First published in Great Britain in 2015 by
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Policy Press 2015
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ISBN 9781447313397
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Policy moves. It moves from place to place: from the head offices of supranational organisations to the (more or less) grateful recipients in faraway elsewheres; or from the strategic stratosphere to the gritty encounters of the front line. Policy moves and the fact of its movement makes things happen. What happens is not necessarily what was intended, or what was planned. Policy moves and moves on, colonising new spaces and new settings with the promise of improving things. All of this is well-known in the world of policymaking and moving, and in the world of policy studies. However, this book emerges from a sense of puzzlement: How does policy move?; Who and what makes it move?; What happens as it arrives and settles in those elsewheres?; What keeps it moving?; and What happens to it as it moves? Linked to this sense of puzzlement and the questions that preoccupy us is a sense of frustration: why are these not the organising questions of policy studies? Why do the questions and answers of so much academic work on policy leave us cold? This mix of puzzlement and frustration brings us to this point: writing a book about making policy move.
Over the last decade, we have found ourselves in recurring conversations and collaborations, despite our geographically and institutionally distributed lives. Those conversations have continually returned to the puzzles and the frustrations that link us. In that time, we have shared our frustrations, exchanged sources of excitement and inspiration, and explored ways of thinking about how policy moves and what happens as it does. In particular, our conversations have led us to this collaboration in which we try to see what happens if we use the ideas of translation and assemblage (and others) to think about policy moves. Doing a book is itself a practice of translation in which we move from talking to ourselves (and small audiences at conferences and workshops) to addressing unseen others. Translation as we suggest in the book is a risky practice: much can be lost in translation and unanticipated meanings and effects can be gained. However, our hope is to recreate reassemble, perhaps both the spirit and the substance of our conversations. That means offering a way of thinking about policy in a spirit of conversation and collaboration. The book and our approach is necessarily unfinished. We could have gone through more and more cycles of discussion, reflection and revision. Some readers may think that we should, indeed, have done so, but we think that it is more important to start conversations than to finish them. Conversations are supposed to include the possibility of talking back, rather than listening to a monologue. Equally, we believe that it is more useful to explore possibilities than to provide definitive answers, even if a book is a rather strangely formalised version of conversation and exploration.
We have tried to find ways of doing the book in the spirit of our ways of working together. It mixes both in substance and style forms of collaborating. This begins with the jointly written first two chapters the slow outcome of frequently circulated drafts, with many revisions, suggested changes and puzzled comments. However, they are, for now, the best we can do as a way of setting up our puzzles, articulating our frustrations and elaborating a way of thinking about the movements of policy. They are followed by four more substantive and more individually authored chapters, in which we each take up and make use of the collective conceptual framing developed in Chapters One and Two. The ways in which we use this framing are different, and each use adds to, stretches and develops it. Although they are individual chapters, they have also been developed through collective discussion, and some of the traces of these discussions can be found in the interruptions that occasionally break into the chapters in which the other voices comment and reflect upon what is being presented. The final chapter is again collaboratively written, reflecting on the arguments of the book and exploring the possibilities and problems of trying to think and do things otherwise. This interest in the possibilities of otherwise is a critical element of our approach to studying policy.
We have several hopes for the book: that it proves interesting and engaging; that it is stimulating of thought and action; and that the spirit in which it has been conceived and written comes through the textual form. We have enjoyed the process of collaboration and we share a sense of playfulness that has shaped how we have worked together. It inflects our sense of doing academic work: our engagements with theory and practice, with established authorities, and with institutional and disciplinary boundaries tend to be transgressive. We think that such playfulness is productive: awed deference and confined subordination tend not to be good speaking or thinking positions. This orientation has certainly served us well, both individually and collectively, and the book could not have been conceived, much less written, without it. Nevertheless, all of those aspirations and orientations may well be also sources of frustration and irritation for readers. We can only say that we have found frustration and irritation to be productive forces too.
Trajectories and conjunctions
Before beginning the explorations in translation and assemblage in the coming chapters, we also thought it might be useful to set out some of the different routes by which we arrived at this joint focus on policy as translation, since they reveal some different but overlapping and intersecting trajectories.
