The nature of the research as set out in the research questions earlier, concerns policy making, which is driven by changing social meanings, as highlighted by the history of policy making in this subject area. The research also seeks to consider the behaviours and decision making of actors within the policy making process.
Accordingly, the research has taken a constructivist view of the nature of reality: that reality is essentially socially constructed and there will be a range of interpretations from different actors, a series of multiple realities. This is manifested through people’s actions, words and beliefs as social reality is produced and reproduced as practices with multiple meanings (Fischer, 2003).
In turn the epistemological position is one, where the nature of social knowledge being without structure or order is produced by people interpreting the world and trying to make sense of it (Wagenaar, 2011). This epistemological position seeks to understand but not explain behaviours (Fischer, 2003). In order to study the “making sense” of this complexity requires ordering devices to assist in the interpretation of meaning that different actors place on it, such as in discourses. “Social
Constructions are produced and negotiated through the medium of discourse”
(Fischer, 2003, p. 68).
89 4.3 Policy Analysis
As mentioned earlier planning as public policy has an impact on land and property markets at three different levels, macro-economic, land economy and micro-economic. This research sought to investigate the latter two areas, the land
economy or property market and the micro-economic or level of the firm or developer.
Within a local context these two levels interrelate, the micro-economic level of the firm involving actors making decisions based upon financial models and appraisals, and the land economy level being the area at which the policy is implemented and involving a network of actors in its implementation. In studying these two different levels of interaction, two areas of research need to be considered, firstly that of policy analysis as it relates to local areas and networks and secondly the decision-making of actors at the micro-economic or level of the firm.
4.3.1 A History of Policy Analysis
The study of policy implementation can be traced back to the 1950s (Lasswell, 1951) and the study of mechanisms of policy making. In the 1950s however the
assumption was that a linear process of survey, analysis, plan, and implementation was how policy was delivered, perhaps with a further step of feedback to learn lessons for the future. This traditional approach also assumed that by establishing formal structures and procedures policy would be implemented as envisaged. This also reflected the welfare state and the dominant role of the public sector in the immediate post Second World War period.
In the 1960s and 70s the dominant role of the public sector, was beginning to be challenged, the assumption that formal structures and procedures ensured policy implementation was undermined by individual people pursuing their own agendas.
These actors often in positions of authority, termed “elites”, used informal processes behind the formal structures and procedures. This introduced the concept of
“power”, and how individual actors and groups of actors used power to influence decision-making, which in turn introduced the importance of relationships between actors and how they negotiated with each other. In the 1960s and 1970s the analysis of actors was prevalent in policy analysis with emphasis placed on the politics and power in decision making and how the state interacted with the private sector, the Action-centred approach of (Barrett and Fudge, 1981) and Advocacy
90
Coalition Frameworks (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith, 1993) are examples of policy analysis at that time.
In the 1980s the state and private sector relationship shifted, with a reduction in the power of the state and government, sometimes referred to as a shift from
Government to governance (Rhodes, 1994). In policy analysis it also reflected the fact that whilst the formal structures and procedures of the past had been embodied in the state and public sector, this was increasingly embodied in social relationships which “structured” the behaviour of actors, rather than formal structures and
procedures of government policy.
By the 1990s the field of policy analysis recognised that governance was within networks of relationships and the “Argumentative Turn” (Fischer and Forester, 1996) was introduced, as an approach with which to analyse policy. This introduced a range of concepts with which to analyse policy networks, such as frames (Schön and Rein, 1995) and policy narratives, storylines or discourses (Hajer, 1995; Yanow, 1996). In this postmodern approach to research these concepts attempted to provide ordering devices with which to mediate between structure and agency (Hajer and Laws, 2006).
Towards the end of the 1990s the “Institutionalist Turn” (Healey, 1999) was presented as an alternative approach, which emphasised social relationships strongly situated in specific localities. This introduced the capacity of governance into the analysis framework of the networks, but again used ordering devices to study these relationships, such as policy communities, policy arenas and policy discourses with which to study policy making in specific localities (Vigar et al., 2000; Healey, 2006b).
In the 21st century, the emergence of “Interpretive Policy Analysis” (Yanow, 2007),
“Deliberative Policy Analysis” (Hajer and Wagenaar, 2003) and Phronetic Policy Analysis (Flyvbjerg, 2004) as examples of a new interpretive approach, have taken some of these matters further. All broadly agree that the rational and linear approach to policy implementation is no longer appropriate for studying contemporary policy implementation due to the challenges, uncertainty, conflict and complexity involved.
Accordingly, an interpretive policy analysis approach was considered to be
91
appropriate, as it was based on discourse analysis with its ability to deal with multiple social meanings, this is considered further in the next section.