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Unpacking Policy: Actors, Knowledge and Spaces

Author: R McGee
Date: 2004
Size: 26 pages (10 KB)

Summary

What is policy? This research published by the Institute of Development Studies, Brighton, suggests that in pursuing reform, enhancing democratic governance and seeking more evidence-based forms of policy, there is a need to explore and analyse the nature of policy itself. The study argues that, in reality, the policy process is one in which a wide diversity of actors, knowledge and policy spaces interact on different terms and conditions in the making and doing of policy. Policy therefore needs to be understood in a way that is radically different from the traditional linear model.

Debates on political development, governance and globalisation were characterised in the 1990s by increasing challenges to conventional "democracy". Representative democratic systems have many flaws, including the fact that they tend not to be accountable to the poor. To become accountable, policy-making needs to be complemented by participatory aspects. At the same time, there is a growing trend towards the idea of "evidence-based policy". The traditional model of policy-making is a linear, top-down process with two distinct phases - formulation and implementation. Despite having been under attack for 30 years, the linear model is still popular in policy, development and political circles. Constructing replacement models, however, could clarify how the new emphasis on involving poor people in poverty reduction policy processes could work in practice.

What is needed is an alternative understanding of the policy process that highlights both the potential roles played by poor people and the dynamics and relationships negotiated to achieve that end.

Policy spans the interface between national government actors and international agencies, from national level down through all the levels of local governance to the most local level of the community.
Policy is a dynamic process, the key elements of which are actors - the people involved in framing and implementing the policy - the different kinds of knowledge they bring to the process, and the "policy spaces" in which they interact in continuous dynamic flux.
The poor are citizens who, as such, enjoy a set of rights and responsibilities in relation to policy processes. They are actual or potential actors, including the intermediary organisations that claim to represent them.
The poor can put these rights into effect by self-organising or by taking up invitations extended by the more powerful to participate in policy processes.

If the political systems and the policy processes are to be democratised then so should the knowledge base that feeds those policy processes.

Democratising the knowledge base means working in an arena characterised by a deliberative process rather than by all-determining technocratic moments of decision.
It means not just producing more poverty knowledge, nor just getting more actors involved but also incorporating knowledge of more different kinds.
It means differentiating more carefully between the respective roles and powers of discourses, narratives, experience and datasets.
It also means reconfiguring the prevailing cultures of "legitimacy" and "representation".

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Source: McGee, R., 2004, 'Unpacking Policy: Actors, Knowledge and Spaces' in Brock, K., McGee, R. and Gaventa, J. (eds.) 'Unpacking Policy: Knowledge, Actors and Spaces in Poverty Reduction in Uganda and Nigeria', Fountain Publishers, Kampala
Author: Institute of Development Studies , http://www.ids.ac.uk