Challenge and Development: The Emerging Understanding of Policy Work

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 has become a form of specialized and interactive practice, going well beyond classical formulations of ‘policy analysis’. This paper reviews the way in which this conceptual development has enabled a more complex and more informative analysis of the policy process, and the place of ‘policy analysis’ as part of this process.