Between Advocacy Coalition, Political Discourse and Policy Statement: How to Grasp Policy Change Beyond Positivist Approaches?

Abstract

One of the most important debates within policy analysis is focused on understanding policy change. Using positivist methods, this issue implies the observation of regularities in order to assimilate policy change to a regular movement. Thus, each theory describes its own movement, like incrementalism, policy cycle, path dependency. But the problem with these approaches is the incapacity to understand the diversity of the situations, the role of actors, the importance of meaning. Moreover, because discourse is not taken into account seriously, the role of political discourse in the policy process and more generally the link between policy and politics are not well understood. More curiously, some researchers have been trying to influence the policy process with their own works, which can be considered as a discursive activity, although they don’t take into account the influence of the discourse. Conversely, a lot of approaches which consider seriously the subjective meaning and the role of discourse have real difficulties to understand policy change. They generally focus on the discourse separately from the actions and have turned away from the policy change question. To produce an analysis, they have tended to separate discourses from the context of their enunciation. In this panel, we would like to question the discourse for its effects on the policymaking process. The idea is to tackle the issue of policy change focusing on discourse as an interaction between actors in a specific context and not only for its content. We are interested by empirical, methodological or theoretical papers which (try to) grasp discourse as a practice to build an advocacy coalition, to define the policy problem, to give a solution the priority, to convince and enlist actors, to build compromises (using for example the ambiguity of some concepts or instruments) and, in fine, to change a policy. Panel Chairs: Philippe Zittoun, Florent Clément, Sonia Lemettre Université de Lyon, LET-ENTPE /PACTE-IEP de Grenoble, France

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