Different ways of seeing policy making

Over the past 25 years a significant sociological and political science literature has accumulated on the complex relationship between evidence and policy, raising critical questions about many of the assumptions of the evidence-based policy movement, and positioning policy making more as a social practice and less a technical, scientific process (Majone, 1989; Stone, 1997; Bacchi, 2000; Klein, 2000; Fischer, 2003). Deborah Stone, for example, argues that the essence of policy making in political communities is the struggle over ideas. She depicts policy making as an activity in which people deliberate and argue about different ways of seeing the world and exercise choices of interpretation. Policy making is about the human struggle over meaning – ‘a constant struggle over the criteria for classification, the boundaries of categories, and the definition of ideals that guide the way people behave’ (Stone, 1997, p 11). And Giandomenico Majone, writing in 1989 about evidence, argument and persuasion in the policy process, suggests that policy making has more to do with the process of argument than the formal technique of problem-solving.

Alongside these theoretical analyses there exist numerous empirical studies of the policy-making process, highlighting the complex relationship between evidence and policy, and similarly challenging many of the rationalist assumptions of evidence-based policy (see Chapter Two in this book; see also Wood et al, 1998; Elliott and Popay, 2000; Green, 2000; Gabbay et al, 2003; Jenkings and Barber, 2004; Dopson and Fitzgerald, 2005). Taken together, the studies demonstrate that in practice the ethical and political questions inherent to the policy-making process cannot be reduced to issues of evidence; that deficiencies in research evidence are not generally resolvable by undertaking more or bigger studies; that the policy-making process does not consist of a series of technical ‘stages’; that the relevant types of knowledge for policy making go far beyond conventional research evidence; and that policy decisions do not usually occur as clearly defined ‘decision points’. The reality of policy making is messier, more contingent, dynamic, iterative and political.

We briefly describe three examples of such studies, to illustrate the rich picture of policy making as social practice that emerges from this body of empirical work. John Gabbay and colleagues undertook an in-depth case study of the use of evidence by two multi-agency groups working on service development improvements for older people in the UK (Gabbay et al, 2003).