Performative deficits and possibilities for repair: A restorative approach to policy conflict

This paper explores what goes wrong when things go wrong in the interactions between citizens and state organizations. We focus on interactions that involve controversial plans for policy, implementation, and governance. We take conflict as a primary, constitutive, dynamic in these dramas of policy action – i.e. as default. We analyze a set of practical efforts to address policy goals in this light. This means treating policy action as a practice for engaging conflict and analyzing it through the categories of conflict analysis. The practical initiatives that we focus on involve questions about public health, climate adaptation, renewable energy, nature conservation, and urban development. From the perspective of conflict, they involve questions about recognition and respect, voice and knowledge, threat and trust, interest and emotion, and legitimacy and agency that play out at a tacit level as they are implied, contested, and resolved or suppressed in the way that people ‘pick up and get on with the business at hand’ (Goffman, 1974). We analyze practice in these cases on the basis of participant observation, interviews, and practical discourse analysis. We start with the conflicting priorities, and interests that set the context for action and focus our analysis on the experience of citizens and stakeholders as they engaged one another and the substantive issues that bound them to, and pitted them against, each other. A shared feature of these cases is that the conflict was not dominated by tensions between stakeholders with opposing interests competing to influence policy. Conflict was substantially, and with lasting impacts, conflict between citizens and the state actors who bore the responsibility for developing and implementing policy. The meant that questions about what to do in a particular case were bound up with questions about the meaning of citizenship and trust in, and the legitimacy of, public institutions and policy organizations. Our analysis describes the way in which memories of prior interactions with government shaped citizens’ expectations and colored the way in which they interpreted and responded to government action (and inaction). We examine how citizens reacted to policy programs and the way that they experienced the opportunities to comment on and influence these programs. Our own experience, and the stories citizens told us, inform a narrative of alienation and neglect that derives as an unintended byproduct of what seem, for all intents and purposes, to be well-intentioned efforts on the part of public officials. And the neglect that citizens experience is mirrored in the frustration that public officials feel as their efforts miss the mark and elicit responses that are counter-intuitive and at odds with their goals. We seek to shed light on the mismatches that drive the experience of citizens and public officials and to provide a more nuanced diagnosis that will help make clear where the need and the opportunity for repair arises and how restorative practices might contribute to repair, to practical compromise, and, in doing so, help to shore up the faltering legitimacy of public institutions and democratic practices.