Radicalising Deliberative Policy Analysis: Applying practice-based methods in DPA to reorient a critical gaze on policy processes

There is a lacuna in policy scholarship, where critical scholars – who have rejected mainstream approaches to policy analysis – tend to focus on fostering novel approaches to policy development outside of dominant settings. Adapting Ahmed’s (2007) suggestion that scholars critique whiteness before seeking to ‘undo’ it, I propose that critical policy analysis recentres a gaze on mainstream, hierarchical approaches to policymaking from the theoretical orientation of Deliberative Policy Analysis (DPA). This endeavour complements and addresses the insight that DPA requires a ‘dose of political realism’. In this paper, I argue that this can be achieved in pursuance of ‘DPA 2.0’ (Bartels et al., 2020), and explore how my use of Nicolini’s (2009) ‘interview-to-the-double’ offers a concrete example of how a practice-orientation to studying policymaking may be implemented in an empirical setting. I set the scene by highlighting the problems within mainstream policy settings, where evidence from outsiders (academics, activists and others) is overwhelmingly used to uphold the status quo. Those who wish to offer an alternative are required to do so in new, radical spaces rather than within dominant policymaking forums, and the gap is filled by positivist approaches to policy analysis which lack the capacity to be disruptive. As a result, the prevailing harmful – and faltering – systems of government have their logics reinforced by the policy analysts who are paying closest attention to them (Hartley and Kuecker, 2022). Next, I build on the contributions of DPA whilst addressing two critiques: first, that DPA does not offer a means to escape the ‘hegemonic cage’ and second, that its applications have largely neglected the ‘pillar’ of a practice-orientation (Li & Wagenaar, 2019). Here, I propose a reframing of the theoretical foundations of DPA which will allow for a recentring of the critical gaze on the practice of actors in mainstream policy settings. Finally, noting that there is a dearth of examples of practice-based approaches being used in such contexts, I show how I deployed the interview-to-the-double in my own research on the landscape of interventions in the UK for people perceived to be at risk of causing sexual harm. Presenting selected findings from my study, I argue that this methodological tool can be considered radical in its potential to uncover and make sense of the practices of policy actors. I close by urging that DPA scholars, retaining a gaze on the practice of actors in mainstream policy settings, build on the radical potential of this orientation through drawing on the rich range of scholarship which critiques racist, sexist, cis-heteronormative and disablist oppressive structures. Doing this, I argue, subverts the question of the hegemonic cage: critical policy scholars know that we will not be heard by policy actors whose ideological commitments clash with our own, and so in those spaces where we cannot upset power dynamics (for example, through fostering participatory or deliberative democracy) our focus must instead be on seeking to understand the policymaking process ‘as an ongoing and unfinished history’ (Ahmed, 2007: 165).