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Studying Policy: a dialogue between anthropology and political scienc e

Taliking Notes for Interest Group on the Anthropology of Public Policy Roundtable

Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association

San Francisco, CA

16 November 2012

Paul Stubbs 1

The Present: dialogue or contact zone?

+ I am here as a rather hybrid self commited to a post-disciplinary approach to policy. In Jessop and Nielsen's

terms post-disciplinary approaches reject the legitimacy of established disciplinary boundaries and adopt a moreproblem-oriented approach. They therefore tend to be more open-textured, more eclectic, and more interested inpolitical and ethical issues2. I usually describe myself as a sociologist with anthropological tendencies. I workprimarily, thankfully not exclusively, on the topic of social policy, a field where, as John Clarke has remarked,there is a sense that complex concepts are best left to others and, hence, arrive late, if at all, and invariably in highlysimplified form3. In Croatia, which has been my home since 1993, I work in an Institute of Economics and, recently, have begunto teach a module on a doctoral programme in Comparative Politics.

+ As I have been drawn ever more into the anthropology of policy, my work has explicitly set itself up against the orthodoxies of particular kinds of political science approaches. Of course, there is a certain irony in using the discipline which has exploredothering most thoroughlyfor my own othering of political sciencescholarship, without seeing that the kinds of approaches I amadvocating for can also be found there too, albeit on the margins. I want to capture here something of the current situation, akin toa contact zone, in which instead of dialogue there is more, in James Cliffords terms, a power -charged set of exchanges4 whenscholars who rarely meet find themselves in a state of co-presence. It is not all one way, and disciplines have their closed mindsand their open ones, of course. I recall being assailed once by an anthropologist for using ethnography in my work: for you it is aluxury, Paul; for me, I have no choice was the gist of the argument. And even I cannotresist retelling that, as I agreed to speak atthis event, the controversy over the American Political Science Association (APSA) holding its conference in New Orleans despitethe State of Louisianas non-recognition of gay marriage loomed large in my mind (did not the AAA also hold its own convention inNew Orleans a couple of years back?). Ttwo quotes struck me as pertinent. One APSA member said that, unlike sociology or anthropology, gender and gay themes were not of great concern to political scientists. My favourite however, was an APSAmember who said on the whole, political scientists arent very political.

+ Two areas where I have explicitly confronted orthodox political science analyses, approaches, and concepts are in terms of multi-level governance and policy transfer. In my 2005critique of the multi-level governance literature5 which I was recentlyasked to revisit in a Regional Studies Association event in Brussels6, my concern initially was how the work, mainly by UK and USpolitical scientists studying the European Union, really did not fit from a vantage point of South East Europe. But, as I dug deeper,it was the idea of a world of neat, anchored levels moving from the localto theregional, to thenational, regional(again) andglobalwhich worried me. Where were the understandings of fluidity, of processes of scaling and re-scaling, of what Doreen

1 Paul Stubbs, Senior Research Fellow, The Institute of Economics, Zagreb, Croatia. pstubbs@eizg.hr 2 Bob Jessop and Klaus Nielsen (2003) Institutions and Rules, http://es.pekea-fr.org/p.php?c=comm/5-1-FT-R-JESSOP.html (accessed 8November 2012).3 John Clarke (2004)Changing Welfare, Changing StatesSage, p. 3.4 James Clifford (1997)Routes 5 Paul Stubbs (2005) 'Stretching Concepts Too Far?: Mutli-Level Governance, Policy Transfer and the Politics of Scale in South EastEurope', Southeast European PoliticsVI (2); 66-87, http://www.seep.ceu.hu/archives/issue62/stubbs.pdf (Accessed 8 November 2012)6 Troubling Multilevel Governance: Coordinating Spatial Interventions, Video athttp://scic.ec.europa.eu/streaming/index.php?es=2&sessionno=51e6d6e679953c6311757004d8cbbba9 (Accessed 8 November 2012)

mailto:pstubbs@eizg.hrmailto:pstubbs@eizg.hrmailto:pstubbs@eizg.hrhttp://es.pekea-fr.org/p.php?c=comm/5-1-FT-R-JESSOP.htmlhttp://es.pekea-fr.org/p.php?c=comm/5-1-FT-R-JESSOP.htmlhttp://es.pekea-fr.org/p.php?c=comm/5-1-FT-R-JESSOP.htmlhttp://www.seep.ceu.hu/archives/issue62/stubbs.pdfhttp://www.seep.ceu.hu/archives/issue62/stubbs.pdfhttp://www.seep.ceu.hu/archives/issue62/stubbs.pdfhttp://scic.ec.europa.eu/streaming/index.php?es=2&sessionno=51e6d6e679953c6311757004d8cbbba9http://scic.ec.europa.eu/streaming/index.php?es=2&sessionno=51e6d6e679953c6311757004d8cbbba9http://scic.ec.europa.eu/streaming/index.php?es=2&sessionno=51e6d6e679953c6311757004d8cbbba9http://www.seep.ceu.hu/archives/issue62/stubbs.pdfhttp://es.pekea-fr.org/p.php?c=comm/5-1-FT-R-JESSOP.htmlmailto:pstubbs@eizg.hr

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Massey terms co-presence7, and of the power of networks, which were so much a part of my lived reality? I think it got worsewhen some leading theorists of multi-level governance started being asked to advise the European Union on, guess what?, itsmulti-level governance. Neat anchored levels and competences now dovetailed into fixed policy sectors (have they not read ChrisShore and Susan Wright on re-domaining8?) which could be ranked, over time, asmainly national, mainly EU, or sharedcompetences. I also have to say that political scientists of policy in general, and those of multi-level governance in particular, doseem to love typologies (which always seem to be 2 x 2 for some reason) and abstract modelling of the policy process. Asheuristic devices, of course, both can be incredibly useful but the danger, I think, is that the really interesting things about policy areincreasingly in the lines, cracks, edges and missing elements of the typologies and models. Political science students, even verygood ones, do have a habit of picking up these models and making them central to their work without, it seems, reading the smallprint of the danger of transferring them to very different conjunctures and contexts. This really matters in a small country likeCroatia where only a very few books onpolicyget translated so that the models of Hal Colebatch9, Hill and Hupe10 and Hoppe11,get reproduced in rather uncritical ways.

+ Probably the best known of my critiques of political science approaches to policy is work I have done with Nomi Lendvai, andin a forthcoming book also with David Bainton and John Clarke, on the way that the transnational dimension of policy can better be considered in terms of the concept of policy translation than the more orthodox approach in terms of policy transfer 12. We arehardly alone in this enterprise and, indeed IGAPP Panels on 2009 and 2011 were arranged, precisely, around this idea13. The

idea of policy as translation questions, above all, the concept of policy transfer as a linear process of policydiffusion or transplantation, challenging assumptions of an objectified or commodified knowledge, to quote DoraYanow, extrapolated from its context14. Translation is a crucialconcept within an anthropology of policy whichemphasises what Chris Shore and Susan Wright have termedthe messiness and complexity of policyprocesses, as a set of imaginaries or narratives moving through time and space non-linearly, with attempts toembed policies as authoritative, normative, forms15. The time seems ripe, here, for some rapprochement andsynthesis, precisely because the policy transfer literature has adapted and developed and, in any case, wasnever as one-dimensional as we stated. Indeed, a recent text by Diane Stone, in attempting exactly this, arguesthat the literature on policy translation, mobilities and learning needs to form the basis of an increasing focuswithin policy studies on thesoft transfer of knowledge, ideas and information via networks.

+ As Sinia Zrinak and I concluded in a recent text on clientelism in Croatia16, more political ethnography is

certainly needed, although this needs to move away from only studying formal power and elite agency and delvemuch more into theshadow elite of what Janine Wedel termsflexians17 and the more mundane networkedbrokers, intermediaries and consultants increasingly important in transnational policy arenas. For me, it hasalways been ethnographys capacity to surprise, as Paul Willis and Max Trondman once framed it18, which ispart of its attraction. Cross-disciplinarity, framed in terms of open research questions, rigorously theorised throughan interrogation of scales, sites, agency, and discourses (the list is not exhaustive), might lead to newunderstandings of theworkwhich policy does, as it moves, sensing and even, maybe, capturing, the paradox of both its fluidity and radical unfinished-ness and its capacity to produce and reproduce relations of domination andcontrol. If we agree on this at least, we may move out of the contact zone and emerge into a space for engagement and dialogue.

7 Doreen Massey (1993). Questions of locality, Geography 78 (1993); 142-9 8 Chris Shore and Susan Wright (2011)Conceptualising Policy: technologies of governance and the politics of visibility, in Chris Shore etal (eds.) Policy Worlds: anthropology and the analysis of contemporary power Bergahn, pp. 1-25.9 Hal Colebatch (1998)Policy MacGraw-Hill.10 Robert Hoppe (2010)The Governance of ProblemsPolicy Press.11 Michael Hill and Peter Hupe (2008)Implementing Public Policy Sage12 Nomi Lendvai and Paul Stubbs (2007)Policies as Translation: situating transnational social policies, in Susan Hodgson and Zo Irving (eds.)Policy Reconsidered . Policy Press, pp. 173-190 and Nomi Lendvai and Paul Stubbs (2009) Assemblages, translation and intermediaries in South East Europe:rethinking transnationalism and social policy,European Societies 11(5); 673-696.13 Beyond Policy Transfer: transnational translations and the reconfiguring of technocracy and politics(2009) and Tracing Policy:translation and assemblage(2011).14 Dora Yanow(2004) Translating local knowledge at organizational peripheries,British Journal of Management , 15(1); p.15..15 Shore and Wright (2011) op. cit. P. 1116 Paul Stubbs and Sinia Zrinak (2011)'Rethinking clientelism, governance and citizenship in social welfare: the case of Croatia', Paper to ESPANET Conference, http://espanet2011.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/st3a_stubbs-zrinscak_op.pdf (accessed 10 November 2012)17 Janine Wedel (2009) Shadow EliteBasic Books.18 Paul Willis, and Max. Trondman(2000) A Manifesto for Ethnography,Ethnography 1(1); 5-15.

http://espanet2011.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/st3a_stubbs-zrinscak_op.pdfhttp://espanet2011.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/st3a_stubbs-zrinscak_op.pdfhttp://espanet2011.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/st3a_stubbs-zrinscak_op.pdfhttp://espanet2011.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/st3a_stubbs-zrinscak_op.pdf