The politics of policy practices

Abstract

This collection explores the relations between policy and care drawing on two specific sources of inspiration – that of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and that of Critical Policy Studies. It takes as its starting point a tension within and between the anticipated features of policy and those of care. Policy is often expected to provide general statements, protocols and directives, measurable outcomes, targets and indicators in order to guide and control. But policy – no less than care – is also a set of open-ended practices; policy is performed and re-performed in particular sites and settings and by particular actors, and so it is also a specific kind of ongoing and distributed ‘doing’. It is not simply a generalised dictate. Characteristics of care, similarly, hold opposing dynamics in play. As well as configuring care as responsive, hesitant, situated and experimental practice, recent feminist research in STS has opened up questions about the non-innocence of care. Care has been enacted within particular histories where inequities of race, gender and power have often been to the fore. So, according to STS, both care and policy are practices: these practices mix humans and non-humans, and they are intimate with and implicated in technoscience. Policy, for example, has been examined as a technology and care as technogovernance. As such, both policy and care distribute relations of power and generate categories of difference. This collection has been put together at a time of seeming crisis in both policy and care. Care, including an alleged loss of care in public services, has become a focus of increased public concern, political debate and academic research in the UK, Europe and US. Moreover, many policies have been exposed as ineffective, harmful or deliberately weak. Hence it seems that there is currently a crisis in care that is bound up with a realisation that ‘policies’ are not care-full enough and may promote relations of neglect and suffering. This monograph draws inevitably from this context, offering a collection of case studies of locations, relations and heterogeneous entities that make up policy practices in various sites. The contributions explore the different ways in which policy and care are entangled in these sites and at this time. The aim of the collection is to attend to, and engage in, the politics of policy practices – and, ultimately, to explore how policy is and could be care.

‘I’d like to report a suspicious looking tree’: Public concern, public attention and the nature of reporting about ash dieback in the United Kingdom

“…However, as policymakers later sought to implement a nuclear power programme the key features of concern transformed, taking shape along economic lines as the anti-nuclear lobby realised that a counter narrative to 'radiophobia' could not be constructed whereas a narrative of resistance built around rational economic and security issues could. Hence we concur with Gill et al (2017) that policy and public concern narratives are inevitably entangled, always processual, and distributed across heterogeneous actors and spaces. For example, 'surface' concerns with protecting the environment may be predicated on deeper, longstanding sociocultural beliefs and tropes which mediate the 'form' that policy can/will take, and also how people orientate toward an issue (Argent, 2013).…”

Take‐home naloxone and the politics of care

“…, Gill et al . ), and researchers have begun exploring the benefits of focussing on care in alcohol and other drug research, policy and practice. Race (), for example, argues that prioritising the non‐normative modes of care already practised by people who consume drugs has significant harm reducing potential.…”

“…, Gill et al . , Puig de la Bellacasa ). This rich area of scholarship emphasises that care is a multiple, complex and contested concept that cannot be approached as a stable practice or experience (Latimer ).…”

Indeterminacy and More-than-human Bodies

“…Seen thus, P became something like a ‘hyperobject’ (Morton, 2013), an entity that is spatially and temporally unbounded, that is intangible, engulfing, more problematic than we thought, acting in multiple ways and dimensions, and in ways that we cannot necessarily capture. Perhaps apprehending P in this way might engender different modes of policy caring (Gill et al, 2017) around the problem of nutrient enrichment that Loweswater exemplifies (but which, of course, is a global problem)?…”