H. K. Colebatch

Working for policy

Though democratic government calls for well-designed and implemented policy, there is surprisingly little expert guidance available for policy makers and politicians. Working for Policy fills that gap, addressing the nature of policy work and offering necessary guidance. The contributors bring together academic and experiential knowledge in their analysis and evaluation of what modern policy makers do in given situations and of how such actions contribute to the policy process. This unique book demonstrates how scholars can help to ensure that policy makers can acquire the skills and knowledge required in governing complex modern societies.

Risk and Governance in Water Recycling Public Acceptance Revisited

Public acceptance is often seen as a key reason why water-recycling technology is (accepted or) rejected. A common assumption is that projects fail because the general public is unable to comprehend specialist information about risk and the belief that if the public were better informed, they would accept change more readily. This article suggests that rhetoric about acceptance is counterproductive in progressing sustainability as it does not address issues relating to institutional arrangements and reinforces a dichotomy between expert and lay groups. Instead, it is argued that institutional change is needed to build opportunities for constructive public engagement. The failure to implement sustainable water use through recycling can be understood as the result of several factors including present cost structures for water, institutional conservatism, administrative fragmentation, and inadequate involvement of communities in planning. Achieving sustainable water use through recycling may require better coordination between agencies and integrated government policies.

Governance as a conceptual development in the analysis of policy

The current interest among political scientists in collaborative and deliberative ways of governing has emerged as part of a discourse about ‘governance’, originating with claims that the practice of governing is changing, that rule by the application of state power is being transformed into the collaborative accomplishment of order through a process of negotiation among a range of participants, government and non-government, and that consequently, political scientists need a new concept to describe this form of rule. Closer examination suggests that the place of non-government in governing has been long recognised, but under-theorised, and that the use of ‘governance’ reflects less a change in the practice of governing than in the practice of analysis, which now recognizes and labels previously-tacit elements of governing.

Problems, policy and politics: making sense of Australia's ‘ice epidemic’

Drug policy is a complex and controversial policy domain and traditional models of the policy process which present policy making as a process of authoritative problem solving by governments deny the complexity of the policy process in the real-world. An alternative perspective is to engage with the idea of policy-making as an ongoing process of managing the problematic, with multiple participants and competing perspectives. Kingdons ‘multiple streams’ is a heuristic for understanding policy-making in this way. This article critically considers to what extent Kingdons heuristic is a useful tool for drug policy analysis, in so far as it may offer an approach to better understanding the complexity of the drug policy process, which extends beyond authoritative problem solving. We apply Kingdons ‘multiple streams’ to a case study examining the emergence of methamphetamine (an illicit, synthetic psychostimulant drug) as a policy issue in Australia from the late-1990s to the late-2000s. We find strengths in Kingdons approach as applied to drug policy but also identify a number of ways in which this case study differed from Kingdons propositions. We question Kingdons assertion that the ‘streams’ operate independently, whether policy windows are necessary for action, the role of the media and the temporal frame for analysis.

Evidence and meaning in policy making

In 2011, Sense About Science launched a campaign backed by various celebrities, academics and other public figures entitled Ask for Evidence, ‘saying that consumers, voters and patients should demand evidence for scientific and medical claims to counter a tide of misinformation’ (Sense About Science, 2011). The campaign website provides examples of people asking for evidence on public claims in such disparate policy areas as video game addiction, food waste among single people and the carbon footprint of recycling mobile phones (Sense About Science, 2014). Potential campaign pa ticipants are advised that ‘[w]hen you ask for evidence, ask them about the science behind the claim’ (Peters, 2013). The campaign provides an example of the widespread support that the idea of evidence-based policy (EBP) now commands (Rutter, 2012). After all, using evidence as the basis for formulating public policy appears so uncontroversial as to be almost impossible to oppose (for an example to the contrary, see Pile, 2011). Taking EBP at face value in this way implies a rational-technical view of policy making, in which principles for selection, action and evaluation are shared amongst policy actors. Such a view assumes that the ‘evidence’ in evidence-based policy making is a given, and that if only politicians paid more attention to the evidence, society would see better policy. This special issue of Evidence and Policy follows the ‘interpretive turn’1 in the analysis of policy making to challenge this view: a shift in the object of attention (policy) from being an artefact – clear, fixed and created by ‘policy makers’ – to a process of meaning making between a range of participants (Hoppe, 1999; Majone, 1989). So if the interpretive approach leads us to focus on meaning, what might this mean for studying EBP? First, it highlights that actors may contest what is meant by ‘evidence’ as a factor in the policy process. One definition could be that evidence is policy-useful information (Lindblom and Cohen, 1979), but what makes information useful, and how does knowledge become useful information? How does the context in which the information is being used affect what counts as evidence? Second, even if a particular piece of evidence becomes accepted as justification for, or measurement of, a particular policy, it will still hold different meanings for different actors (Yanow, 1996). Third, the meaning of EBP as a paradigm guiding policy makers comes into SPECIAL ISSUE • Evidence and meaning in policy making

Through a Glass Darkly: Policy development on higher degree completions in Australia

A contemporary issue in higher education policy--the completion of research degrees in Australian universities--is reviewed from the perspective of an informed policy consumer--an academic working in the policy studies field who has pastoral responsibility for PhD students. The article investigates the way that the framing of the policy question, and the policy response, draws on research on the experience of PhD students, and puts forward an alternative framing based on micro-level data from the authors own school. It discusses the significance of the way that the policy issue has been framed and the likely impact of this on the PhD process.

Making sense of governance

Abstract Governance is a term which is widely, but not always precisely, used, and this article seeks to clarify what the term is being used to mean. In particular, it is concerned with whether it denotes a particular mode of government, or whether is a broad category encompassing all modes of government. It focuses on the arguments about political practice on which the original claims about governance were based, and the evidence that there has been a change is political practice which demands a new label. It concludes with a discussion of the way that accounts of government are used in the practice of governing, and the incentives that this gives both participants and observers to adopt the warm but fuzzy term ‘governance’.

Learning about Learning: Discovering the Work of Policy

The development of policy rests on skilled practice by knowledgeable practitioners – ‘policy work’ – and it is important to know what skills and knowledge this work calls upon, and where these are learned. Although there is substantial academic knowledge and courses in this field, many practitioners will argue that policy work is ‘as much an art as a science’ and is something that ‘you learn as you go’. This article reports on an exploratory study of policy practitioners’ accounts of their practice, what counts as knowledge, and in what contexts it is ‘useful’. We examine the discourses through which policy work is accomplished, the way in which people learn to do it, and the place of academic work in the constitution of these discourses. Drawing on our respondents understanding of policy practice, we discuss what more might be done to facilitate learning about the work of policy.

Theory and the analysis of Australian politics

Sharmans 1989 APSA Presidential Address is a welcome critique of the interpretation of Australian politics, but the questions that it raises need to be taken further. The importance of Australian political experience in the formation of an indigenous political tradition is recognised, but it is misleading to see it as stemming from the desire to limit executive power. This article explores the nature of this indigenous governmental tradition, and goes on to consider what we learn from this debate about the nature of constitutional theory, and the relationship of academic debate to constitutional models.

The idea of policy design: Intention, process, outcome, meaning and validity

While 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 problems, 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, continuing 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.