This collection of essays deals with the concept of "policy practice" - the way in which policies, and particularly development policies, are constructed and implemented in the context of bureaucracies which have their own grammars of analysis and action. These institutional modes, of thinking and doing, have coloured and shaped the reality of economic and social development programmes, the results and ironies of which are addressed in these articles (all published here for the first time) by the late Bernard Schaffer and some of his contemporaries and colleagues in the field of development studies.