Table Of ContentColebatch 27-09-2010 21:54 Pagina 1
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Many people are involved in making policy, but most books on public policy tend w
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to ignore the actual practice of policy work. They offer little guidance to policy r hal colebatch, robert hoppe
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workers or students of policy. Policy workseems to be something you learn on the i
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job. Working for Policy directly addresses the nature of policy work. By blending g & mirko noordegraaf
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academic and experiential knowledge, it describes, analyses and evaluates what
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modern policy workers do in particular situations. This book explains how real-
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life understandings of policy work clarify the policy process in complex policy o working
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fields, and sketches the skills and knowledge required for policy work in modern ic
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societies.
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Hal Colebatchis Professorial Visiting Fellow at the University of New South l
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Wales, Australia, and Visiting Fellow in the Institute of Governance Studies at the b for
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University of Twente. Robert Hoppeis professor of Knowledge and Policy at the t
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University of Twente. Mirko Noordegraafis professor of Public Administra- h
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tion and Organization Sciences at Utrecht University.
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isbn 978 90 8964 253 0
www.aup.nl
9 789089 642530
working for policy
Working for Policy
Hal K. Colebatch, Robert Hoppe
& Mirko Noordegraaf (eds.)
Cover design: René Staelenberg, Amsterdam
Layout: V3-Services, Baarn
isbn 978 90 8964 253 0
e-isbn 978 90 4851 308 6
nur 805
© Hal K. Colebatch, Robert Hoppe & Mirko Noordegraaf / Amsterdam
University Press, Amsterdam 2010
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved
above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written per-
mission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.
Table of Contents
Preface 7
A Introduction
1 Understanding Policy Work 11
Hal Colebatch, Robert Hoppe and Mirko Noordegraaf
B Accounts of Policy Work
2 Giving Accounts of Policy Work 31
Hal Colebatch
3 Academic Accounts of Policy Experience 45
Mirko Noordegraaf
C Constructing Meaning Through Policy Work
4 New Life for Old Buildings: Mediating Between Different
Meanings 75
Tamara Metze
5 Policy Workers Tinkering with Uncertainty: Dutch Econometric
Policy Advice in Action 91
Annick de Vries, Willem Halffman and Rob Hoppe
D Policy Work as Mediation
6 Managing the Problematic in Policy Work 115
Lydia Sterrenberg
5
7 Evaluation as Policy Work: Puzzling and Powering in a Dutch
Program for Sustainable Development 131
Anne Loeber
E Policy Work Beyond the Nation-State
8 Policy Work Between National and International Contexts:
Maintaining Ongoing Collaboration 159
Tanja Woeltjes
9 Flying Blind in Brussels: How National Officials Do European
Business Without Political Steering 171
Karin Geuijen and Paul ’t Hart
F Linking Systemic and Experiential Knowledge
10 Is Evidence-Based Policy Making Really Possible? Reflections for
Policymakers and Academics on Making Use of Research
in the Work of Policy 195
Amanda Williams
11 Locating the Work of Policy 211
Cris Shore
G Conclusion
12 The Lessons for Policy Work 227
Hal Colebatch, Robert Hoppe and Mirko Noordegraaf
About the Authors 247
Index of Names 251
Index of Subjects 257
6 Working for policy
Preface
There is a substantial body of literature on how policy elites engage in pol-
icy-making. Moreover, there are numerous textbooks that purport to teach
students the proper methods and techniques of policy analysis. However, em-
pirical studies of the work of ‘ordinary,’ mid-level policy workers, inside or
outside government, remain rare. This book is part of a small, but growing
body of research that seeks to remedy this situation, which includes Page and
Jenkins’ Policy Bureaucracy: Government with a Cast of Thousands (2005), and
more particularly, Colebatch’s The Work of Policy: An International Survey
(2006). This book builds on these earlier studies of policy work, adding new
perspectives and findings.
First, we have tried to detect whether contemporary accounts of policy work
deviate from traditional accounts of policy-making and policy analysis or not.
We trace the potential influences of government reforms, such as the drive
for New Public Management and the shift towards network governance. We
looked at policy work in different countries (mostly the Netherlands, but also
Canada and the United States) and in different settings where these trends
occur. This includes policy work in the increasingly important setting of
transnational regimes, particularly the European Union.
Second, from a more analytical angle, the book explicitly focuses on pro-
cesses of account giving in the study of policy-making. It focuses on how we
– both observers and participants – perceive, frame and actively construe the
intrinsically ambiguous phenomenon known as ‘policy.’ It also shows that we
are politically and professionally socialized to apply a few standardized and
taken-for-granted accounts.
Third, by focusing on the account giving of both observers (scholars and
researchers) and participants (practitioners and policy workers), the book
seeks to improve the troubled dialogue between the scientific study of public
policy and practical policy work.
Fourth, the book focuses primarily on individual policy workers, and on
the day-to-day practices that make up policy. We are especially interested in
7
the potentially innovative capacity of policy work. Although policy workers
have to act within the constraints of organizational routines and the struc-
tured interactions of politics and administration, they must be seen as essen-
tially ‘agents’ that enact policy realities that structure and potentially innovate
and change subsequent policy acts.
Fifth, the book aims to be reflective and self-critical, avoiding the assump-
tion that policy can be understood simply as a product of the activities of
policy workers. It takes into account the social, cultural, administrative and
political phenomena within which policy is put together, reflecting upon in-
terpretive policy outlooks themselves, and in this way, showing that we may
need to broaden our perception of how we understand ‘policy domains.’
The book resulted from an intensive collaborative project that took shape
at the margins of the Interpretative Policy Analysis (IPA) conference in Am-
sterdam, 2006. Several scholars and ‘reflexive’ practitioners came together in
order to discuss papers on the nature of policy, and on how to represent and
interpret policy work. In subsequent years, this group started to organize
discussions and to produce more developed papers, which evolved into the
chapters of this book. This means that most of the empirical material re-
ported here is drawn from Dutch policy experience but we make no apology
for this: no account of policy work is context-free, but nothing in the research
reported here suggested that this experience is idiosyncratic or irrelevant to
policy work elsewhere.
The realization of this book would, of course, not have been possible with-
out the authors’ inputs and contributions. We thank them for their high-qual-
ity cooperation. We also thank Laura Opraus, student at the Utrecht School
of Governance, University of Utrecht, for her valuable editorial support.
Hal Colebatch, Robert Hoppe, Mirko Noordegraaf,
October 2009
8 Working for policy
A
Introduction
