Conflict and Controversy as Opportunities for Policy Inquiry and Public Action

Abstract

This panel explores conflict as a distinctive moment in policy practice and governance. The papers examine conflict as an episode of disruption that can provide access not only to the contentious views and behaviors that create the disruption, but also to more general features of policy problems, of the knowledge on which plans are based, and of citizens’ and stakeholders’ views of what is necessary for policy action to be legitimate and effective. This approach addresses a mismatch that has characterized work on policy implementation, on governance, and on policy conflict. Despite a history of accounts that detail the varied ways in which conflicts arise, disrupt, and shape the fate of policy implementation and governance initiatives, policy conflicts have largely been treated as exceptional moments that demand the use of specialist approaches and the interventions of a special class of professionals to manage threats, break impasses, and so restore the policy system to its ‘normal’ functioning (e.g. Pressman and Wildavsky, 1984: Brunner and Steelman, 2005; Susskind and Field, 2010). This panel takes a different tack and explores conflicts as episodes of that are intrinsic to policy practice and that offer general insights into the kinds of practices and commitments that can enhance the legitimacy, inclusiveness, perspicacity, and productivity of policy making and governance programs. This approach builds on scholarship that has treated conflict and controversy as an intrinsic feature of policy practice, rather than a kind of virus or bacteria that can be treated and the patient restored to normal functioning (Schön and Rein, 1995; Forester, 2009; Laws and Forester, 2015). This approach overlaps with efforts that look to the details of policy practice to find the insights that can enhance efforts to make analysis more deliberative, planning more inclusive, and both more likely to contribute to concrete commitments to ‘move ahead together’ (Forester, 1999; Fung, 2006; Hajer and Wagenaar, 2006). The papers explore this insight across a range of policy domains from immigration and social policy to urban development and sustainability, and to food security, plant breeding, and genetics. They examine and describe practical methods that have developed as part of efforts to address conflict and manage interdependence under conditions of polarization, threat, limited legitimacy and trust. Methods like mediation are explored as forms of governance that, in responding to the particular demands of policy conflicts, have produced practices that are broadly relevant and instructive for the focus and concreteness they bring to inclusion and deliberation and the salutary effects they have had on problem solving, on securing consensual commitments to act, and on legitimacy. The panel will provide opportunities to explore both the details of practices for handling policy conflict and the more general insights that such experience offers for inclusion, deliberation, and policy action.

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