Abstract

The Oficina focuses on the emerging approaches which place policy research in its relevant political and historical contexts and address the relevance of social meanings and human subjectivity for policy inquiry.

While policy analysis is generally described as the need and the actions to be taken by public authorities to achieve some goals, and the practice of the analysis tends to emphasize the comparisons between costs and benefits and the impact on targets, interpretive approaches are mainly focused on the meanings of policies for policymakers, stakeholders and citizens, as revealed by metaphors, narratives and framing adopted in the public space, putting the notion of discourse, and its relation with policy practices, at the core of the analysis.
Following this line, interpretive approaches are developing a powerful critique of the traditional description of policy-making as a problem-oriented sequence of activities organized around the policy decisions of a central actor (generally the government, be it national or local), a reading that is indeed still popular among both scholars and practitioners.

The Oficina workshop will try to achieve a balance between empirical and theoretical dimensions, by using materials from an empirical case study to address theoretical issues such as authors, concepts and vocabularies of the interpretive approaches.
I will present the case of my Phd research on water policymaking in Italy in order to clarify the main differences between the two approaches to policy enquiry, by telling how (and why) I decided to turn my attention to an interpretive approach in order to investigate the relations of power around the social constructs of “water” in Italian policy-making, after having approached for some time the topic of the water reform through a more conventional policy studies perspective.

Bibliographical references
- Flyvbjerg B., 2001, Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How It Can Succeed Again. Cambridge MA, Cambridge University Press.
- Hajer M.A., 1995, The politics of environmental discourse. Ecological Modernization and the Policy Process. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
- Jasanoff S., 2005, Designs on nature: science and democracy in Europe and the United States. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press.
- Fischer F. & Forester J., 1993, The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning, London, UCL Press.
- Hajer M.A. & Wagenaar H., (eds), 2003, Deliberative Policy Analysis: Understanding Governance in the Network Society, Cambridge MA, Cambridge University Press.

Activity within the Research Group on Science, Economy and Society