Academic Accounts of Policy Experience

Abstract

Introduction There is no shortage of texts on policy making, policy analysis, policy processes and policy implementation (e.g., Dunn 1994; Parsons 1995; John 1998; Radin 2000). They show us how policy decisions emerge from policy-making institutions – such as policy bureaucracies – and how circumstances influence the policies that are made. They focus on the policy networks, circles, triangles and rings that constitute policy domains, and determine participants and positions. They describe the policy steps, phases, cycles, and rounds that are necessary to go from initial ideas to policy measures, and they trace how decisions are adapted when plans are implemented by executive agencies. They explore how policies affect citizens and companies. Although these texts are important for providing perspectives on policy, and for getting ‘the bigger picture,’ they tell us little about what happens inside policy bureaucracies, how policy plans emerge, what negotiations take place, which relations are formed, how policy categories are formed, how policymakers think and act. Texts on ‘real’ policy work and on day-to-day policy experiences are scarce. This may be understandable, but it is far from satisfactory. Of course, the phenomenon of ‘policy’ does not equal individual policy acts, and policy is larger than the life of individual policymakers, so merely looking at what policymakers do and feel will not be enough to fully capture policy dynamics. However, policy comes from real people and human action, so it makes no sense to separate policy dynamics from acts and experiences. Therefore, this chapter will start the other way around – it will analyze how policy work is done, what acts and experiences contribute to what we see as policy, how bundles of acts and experiences make up policy dynamics, and how this might affect society. It will draw from available academic texts in order to reveal the ‘smaller pictures’ that can be sketched when it comes to public policy. This is not an easy task because academic accounts of policy work are not merely or directly about policy work. People appointed to make policy can be observed and studied, but understanding who the relevant players are, what they do and how they do it, calls for conceptual constructs that do not emerge directly from daily behavior.

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