Understanding the policymaking enterprise: Foucault among the bureaucrats

The path is made by walking: knowledge, policy design and impact in Indigenous policymaking

“…According to Schneider and Ingram, "policy designs are produced through a dynamic historical process involving the social constructions of knowledge and identities of target populations power relationships, and institutions" (1997,5). The critical point here is that the knowledge involved in policymaking is a socially constructed phenomenon 2 emerging from interaction within social networks (Charon 1995;Hall 1972;Oliver 2012;Ritchie 2021;Kuhn and Hacking 2012). These constructions both enable and limit human insight, shaping the knowledge we bring to policymaking (Schneider and Ingram, 1993) and which, through radically recursive processes, become hard-wired into policy designs themselves as a priori epistemic commitments that present as both neutral and universal.…”

“…He posits the source of this failure in the state exclusion of local/particular forms of knowledge and practice, in favor of the high modernist epistemology that emerged in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. At the core of his critique of modernist statecraft is a radical cultural dissonance (Ritchie 2021) manifest in a contest between these different ways of knowing and doing -"modernist" knowledge, universal and imperious; and the local and particular knowledges that orientate and organize social networks and the lives of the members of those networks. This epistemic imposition/suppression dynamic is the primary phenomenon that Scott problematizes in his analysis of statecraft.…”

“…This idea is akin to Foucault's concept of dispositif that I have argued elsewhere provides a powerful analytical perspective on the operational dynamics of the policy enterprise. See (Ritchie 2021) 2. This social constructionist approach to knowledge stands in stark contrast, and challenge, to hegemonic epistemological positions of contemporary policymaking where knowledge is positioned outside questions of meaning and independent of human thought as something to be discovered, articulated, and applied to solve problems.…”