Poststructural Policy Analysis: A Guide to Practice

✍ Scribed by Carol Bacchi, Susan Goodwin (auth.)

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US
• Year: 2016
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 150
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book offers a novel, refreshing and politically engaged way to think about public policy. Instead of treating policy as simply the government’s best efforts to address problems, it offers a way to question critically how policies produce “problems” as particular sorts of problems, with important political implications. Governing, it is argued, takes place through these problematizations. According to the authors, interrogating policies and policy proposals as problematizations involves asking questions about the assumptions they rely upon, how they have been made, what their effects are, as well as how they could be unmade. To enable this form of critical analysis, this book introduces an analytic strategy, the “What’s the Problem Represented to be?” (WPR) approach. It features examples of applications of the approach with topics as diverse as obesity, economic policy, migration, drug and alcohol policy, and gender equality to illustrate the growing popularity of this way of thinking and to provide clear and useful examples of poststructural policy analysis in practice.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages i-viii
Front Matter....Pages 1-1
Introduction....Pages 3-12
Making Politics Visible: The WPR Approach....Pages 13-26
Key Themes and Concepts....Pages 27-53
Front Matter....Pages 55-55
Making and Unmaking “problems”....Pages 57-68
Making and Unmaking “subjects”....Pages 69-81
Making and Unmaking “objects”....Pages 83-94
Making and Unmaking “places”....Pages 95-105
Conclusion....Pages 107-112
Back Matter....Pages 113-149

✦ Subjects

Public Policy;Comparative Politics;US Politics;Democracy