Projects

Deliberative Policy Analysis
Civic Enterprises, the Commons and the Political Economy of Citizen Participation.
Practice Theory in Public Policy
Doing Interpretive Research: Experience, Learning and Teaching

Deliberative Policy Analysis

It has been 15 years since Maarten Hajer and I published Deliberative Policy Analysis. (DPA). The book’s publication was considered a major development in the post-positivist policy movement. The book’s subtitle ‘Understanding Governance in the Network Society’ indicated DPA’s programmatic approach. It argued that the changing nature of the political-administrative system made traditional, technocratic information less effective as input into processes of political decision making. The editors, in their introduction to the book, depicted these changes in terms of a ‘network society’; in today’s terms the vocabulary would be one of complexity (Wagenaar 2007; Stout and Love 2018), turbulence (Ansell & Trondal 2018), or uncertainty (Funtowicz and Ravitz 1993). This led them to ask: ‘What kind of policy analysis might be relevant to understanding governance in the emerging network society?’ and to posit a lack of fit between, dominant positivist, technocratic forms of policy analysis and the predicament of political and administrative decision making (Hajer and Wagenaar 2003, 13). For policy analysis in the network society to be effective and democratically legitimate, the editors argued, it should be interpretive, practice-oriented and deliberative.

As Li observes (2019), since the book’s publication the development of DPA has been both inspiring and frustrating. Many readers found the book’s diagnosis of the limits of technocratic policy analysis convincing. They also regarded the book’s central message, that an interpretive and participative form of policy analysis is better equipped to address the challenges that the dynamic, interconnected nature of contemporary society poses to policy makers, persuasive. However, as Li argues (2019), the absence of a clearly recognizable and replicable methodological approach, a set of operational and replicable procedures that potential practitioners can make their own, has hampered the diffusion of DPA. Currently people who are in principle sympathetic towards DPA have a hard time figuring out how to actually do it.

For 2 years I have been working towards a methodology for DPA. Through a number of panels at academic conferences (IPPA; ECPR) organized with Ya Li and Koen Bartels we invited a number of colleagues to present examples of DPA. This has resulted in two special issues for Policy Studies, both currently in preparation. I was also asked to contribute a chapter (“Deliberative Policy Analysis as Design-in-Practice: Towards a Methodological Approach”) on the methodology of DPA for Asenbaum, H., Curato, N., Ercan, S.A., Mendonça, R.F. (eds.) (forthcoming). Assessing Deliberation: Methodological Approaches in Deliberative Democracy, ANU Press.

Publications

Li, Y and Wagenaar, H., 2019. “Introduction: Revisiting Deliberative Policy Analysis”, Policy Studies, 40

Li, Y. and Wagenaar, H., “Conclusion: Building New Momentum for Deliberative Policy Analysis”, Policy Studies, 40

West, S., van Kerkhoff, L and Wagenaar, H., 2019. “Beyond ‘linking knowledge and action’: towards a practice-based approach to transdisciplinary sustainability interventions” Policy Studies, 40

Hajer, M. and Wagenaar, H. (eds.), 2003. Deliberative Policy Analysis: Understanding Governance in the Network Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hajer, M. and Wagenaar, H., 2003. “Editors’ Introduction”, in M. Hajer and H. Wagenaar (eds.), Deliberative Policy Analysis: Understanding Governance in the Network Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1-30

Civic Enterprises, the Commons and the Political Economy of Citizen Participation

This project combines three strands of inquiry: civic enterprises, the Commons, and the political economy in which these operate. For a number of years I have been doing research on civic enterprises (CEs), oftebn in collaboration with my colleague Jurgen van der Heijden. Civic enterprises are local citizen initiatives in which the citizens organize themselves to produce social goods or services. Or, in a more formal definition: “[C]ivic enterprise produce social goods (public services and products) in a democratic way (non-hierarchical, non-profit, democratically, sustainable, responsive to local and individual needs). Thus, they form an alternative to the traditional social production system of democratic capitalism in which large centralized firms, largely insulated from democratic control, provide mass-produced goods to consumers with little or no voice in the production system.” (Wagenaar and van der Heijden 2015, 132) CEs have sprung up in many countries in many domains , such as renewable energy, sustainable food production, public transport, rural broadband, urban renewal and housing, and so on. My research focuses on citizen care cooperatives in the Netherlands. Wat makes CEs such a fascinating topic for research is their innovative potential. CEs practice joint ownership (cooperative structure), participatory and deliberative decision making, recombinatory potential (van der Heijden), cap individual profits/dividends and channel earnings back into the cooperative. They have proven to provide better services for less money, come up with creative, integrated solutions, and facilitate a richer democratic life. They are schools for democracy. Their importance, in short, is that they are prefigurative examples of an alternative political economic organization.

My inquiry on the Commons began as a theoretical project but now has become very practical indeed. CEs are a member of much larger and older family of citizen-led initiatives to organize and manage their social, political and economic environment. Think of the mutual societies and workman associations in late 19th century Britain and Western Europe, the social economy in the 1980s and social enterprises, neighborhood innovations, and various forms of the sharing economy and peer-to-peer initiatives and in today’s landscape. What all these iterations of ‘diverse economies’ had in common were that they contained elements of the Commons. The Commons are: “The wealth that we inherit or create together and must pass on, undiminished or enhanced, to or children..” It is: “A social system for the long-term stewardship of resources that preserve shared values and community identity”. (Bollier 2014, 175). What makes the concept of the Commons attractive is that it forms a robust alternative to the political economy of neoliberal capitalism, and through its ‘design principles’ (Ostrom 1990) can be subject of purposeful intervention. I have become involved with the Ru Paré Community in the Slotervaart district in Amsterdam. Led by Hans Krikke, in collaboration with a team of residents and professionals, the Ru Paré Community fights poverty and structural social inequality in the city. It organizes citizen-based alternatives for state-provided social programs. (https://www.sw-sl.nl/rupare-community/) It operates on the principle of reciprocity: citizens can obtain support and services for which they give something back to the Community. The community occupies a refurbished school building that has won several architectural awards. Supported by the Green city administration in Amsterdam, we are now working towards an urban commons in Slotervaart: https://commonslab.sw-sl.nl. The purpose of the urban commons is to facilitate a solidary urban society at city and neighbourhood level. The urban commons seeks an inclusive society with a social infrastructure of which residents are co-owner, in which they co-produce, and thus, of which they feel responsible for its flourishing. Participation is based on the right to develop and apply one’s talents and capacities.

For several years I intuited that local citizen initiatives could not be seen apart from their political and economic environment. The Ru Paré Community for example operates in a climate of austerity and fills the gap that austerity has left in the social service landscape in Slotervaart. Moreover, citizen initiatives have democratic implications; they are not only schools of democracy but they are also a form of associative democracy (Hirst, 1994) Yet, very few of these grassroots initiatives explicitly position themselves as an alternative to, or critique of, the current regime of democratic capitalism. Their participants view them above all practical solutions to what they perceive as unmet social and environmental needs. If this can be called politics, it is “citizen politics”; citizens who practise the “power of possibility” by working together on concrete problems to pursue a society that is organized according to solidarity, inclusiveness, cooperation, fairness and sustainability (Mathews 1999, 121-135). I have tried to conceptualize this ambiguous relationship between citizen initiative, politics and democracy in terms of the influence of the democratic capitalist system on our democratic institutions and practices. This has led me to study processes of de-democratization; the refashioning of the discourse of justice, rights, and visions of the good into one of (crisis-)management, (economic) efficiency, security, debt and profit (Brown, 2015). As de-democratisation often goes hand in hand with the financialization of public functions and goods, I now study the modern financial system, its intrinsic entanglement with the state, and its direct and indirect effects on the possibilities for a more participatory and associative form of democracy. I guess I am formulating a political economy of citizen participation.

Publications

Wagenaar, H. and van der Heijden, J., 2015. ‘The Promise of Democracy? Civic Enterprise, Localism and the Transformation of Democratic Capitalism”, In, S. Davoudi and A. Madanipour (eds.) Reconsidering Localism, Milton Park, Abingdon: Routledge: 126 - 146.

Wagenaar, H and Healey, P., 2015. “Interface: The Transformative Potential of Civic Enterprise”, Planning Theory and Practice, 16(4): 557-561

Wagenaar, H., 2015, ‘Transforming Citizenship: The Democratic Potential of Civic Enterprises’, Planning Theory and Practice, 16(4): 582-588

Wagenaar, H., 2014. “The Agonistic Experience: Informality, Hegemony and the Prospects for Democratic Governance”, In: S. Griggs, A. Norval, and H. Wagenaar (eds.) Practices of Freedom: Democracy, Conflict and Participation in Decentred Governance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 217-248.

Griggs, S., Norval, A and Wagenaar, H., 2014. “Introduction: Democracy, Conflict and Participation in Decentred Governance”. In, S. Griggs, A. Norval, and H. Wagenaar (eds.) Practices of Freedom: Democracy, Conflict and Participation in Decentred Governance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1-38

Wagenaar, H., 2012, “Een Hollands Drama: De Conflicterende Rationaliteiten van Wijkgericht Beleid”, In: N. Verloo, Een Inkijkje in de Onzichtbare Stad: Alledaagse Spanningen en Latent Conflict Rondom het Zwanenvechtplein, Amsterdam: Centre for Conflict Studies: 65-75

Wagenaar, H. and Duiveman, R., 2012. “De Kwaliteit van een Stadswijk: good governance door stedelijke daadkracht in Den Haag”. In: F. Hendriks and G. Drosterij (eds.), De Zucht naar Goed Bestuur in de Stad, Den Haag: Boom Lemma: 63-79

Wagenaar, H. and Specht, M., 2010. “Hoe Burgers Zichzelf Maken. Het Pragmatisch Idealisme van Participatie.” In: I. Verhoeven and M. Ham (eds) Brave Burgers Gezocht. De Grenzen van de Activerende Overheid. Amsterdam: van Gennep: 193-211.

Wagenaar, H., 2007. “Governance, Complexity and Democratic Participation: How citizens and public officials harness the complexities of neighbourhood decline”, American Review of Public Administration, 37(1): 17-50. (Best Article Award 2007.)

Wagenaar, H., 2005. Stadswijken, Complexiteit en Burgerbestuur, Den Haag: XPIN

Practice Theory in Public Policy

Practice theory is less a project than an ongoing interest. What attracts me to practice theory is its ability to reveal aspects of reality that remain hidden in explanations that rely on concepts such as structures, institutions, networks or individual behaviour. What is it that a practice account has to offer to our understanding of public policy, for example? There are many and varying accounts of practice (Nicolini, 2012), but most seem to agree on the following four premises: The first, at the same time the most obvious yet the most far-reaching, is the primacy of interventionism. Reality (the environment in which we live and move, that brushes against us from all sides, that we overwhelmingly experience as “out there”, independent of ourselves) is actually a product of our ongoing practical engagement with the world, the experience of our interaction with, and interventions in, the world (Cook and Wagenaar 2012). The second premise concerns temporal emergence and follows from the first. The constraints and affordances of the outer world only come to us through our experience of them in a given emergent time (within an eternally unfolding “now”) (ibid.) Practices, although recognizable and intelligible to practitioners and observers, and unfolding within a broad social “script”, always have a certain open-ended, improvisational quality. Our third premise is that the interpenetration of the human and the material is at the core of how we act on, and understand, the world (Pickering 1995; Shove et. al, 2012). In accord with this relational, dynamic view of practice, our understanding of its dimensions must be seen as explanatory tools supportive of research, assessment and intervention—not as foundational claims about the “objective” character of practice. These three premises rest on a fourth premise that is enormously significant for a proper understanding of the reach of the practice approach in social and political analysis: a focus on practices allows the analyst to reveal the unspoken, taken-for-granted, tacit, dimensions of our being in the world. With this I mean the whole substructure of understanding, knowledge, experience, assumptions, predispositions and objects that is implicated by a particular practice, that shapes that practice, and that makes a practice into a social, not an individual, accomplishment (Taylor, 1995, 76-77). With a number of colleagues I have written several ‘foundational’ articles. I have also applied practice theory to problems such as value dilemmas in public administration, the nature of airports, recurrent dysfunctional approaches to prostitution policy, and the adaptive management in environmental policy making. I am currently interested in the methodology of practice research.

Publications

Wagenaar, H. (in press). Discretion and administrative practice, in T. Evans and P. Hupe (Eds.) Discretion and the Quest for Controlled Freedom, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Wagenaar, H., 2018. “Policy as Practice: Explaining persistent patterns in prostitution policy”. The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice, 57(3): 379-400

Wagenaar, H., 2016. “Extending Interpretivism: Articulating the Practice Dimension in Bevir and Rhodes’ Differentiated Polity Model”, in N. Turnbull (ed.), Interpreting Governance, High Politics and Public Policy: Essays Commemorating Interpreting British Governance, Milton Park, Abingdale: Routledge: 133-150

Wagenaar, H., 2015) “Administrative Decision-making: A Practical Clarification”, Administration & Society, 47: 1087-1093.

Wagenaar, H., 2014. “The Necessity of Value Pluralism in Administrative Practice: A Reply to Overeem”, Administration and Society, 46(8): 1020-1028

Wagenaar, H. and Wilkinson, C., 2013. “Enacting Resilience: a performative account of governing for urban resilience”, Urban Studies, 52(7): 1265-1284

Wagenaar, H., 2012. “Dwellers on the Threshold of Practice: The Interpretivism of Bevir and Rhodes”, Critical Policy Studies, 6(1): 85-99

Cook, S.D.N. & Wagenaar, H., 2012. Navigating the Eternally Unfolding Present. Toward an Epistemology of Practice". American Review of Public Administration, 42(1): 3-38

Wagenaar, H. & Cook, S.D.N., 2011. “The Push and Pull of the World: How Experience Animates Practice”, Evidence and Policy, 7(2): 193-212

Wagenaar, H., 2004). ‘Knowing’ the Rules. Administrative Work as Practice, Public Administration Review, 64(6): 643-655. (Best Lead Article Award 2004)

Hartendorp, R. and Wagenaar, H., 2004. “De Praktische Rechter. De opmerkelijke relevantie van Paul Scholten voor een eigentijdse rechtsvindingstheorie, Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Rechtsfilosofie & Rechtstheorie, 33(1): 60-89

Wagenaar, H. and Cook, S.D.N., 2003, “Understanding Policy Practices: action, dialectic and deliberation in policy analysis”, in M. Hajer & H. Wagenaar (eds.), Deliberative Policy Analysis: Understanding Governance in the Network Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 139-171

Wagenaar, H., 2002. “Value Pluralism in Public Administration: Two perspectives on administrative morality”, in J. S. Jun (ed.), Rethinking Administrative Theory. The Challenge of the New Century, Westport, CT: Praeger: 105-131,

Wagenaar, H. and Hartendorp, R., 2000. “Oedipus in the Welfare Office”, in H. Wagenaar (ed.), Government Institutions: Effects, Changes and Normative Foundations, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Press:147-178

Wagenaar, H., 1999. “Value Pluralism in Public Administration”, Administrative Theory & Praxis, 21(4): 441-449

Doing Interpretive Research: Experience, Learning and Teaching

Courses in research methods mainly focus on the transmission of knowledge of distinct methods and some training in how to apply them. The received view of teaching research methods is that methods are general, unvarying and of one piece; bits of knowledge that are uniformly applicable across a wide range of research situations. This leaves it unclear how to make such general principles specific to the situation at hand, how to improvise to make the methods fit the particulars of concrete situations. The result is a one-sided and ineffective learning and teaching process. At the same time, we noticed that novice researchers evince a range of emotions, such as curiosity, excitement, anxiety and self-doubt, during the course of their research project. We also observed that many students adopted unproductive research strategies, such as hiding behind grand theory, frontloading their data collection or analysis with pre-assumptions, endless collection of data, or persistent failure to formulate a research question that could guide the research. Koen Bartels and I decided to articulate our teaching experiences and wrote an article in which we drew upon experiential learning theory to make sense of our observations and our approach to teaching methods (Bartels and Wagenaar 2018). Experiential learning posits that learning involves the whole person, including the student’s emotions, and proceeds through a dialectic between experience and reflection upon that experience (Kolb 1984). T he article received so many positive reactions from students that we decided to turn the article into a book, on which we are working now.

Publications

Bartels, K. & Wagenaar H., 2018. “Doubt and Excitement: An Experiential Learning Approach to Teaching the Practice of Qualitative Research”, Qualitative Research. 18(2): 191-206

Wagenaar, H., 2011. Meaning in Action: Interpretation and Dialogue in Policy Analysis, Milton Park, Abingdale: Routledge. (In particular chapter 9)

Wagenaar, H., 1996. "The Well-Tempered Interviewer", Beleid & Maatschappij, 23: 152-157