Agenda-setting and Policy-making in Time. What Multiple Streams (MS) can teach us – and what not

The contribution will reflect three important issues with which the Multiple Streams (MS) concept has not yet sufficiently dealt with. (i) MS prominently deals with time, but it never made any attempt to situate agenda-setting and policy-making on the historical time axis. In which time are modern societies located, which challenges arise for agenda-setting and decision-making in highly contingent, highly complex and highly accelerated modern societies and which consequences may this have for the basic premises of MS? The question arises whether MS is able to reflect the new challenges posed by the post-modern societies in a globalized world. (ii) MS introduces contingency into its analytical framework without deliberating on the question how contingency may be conceptualized. Window of opportunity and political entrepreneurs are very important and systematic factors in the concept but their status seems unclear. How can contingent events be integrated in a theoretical concept? The idea of explaining by means of causal mechanisms seems a helpful concept which may be introduced in the MS framework and thus improve its status as theoretical concept. (iii) Complexity, contingency and social acceleration may end up in producing “wicked problems” with which politics and policy analysis no longer can deal with the assumption of rationality. Instead of, it seems plausible that policy-making changes from goal-oriented rationality to time-oriented reactivity. The question then is, if the time of MS has come because it enables researchers to conceptionally deal with time-oriented reactivity. Politics and policy-making change into a political game which may be coined “politicking” (Palonen). That means that politicking is a mere game with the issues already marked as “political” and in which the concept of rationality is no longer convincing. The question then is: Can the MS framework deal with those presumptions and translate them into a straightforward concept?