Conclusion: building new momentum for deliberative policy analysis (original) (raw)

Introduction: towards deliberative policy analysis 2.0

Policy Studies

The purpose of this second special issue is to build on and extend the development of Deliberative Policy Analysis (DPA) 2.0 that was set in motion by the first special issue on DPA in this journal. It is set up around a symposium focused on integrating DPA's pillars of interpretation, practice, and deliberation. We identify three key threads for interweaving these three pillars and advancing DPA 2.0 and introduce the five other contributions to this special issue along these lines. We conclude that DPA 2.0 offers a range of solid and progressive approaches for methodically engaging with the complexity, relationality and practical nature of policy processes.

Deliberative Policy Analysis

Encyclopedia of Global Environmental Governance and Politics, 2016

This chapter maps and evaluates an approach to the study of global environmental governance that can be broadly characterised as ‘deliberative policy analysis’. Deliberative policy analysis emerges from two distinct theoretical traditions that sometimes but not always converge in studies of global environmental governance. The first is the normative tradition of deliberative democracy, concerned with principles and practices such as deliberation, legitimacy, participation, representation, and accountability. The second is the interpretivist tradition of discourse analysis that is concerned with understanding how policy is produced from specific interpretations of the world, which reflect certain values, assumptions, and interests and marginalise others. Each of these theoretical influences independently offers a coherent approach to the study of global environmental governance, but the value of a ‘deliberative policy analysis’ approach is best derived by combining them.

A double helix approach: a proposal to forge a better integration of analysis and process in policy development

International Journal of Technology, Policy and Management, 2003

In this article we distinguish two approaches of policy making: the analytical and the process management approach. The first stresses the importance of creating a substantively sound policy, the latter focuses on the process of policy development. In the past the two camps have been partially ignoring each other, with the result that the one approach misses what the other approach possesses. We try to create an integration of the two visions by developing a double helix approach on policy development. We have designed this double helix approach by identifying the potential risks of the analytical and the process management approach. We use these risks for constructing bridges between the two approaches. In this way the bridges form the principles of the double helix approach, which are described in detail in this article.

Policy analysis in uncertain and ambiguous context: Agenda for methodological pluralism

Political Expertise: POLITEX

In this article we demonstrate why and how in the Western science of policymaking a challenge posited by empirical behaviouralism aimed at reforming the over-politicised plicy process along the analytical-rational lines in 1950s did not succeeded. However, it produced a meaningful shift in understanding the policy process and it formed by the 1970s a completely new conceptual context and discourse on the policy process. As a result, by the new millennium the positivist and constructivists perspectives, that are located at the opposite ends of the continuum of methodological presumptions, started to complement each other and even to intermingle at the level of providing practical policy solutions. In the first part we analyse how the cognitive limits and uncertainty of the context forces to re-focus policy analysis from substantive issues to the policy arena design, and to work out conceptions of interactive policymaking. Simultaneously several concepts of constructivist social scien...

The paradox of policy analysis: If it is not used, why do we produce so much of it?

Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 1999

This article explores the apparent paradox that our society invests heavily in policy analysis when empirical studies, political science theory, and common wisdom all suggest that analysis is not used by policymakers to make better policy decisions. It offers a critique of the traditional view of policy analysis and presents an alternative view derived from contemporary literature on the policy process and decisionmaking. The alternative view suggests that there are legitimate uses for analysis other than the problem-solving use originally envisioned but apparently rarely attained. The two views imply different patterns of use of analysis by legislative committees-a contrast that I subject to an empirical test. An examination of quantitative data on policy analysis use by congressional committees from 1985 to 1994 lends support for the alternative view. The research has two implications. First, despite its scientific origins, policy analysis may be a more effective instrument of the democratic process than of the problemsolving process. Second, the profession of policy analysis may be in better shape than many who are calling for fundamental changes to its practice seem to believe.