In its effort to address the alleged failure of historical institutionalism to explain policy change in any other way than the result of exogenous shocks, discursive institutionalism usually abandons the key historical institutionalist idea of history as sequence. Losing the sense that what is prior in a sequence is a key part of the explanation of what comes later sacrifices diachronic explanation for the synchronic structuring of discourse. This paper reintroduces history into discursive institutionalism through the concept of translation in time. In a three country comparison of policy development and public engagement in biofuels policy, it shows how translation effects are constrained by sequence, both in terms of the original framings of the problem and the different speeds of translation in the policy process and in the larger worlds of politics.
