Robert Hoppe

If Post-Normal Science is the Solution, What is the Problem?: The Politics of Activist Environmental Science

Post-normal science (PNS) is presented by its proponents as a new way of doing science that deals with uncertainties, value diversity or antagonism, and high decision stakes and urgency, with the ultimate goal of remedying the pathologies of the global industrial system for which, according to Funtowicz and Ravetz, existing science forms the basis. The authors critically examine whether PNS can fulfill this claim in the light of empirical and theoretical work on politics and policy making. The authors credit PNS as an innovative frontrunner in raising important issues regarding the limited problem-solving capacity of ‘‘normal science’’ and ‘‘professional consultancy.’’ Yet, the authors notice that PNS lacks important considerations about the governance of problems and aspects of participatory and deliberative democracy. PNS in effect implies that methodological ‘‘ratiocination’’ would prevail over political deliberation and democratic interaction and that merely changing scientific input in public policy making would have the power to change its outcomes. This scientistic hubris can be traced back to PNS’s origin in concerned scientists’ activism, which in effect accessed the political arena through the scientific entrance. The authors conclude that the art of politics needs to come back into the discussion on environmental problems if societal change is to occur.

Cultures of public policy problems

This article is an essay about the construction of a culturalist theory of problem definition in the public domain. Using grid-group Cultural Theory and a typology of the structures of policy problems, questions are posed such as the following: Why do some policymakers prefer to define problems as overstructured and not understructured? May one predict that policymakers who adhere to different ways of life will prove to be more adept in solving some problem types rather than others? Renowned policy science research work suggests how each way of life corresponds to a particular problem definition strategy. Hierarchists will impose a clear structure on any problem, no matter what the cost. Isolates see social reality as an unstable casino in which any privileged problem structure jeopardizes chances for survival. Enclavists (or egalitarians) will define any policy problem as an issue of fairness and distributive justice. Individualists will exploit any bit of usable knowledge to improve a problematic situation. These four focal strategies are part of repertoires of problem definition strategies, where each cultural solidarity type disposes of a differentially composed set of secondary strategies. Finally, it is suggested that the links between group-grid Cultural Theory and policy problem types may serve the practitioner as analytic tool for active and (self-) critical problem structuring and (re)framing.

From “knowledge use” towards “boundary work”: sketch of an emerging new agenda for inquiry into science-policy interaction

This chapter is about a new agenda for inquiry into the relationships between science and public policy. So far, most research has conceptualised this relationship in terms of knowledge utilisation and downstream impact on the policy process. However, this leads to over-instrumentalisation and serious attenuation of expert advice. Therefore, I propose a new perspective: interaction through boundary work, a concept expressing how expert advice simultaneously demarcates and coordinates science and public policy. Research shows that there are many different types of boundary work depending on various types of policy problems. This chapter concludes with a proposal for a multilevel model, which enables us to understand the variety in types of boundary work, and discriminate conditions of success and failure of boundary arrangements and boundary work practices on several levels of analysis

Understanding policy persistence : The case of police drug detection dog policy in NSW, Australia

BACKGROUNDnSignificant research attention has been given to understanding the processes of drug policy reform. However, there has been surprisingly little analysis of the persistence of policy in the face of opposition and evidence of ineffectiveness. In this article we analysed just such a case - police drug detection dog policy in NSW, Australia. We sought to identify factors which may account for the continuation of this policy, in spite of counter-evidence and concerted advocacy.nnnMETHODSnThe analysis was conducted using the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF). We collated documents relating to NSW drug detection dog policy from 1995 to 2016, including parliamentary records (NSW Parliament Hansard), government and institutional reports, legislation, police procedures, books, media, and academic publications. Texts were then read, coded and classified against the core dimensions of the ACF, including subsystem actors and coalitions, their belief systems and resources and venues employed for policy debate.nnnRESULTSnThree coalitions were identified as competing in the policy subsystem: security/law and order, civil liberties and harm reduction. Factors that aided policy stability were the continued dominance of the security/law and order coalition since they introduced the drug dog policy; a power imbalance enabling the ruling coalition to limit when and where the policy was discussed; and a highly adversarial policy subsystem. In this context even technical knowledge that dogs infringed civil liberties and increased risks of overdose were readily downplayed, leading to only incremental changes in implementation rather than policy cessation or wholesale revision.nnnCONCLUSIONnThe analysis provides new insights into why the accumulation of new evidence and advocacy efforts can be insufficient to drive significant policy change. It poses a challenge for the evidence-based paradigm suggesting that in highly adversarial policy subsystems new evidence is unlikely to generate policy change without broader subsystem change, such as reducing the adversarial nature and/or providing new avenues for cross-coalition learning.

Using the Advocacy Coalition Framework and Multiple Streams policy theories to examine the role of evidence, research and other types of knowledge in drug policy

BACKGROUND AND AIMSnThe prevailing evidence-based policy paradigm emphasizes a technical-rational relationship between alcohol and drug research evidence and subsequent policy action. However, policy process theories do not start with this premise, and hence provide an opportunity to consider anew the ways in which evidence, research and other types of knowledge impact upon policy. This paper presents a case study, the police deployment of drug detection dogs, to highlight how two prominent policy theories [the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) and the Multiple Streams (MS) approach] explicate the relationship between evidence and policy.nnnMETHODSnThe two theories were interrogated with reference to their descriptions and framings of evidence, research and other types of knowledge. The case study methodology was employed to extract data concerned with evidence and other types of knowledge from a previous detailed historical account and analysis of drug detection dogs in one Australian state (New South Wales). Different types of knowledge employed across the case study were identified and coded, and then analysed with reference to each theory. A detailed analysis of one key evidence event within the case study was also undertaken.nnnRESULTSnFive types of knowledge were apparent in the case study: quantitative program data; practitioner knowledge; legal knowledge; academic research; and lay knowledge. The ACF highlights how these various types of knowledge are only influential inasmuch as they provide the opportunity to alter the beliefs of decision-makers. The MS highlights how multiple types of knowledge may or may not form part of the strategy of policy entrepreneurs to forge the confluence of problems, solutions and politics.nnnCONCLUSIONSnNeither the Advocacy Coalition Framework nor the Multiple Streams approach presents an uncomplicated linear relationship between evidence and policy action, nor do they preference any one type of knowledge. The implications for research and practice include the contestation of evidence through beliefs (Advocacy Coalition Framework), the importance of venues for debate (Advocacy Coalition Framework), the way in which data and indicators are transformed into problem specification (Multiple Streams) and the importance of the policy (alternatives) stream (Multiple Streams).

Tensions in Rural Water Governance: The Elusive Functioning of Rural Water Points in Tanzania

Public water services are still failing rural Tanzanians. Emboldened by advances in information communication technologies, the Ministry of Water has been developing computing, financial and administrative technologies to update and visualise the status of rural water points. This amalgam of technologies marks the emergence of an information infrastructure for rural water governance. The information infrastructure will enable the ministry to “see” the functionality status of all rural water points and to plan and budget for their repair and maintenance. In this paper, we examine three administrative technologies, which aim to standardise the functionality status of water points, and to prescribe how the information flows within the government hierarchy, and who is a legitimate recipient of this information. We analyze qualitative data, collected over a period of four years, in the framework of an interdisciplinary research program, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research—Science for Global Development (NWO-Wotro). In contrast to other researchers who study how information infrastructure evolves over time, we study what infrastructure evolution reveals about water governance. Our analysis of the practices of participants in rural water governance reveals tensions between formal and informal processes, which affect rural water services negatively.

Problematizing ‘wickedness’: a critique of the wicked problems concept, from philosophy to practice

ABSTRACT The concept of ‘wicked problems’ is a major current in the fields of policy analysis and planning. However, the basis of the concept has been insufficiently examined. This re-examination of its conceptual basis explains the origins of the limitations and flaws in the wicked problems concept. This paper analyses and rejects the notion of ‘wicked problems’ on philosophical and practical grounds. We argue instead that the policy sciences already had better conceptualizations of public problems before Rittel and Webber’s flawed formulation. We return to this literature, and build upon it by reframing ‘wickedness’ in terms of higher and lower levels of problematicity in problem structuring efforts. In doing so, we offer an alternative, novel combination of the philosophy of questioning and the policy work approach to policy practice. ‘Wickedness’ is re-conceptualized as problematicity, conceived as the distance between those who question or inquire into a policy problem. This is primarily a political distance, articulated in terms of ideas, interests, institutions and practices. High problematicity arises only when wide political distances are explicitly maintained, such that partial answers cannot be reached. Practitioners deal with problematicity by a dual practical strategy of balancing closing-down and opening-up sub-questions to the problem in order to structure them such that they become amenable to action through partial answers. This simultaneously incorporates a politics of negotiating political distance via partisan adjustment and serial strategic analysis. The argument constitutes a theoretically and practically superior alternative to the ‘wicked problems’ perspective.

Rules-of-thumb for problem-structuring policy design

Abstract This article provides practitioners with rules-of-thumb for policy design as both problem finding and problem solving. From their perspective, policy design is an inevitable moving back and forth between thinking out (“puzzling”) and fighting over policy (“powering”). It is, simultaneously, problem-structuring: “wicked” or unstructured problems are translated from problems as “messes” of undesirable situations to problems as specific, time-and-space bound opportunities for improvement. This article decomposes problem-structuring as an iterative process of problem sensing, problem categorization, problem decomposition and problem definition. For each of these problem-structuring functions, appropriate rules-of-thumb can be suggested that induce thought habits and styles for responsive and solid policy designs.