management covers the full cycle.