Discursive policy analysis (WPR) and the politics of need interpretation: Silencing and needs

What’s the Problem represented to be (WPR) has been a successful, discursive approach to policy analysis (Bacchi, 1999; 2009; Bacchi and Goodwin, 2016). In this paper I want to augment WPR and combine it with the politics of need interpretation articulated by Nancy Fraser (1989). From a position of thinking with Bacchi, I will specify and extend step 4: What is left unproblematic? This step is about the limits of what fails to be problematized (Bacchi, 2009): silence that turns our attention to what could have been problematized and different. Working with silence, however, is tricky. Silence is neither about individual agency with a concept of strategic silences, nor is it about having a check list of what’s not there. Silence can only be identified through a laborious process of analysing problematizations. Silences are actively produced through processes of silencing (Dahl, 2017). Studying silencing requires a dynamic view, one that is often not possible when trying to work backwards form an identified policy solution (at a given time) to its problematization. So how can a dynamic view be integrated into the WPR approach? I will argue that this requires policy documents from a longer period (in line with genealogy) and a stronger attention to step 7 in WPR – and how we as researcher are implicated in reproducing and changing silencing. To help identify silencing I will combine WPR with ‘the politics of need interpretation’ advocated by Fraser. The two approaches share a similar epistemology. I use Fraser’s approach to direct my analytical attention to the needs articulated and for whom, which is helpful in identifying elements of silencing as needs-talk is increasingly becoming a major part of Western political discourse. I use examples from a recent analysis of the European Care Strategy to show how to augment a WPR with a politics of need interpretation and attention to silencing.