A scholarly debate inspired by the argumentative turn addresses the relevance of differing epistemological positions arising in citizen engagement with complex policy problems - the ways in which policy problems are differently framed by different actors. These debates echo and draw from the attention paid by science and technology studies to social constructivism and epistemological relativism. Radically different frames call into question the universality of democratic norms found in the “argumentative turn”, at least in some of its Habermasian variants. One means of exploring these questions is suggested by Hajer and Laws (2006), who argue that the ambivalence which often characterizes complex policy deliberations should be taken as a given rather than seen as a problem, in good policy practice. Nonetheless, the recognition of ambivalence poses a serious problem for the uptake and use of engagement, where policy advice is usually required to be clear and unambiguous. This paper investigates, through discourse analysis, how various actors engaged in policy discussions have negotiated different ways of understanding a complex technical policy issue - biofuels as part of a renewable energy policy framework – and transformed that understanding into policy advice. We used NVivo to analyse patterns in documents from public consultations in Canada, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands and traced themes and frames from their introduction to consultative actions through to outcomes (consultation reports, regulatory initiatives, policy formulation). Our analysis illuminates how key themes play differently across contexts, and how handlers of discourse have alternately forwarded their positions or met obstruction.
