The paper will be about the philosophical foundations of network analysis/network science in the research on public policy and governance. The application of social network analysis (SNA) to policy analysis emerged during the late 1980s and early 1990s. However, this type of policy research was rather a latecomer compared to the use of SNA in sociology and other areas of social science. Long time SNA was treated just as a specific methodological toolbox for analyzing a particular kind of data. However, since some time, an increasing number of scholars in social and political science conceive „relationalism“ as a new meta-theoretical frame or background philosophy for network studies. The basic idea emerged with American sociology in the 1990s and has spread into other areas of social analysis, for instance into social geography and recently also into political science. The goal of this paper is to trace and outline this debate, and to evaluate its implications and analytical potential for policy analysis and governance studies. In this respect the new theoretical orientation will be contrasted with other streams of theorizing such as various forms of institutionalism, structuralism, and different ideational variants emphasizing discourses and belief systems.
The paper first gives a short overview on network analysis and network thinking in policy analysis, and then will locate this type of research network in a two-dimensional the landscape of science, e.g. is it just a metaphor, a paradigm, an approach, method or a theory. In a next step the paper discusses the promises of „relationalism“ for network analysis and its implications for policy network research. In this respect some variants of relationalism and varieties of relations in policy-making will be discussed.
