1,720,979 research outputs found
Stasis and change
No full textThe normal state of a policy domain is stasis: issues are solved and settled within, and reproducing, the domain’s structural features. Transformative change is the exception, but in the early 21st century a topical one: think of transforming welfare states, identity politics and the transition to sustainability. This chapter reviews theories that seek to explain stasis and change in the same terms. Using examples as illustrations, it discusses various branches of theory. Regarding punctuated equilibrium theory, there appears ample evidence for the main causal claims of the theory, but the role of agency and reflexivity remains obscure. Early neo-institutionalist theorizing is demonstrated to pay more attention to agency and ideas, yet more to explain stasis than change. On the latter account, interpretive and discursive neo-institutionalist theories do much better. Yet future theorizing may benefit from fields like transition studies and urban studies, where the intertwining of policy and societal practices is emphasized
7. Evaluation as Policy Work: Puzzling and Powering in a Dutch Program for Sustainable Development
No full textThe idea of policy design: Intention, process, outcome, meaning and validity
Full text linkWhile policy design is a relatively recent term in the social science literature, the concept itself is ancient. The modernist incarnation, from the mid-20th century onwards, is grounded in the applied social sciences: the systematic calculation of prob- lems, values, practices and outcomes. But in many ways, the confidence of the faith in systematic design was not borne out by experience. It became clear that rather than finding expert designers advising authoritative decision-makers and perhaps monitoring the activities of subordinate ‘implementers’, the world of policy was populated by multiple participants in distinct organisational locations, with divergent framings, con- tinuing negotiation on practice, and ambiguity in the understanding of outcomes. There is clearly a tension between the image of policy design and the experience of the activity. The response to this tension in the literature on policy design has largely been aimed at reconciling the experience of practice with the norms of instrumental rationality. It has tended to give little attention to the interpretive significance of ‘design talk’ in the process of governing. This paper argues that ‘policy design’ is an exercise in giving meaning – framing activity in a way that makes practices and outcomes appropriate and valid – and develops a more comprehensive analysis of ‘policy design’ as a concept in use in both policy practice and the analysis of that practice
Policy, learning and regime change: Western concepts and CEE experience
No full textThis article offers an outsider’s perspective on the place of policy in the analysis of governing in Central and Eastern Europe, both before the change from a communist to a post-communist order, and since. It explores the way in which ‘policy’ is used as a construct in both the practice of governing and the analysis of that practice. It argues that we have to recognise multiple strands – authority, structured interaction, and collective problematisation - in the construction of ‘policy’. It points to a distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘practical’ perspectives, and argues that this distinction reflects structural tensions in the process of ’putting together’ the shared understandings and relationships which make g for ‘governing’, It argues for the importance of continuing research, empirically based and theoretically informed, into the way that governing is ‘put together’ in Central and Eastern Europe, and how both participants and the governed ‘make sense’ of this process
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