Advances in Policy and Interpretation

Abstract

This panel showcases significant advances in interpretive approaches to policy studies. The papers address a range of pressing policy issues across the world: the implications of a transition to a bioeconomy for democracy and welfare distribution, the spread of behavioural insights and nudging as policy instruments, the normative standing of philanthropy by the super-rich, the development of policy discourse on the circular economy, and the creation and diffusion of the policy model of conditional cash transfers by the World Bank. They all demonstrate that the ways in which policies are constructed, interpreted and enacted have significant implications for democracy, environment, political power, social welfare and economic inequality (and vice versa). Moreover, they do so by adopting innovative interpretive approaches grounded in careful and systematic empirical research. Together, they show that interpretive approaches to policy studies are invaluable for illuminating and criticising key challenges of our time: hidden political struggle, conceptions of the ‘public good’, structural economic inequalities, the hegemony of technocratic policy-making, and environmental sustainability.

Title	Details
Problematising the Circular Economy: What is the Problem Represented to Be?	View Paper Details
'Rich on Resources' - An Interpretive Policy Analysis of Producing Public Good in Salmon Governance in Norway	View Paper Details
Seeing Like a Policy Laboratory: How the World Bank Constructed and Conferred Authority to the Policy Model of Conditional Cash Transfers	View Paper Details
Behavioural Insights - Panacea or Placebo?	View Paper Details
Imagining Altruism: An Interpretive Analysis of the Giving Pledge	View Paper Details