Poststructural Policy Analysis: A Guide to Practice

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:
Part I  Asking new policy questions 1 Introduction 22 Making politics visible: The WPR approach 153 Key themes and concepts 33Power, knowledge and resistance 34Practices, events and relations 39Discourses and discursive practices 43Problematizing, problematizations, self-problematization 47Governmentality: rationalities and technologies 52Genealogy and subjugated knowledges 58Subjectification, subject positions and dividing practices 63Part II Interrogating policies as constitutive: WPR applications4 Making and unmaking “problems” 71Understandings of “problems” in policy analysis 72Alcohol and other drug “problems” 77“Gender equality” 805 Making and unmaking “subjects” 87Education policy 90Health policy 92Immigration policy 94Economic policy 96Transport/environment policy 98Disability/equality policy 99Family policy <1016 Making and unmaking “objects” 104“traffic”/“cycling” 107“poverty”/“social inclusion” 109“addiction” 111“literacy” 114States of being: “wellbeing”, “disability”, “developing/developed” 1167 Making and unmaking “places” 120Making (up) “the state”            123Making (up) “Europe” 124Making (up) “urban”/“rural” “places” 127Making (up) “developed” and “developing” “places” 130Making (up) “public places” 1328 Conclusion 135Appendix:     Poststructural Interview Analysis: Politicizing “personhood” by Carol Bacchi and Jennifer Bonham 143Bibliography 155Index

About the Author :
Carol Bacchi is Professor Emerita of Politics at the University of Adelaide, Australia. Her work over the past forty years has encouraged rethinking of taken-for-granted truths about women’s history, equality policy and public policy generally. Major publications include: Same Difference: Feminism and Sexual Difference (1990), Women, Policy and Politics: The Construction of Policy Problems (1999) and Analysing Policy: What’s the Problem Represented to Be? (2009).  Susan Goodwin is Associate Professor of Policy Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research focuses on social policy and gender, and she contributes to policy processes at local, national and international levels. Recent publications include Markets, Rights and Power in Australian Social Policy (2015), Schools, Communities and Social Inclusion (2011) and Social Policy for Social Change (2010).