Deliberative Policy Analysis : Understanding Governance in the Network Society (Theories of Institutional Design)

Rating:
Summary: Turning the page
Review: This book very plausibly shows that the recent boom of terms such as "governance", "networks", "trust", and "reflexivity" in political and policy science literature is more than just the outcome of renaming-games of bored policy scientist at times in which everything seems to have been said already. The chapters of the book, organized around the gravity center of new takes on policy discourses and participation, draw a nuanced picture of how the scenes and stages of contemporary policymaking are adapting to increasingly decentralized power structures and increasingly "networked" political realities. This adaption process, of course, does not always function smoothly. For policy analysts, the challenge in keeping up with these changing realities consists of not only "unlearn(ing) embedded intellectual reflexes" in the sense of rethinking "what politics and policymaking are about" (editors' introduction), but also of directing our gazes at the institutional and discoursive manifestations of these changes. These changes are difficult to discern if not at the level of practice - a point which the editors and contributors to the book do certainly not fail to emphasize.

"Deliberative Policy Analysis" turns the page to a post-positivist policy analysis which not only suggests that the landscape of policymaking has changed, but one that actually shows how these changes are taking place, and what the "new spaces of politics" are filled with (or how they remain unfilled). This latter aspect actually alludes to another mistake that the editors did not make: instead of formulating yet another theory of governance, they let theoretical insight raise from the bottom up. The theory underlying the book, although eloquently circumscribed in the introduction, appears as one that has accumulated from the different insights drawn from the particular case studies and chapters, and not as one that has been "authored" in the back rooms of academic institutions. It is not forcibly coherent, and through its closeness to practices of policy making and political identities, it achieves a level of complexity which comes close to the unorderly character of political reality. The book is therefore an equally useful tool for the work of students and scholars in political theory and policy analysis, policy makers, and those interested in the role of language in shaping reality.