Narratives of widening participation and interviews with policy actors: questions and dilemmas (original) (raw)
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Modernising the Policy Process
Policy Studies, 2006
In an increasingly complex world of interrelated problems many governments have tried to modernise their institutional structures and the ways in which they go about making policy. In the UK and elsewhere this has been most apparent in the growing emphasis given to evidence-based policy making in contrast to faith-based approaches and the conviction politics of earlier periods. Much of the debate about the impact and indeed value of this apparently new approach has focussed on the supply side of the equation: on the utilisation of research evidence and how researchers might make their work more relevant and useful to policy makers. Less attention has been paid in these debates to the different ways in which the nature of policy and policy making is conceptualised and how this might affect the relationship between research and policy. This article takes forward this debate by critically reviewing the theorisation of the policy/ research relationship under three different conceptions of policy making: the stages model, the advocacy coalition framework and the argumentative turn. It considers the future of policy research via two questions: who should carry out policy research in which settings; and what skills do they need to do so more effectively?
Canadian Political Science Review, 2021
Policy work in government is often framed as existing in a "black box". It is assumed that public administrators, as "insiders", have more knowledge of policy development processes than those outside of government. Are black box narratives of policy work constructed by practitioners? Or is the idea of a "translucent" box more appropriate to understand policy work within the bureaucracy? Based on interviews with sub-national civil servants in one provincial government in Canada, this article finds that black box narratives are used by practitioners to understand policy work. I interpret these results to argue that a theory-practice gap does not necessarily exist when it comes to constructions of policy work: practitioners in the field, like scholars, employ black box narratives to frame policy work in the bureaucracy. Yet, academics may still find that translucent box theory provides a more nuanced way of understanding government's internal policy processes.
Challenge and Development: The Emerging Understanding of Policy Work
2011
Two themes have traversed the academic and practitioner literatures on policy and policy analysis: the search for a sophisticated technology of choice in the paradigm of instrumental rationality, and a ‘puzzling’ about the relationship of this technology to practice. A great deal of conceptual development has emerged from the tension between these two themes. There has been a re-thinking of the nature of the actors in the policy process, of the significance of the organizational forms within which they are located, and of the way in which they engage with policy problems. There has been an increasing realization that while concepts of hierarchical authority and instrumental rationality are very significant in the policy process, they are inadequate as descriptions of that process, and that attention has to be given to the place of interpretation in the construction of policy. In this context, there has been a focus on the agency of the participants, and the way that policy activity ...
No Hiding Place: On the Discomforts of Researching the Contemporary Policy Process
Journal of Social Policy, 1990
It has never been easy to conduct research into currently sensitive policy issues, but there is now accumulating evidence to indicate that various forms of resistence to scholarly investigation are on the increase. Such a climate handicaps all social policy research, but may have the greatest impact on ethnographic projects. Yet, it is argued, ethnography is increasingly widely recognised among academics as having a particularly valuable contribution to make to the study of the policy process. Unfortunately, many policy practitioners (and occasionally some academic colleagues) perceive ethnographic research as being of questionable validity and low helpfulness. This behoves policy-oriented ethnographers to demonstrate that they do indeed have procedures for assuring validity, even if their style of investigation is never likely to be popular with government. But in an era of bad faith, the man who does not want to renounce separating true from false is condemned to a certain kind of exile (Albert Camus to Jean Gillibert, February 1956). * We thank the ESRC for their judgement in funding our research, and 13 health authorities for making the time and having the courage to let us in.
Policy and power: A conceptual framework between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ policy idioms
Policy Sciences, 2004
During the last few decades, both policy practices and policy idioms have drastically changed. Concepts such as interactive planning, network management, stakeholder dialogue, deliberative democracy, policy discourses, governance, etc. have replaced older ones such as public administration, policy programmes, interest groups, institutions, power, and the like. Although we recognise the relevance and importance of this shift in vocabulary, we also regret related ‘losses’. We particularly regret that the concept of power has – in our view – become an ‘endangered species’ in the field of public policy analysis. We therefore will develop a framework to analyse power – being a multi-layered concept – in policy practices in this article. We will do so on the basis of the so-called policy arrangement approach, which combines elements of the old and new policy vocabularies. In addition, we draw upon different power theories in developing our argument and model. As a result, we hope to combine the best of two worlds, of the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ idioms in policy studies, and to achieve our two aims: to bring back in the concept of power in current policy analysis and to expand the policy arrangement approach from a power perspective.
11. Locating the Work of Policy
Amsterdam University Press eBooks, 2011
Getting close to policy 1 What exactly do social scientists seek to achieve when they engage in policy work? Is it dialogue with, or influence over policy professionals? Is it a way for academics to shape the formation or implementation of public policy, or is it to analyze and deconstruct policy in order to explore deeper patterns and processes pertaining to the organization of society? In short, should social scientists follow the policy gaze or seek to critique it? The answers to these questions necessarily depend on a host of other variables, including professional ethics, the nature of the policy in question, and one's own particular political disposition. These reflexive and epistemological considerations are central to social anthropology's methodology (Scholte 1972; Hammersley and Atkinson 1995; Meyerhoff and Ruby 1982; Davies 2007). But, while anthropologists excel in highlighting cultural complexity and the various sides of any argument (including their own subject-positioning), they frequently complain that government agencies and policy elites who commission research typically want simple conclusions and ' quick fixes.' For critical and interpretive social scientists, engaging with policymakers often seems like a ' dialogue of the deaf.' This has led some scholars to call for a change in the discourse and practice of the social sciences. As one prominent US professor summed it up, 'we need to learn to think and talk more like policymakers.' 2 This chapter aims to critique that argument and question its underlying assumptions. Far from offering social scientists a way forward, learning to 'think and talk like a policymaker' may be the problem that good social science needs to overcome. What gives anthropology its analytical edge when confronting policymakers is precisely its capacity to challenge received wisdom and think outside of the conventional policy box. My ambition, therefore, is to illustrate how anthropological approaches and perspectives might help us to better understand what is at stake when we confront policy processes. Social anthropologists are experienced at tracking the genealogies and flows of particular policies and their impact on people's lives and everyday behavior.
2. Giving Accounts of Policy Work
Working for Policy, 2011
This book focuses on how we account for the work of policy, recognizing that there is more than one type of account, and that different accounts may 'make sense' in different contexts. In this perspective, we need to recognize that 'policy' is itself an account of government, a construct mobilized, both by academic observers and by practitioners, to make sense of the activity of governing. It presents government as a process of instrumental decision making, in which actors called governments address problems and identify goals; the practice of governing is then explained by referring back to these decisions, seeing it as the 'implementation' of the choices made by governments. Dye described public policy 'whatever government decides to do or not to do' (Dye 1985). The basic assumptions underlying this description are seldom examined because it seems like ' common sense,' but this is precisely why we need to examine these (and other accounts): in how (and why) they 'make sense' of the process? This account of government as a pattern of official problem solving is not the only version available. A much older interpretation (e.g., from Hobbes to Oakeshott) believes that government is concerned with order or the maintenance of stable relationships and practices as well as dealing with disturbances. The dominant paradigm in welfare economics considers government to be a mechanism that deals with market failure, while the processes of choice are simply devices that enforce calculated solutions to problems of collective action. A third interpretation sees government as a struggle for partisan benefit: 'who gets what, when and how,' as Lasswell (1936) described it. Linked to this, but also distinguished from it, is a perception of government as a competitive struggle for dominance among leaders, with statements about goals, choices or benefits being largely tokens in this continuing struggle. More recently, the term governance has been used to suggest that governing is the outcome of a complex interweaving of both official and non-official organizational forms, that often mobilizes different frameworks of meaning and rationales of ac