Knowing the Unavailable: Policy-Making as Temporal Sorting

At the most general level, every policy initiative is based on a differentiation between “is” and “ought”, between the status quo and an imaginative situation that is to be reached. Therefore, policy formulation inherently involves both an estimate about the future and a re-actualisation of the past from which the future should differentiate from. The construction and sorting of these temporal horizons is a thoroughly knowledge-based practice, in which individual and collective stocks of knowledge inform how one meaningful (re)constructs what has happened and what will happen if a particular decision is (not) taken. From this perspective, past, present and future do not appear as objectively given periods linked by a linear stream of time, but as contingent projection surfaces that need to be filled with definitions, categorisations and evaluations and linked to one another through cause-and-effect relationships. The policy process is then to be seen as a complex practice of temporal sorting through which ambiguity and uncertainty are transformed into a decidable situation. The aim of the proposed paper is to theoretically unfold this perspective on the interrelationship between time, knowledge and policy-making. The guiding question is how we can conceptualise the social processes through which knowledge about the unavailable future (which has not yet arrived) and the unavailable past (which is irretrievably over) is generated and utilised in political practices. To do so, the paper makes use of phenomenological sociology in the tradition of Alfred Schütz and systems theory in the tradition of Niklas Luhmann in order to elaborate on how temporality features in meaning- and decision-making processes. It will be shown that both accounts provide (distinct) insights with regard to how time is involved, on the one hand, in the construction of knowledge about a decision-making situation and, on the other hand, in the act of taking a particular decision. On the basis of these theoretical considerations, the paper reflects on the implications for empirical research on the interrelationship between time, knowledge and policy-making. Using the field of local environmental policies as an example, it will be shown how the temporal practices of remembrance (like first-hand experiences or monitoring devices) and anticipation (like scenarios or statistical modelling) condense into collectively available stocks of knowledge which transform an inherently complex, ambiguous and “wicked” problem into a political situation in which “rational” decisions can be taken.