This book presents a systematic account of Carol Bacchi's distinctive approach to policy analysis – known here as ‘What's The Problem Represented To Be’ (WPR). I first encountered the elements of this approach in her 1999 book Women, policy and politics: The construction of policy problems. In this latest work, the approach is turned into a ‘guide to practice’ for critical policy analysis and is exemplified through a range of policy analytic studies. The book is organised in two main parts. In Part I the ‘WPR’ approach is introduced and set out as a guide to conducting policy analysis in a poststructuralist or, more precisely, Foucauldian way. There is a particularly useful 7 step guide (page 20) to organising the practice of policy analysis that begins from the task of identifying that ‘problem’ that the policy is involved in constructing, and ends with the reflexive challenge to apply the previous six questions to ‘your own problem representations’. The first part concludes with a chapter detailing the conceptual resources on which the approach draws. These are mostly drawn from the work of Michel Foucault, and involve such framing ideas as problematization, formations of power/knowledge, subjectification, governmentality, genealogy and discursive practices.
The second part of the book traces how the approach has been productive for a range of policy studies. These are grouped around four key themes that treat policy as ‘making up’ things: problems, subjects, objects and places. Here Bacchi and Goodwin marshal a range of investigations to demonstrate the deconstructive capacity of a WPR approach to policy and its illumination of the ways in which things are ‘made up’. This deconstructive capacity is central to the approach: denaturalising the policy process, and refusing the normalising assumptions that ‘problems’ are pre-existing and demand answers from policy makers. Instead, we come to see how policies create their problems ready-made for their answers, ranging from ‘traffic’ to ‘less developed’ places; from ‘gender equity’ to ‘antisocial behaviour’. In the process, problems are linked to the identification (naming and enrolling) of particular types of people (either as the bearers of the problems – drug users, lone mothers, etc. – or as the bearers of solutions – consultants, therapists, advisers, case workers and more. The book concludes with an Appendix by Carol Bacchi and Jennifer Bonham that extends the poststructural approach of the book to a way of analysing interviews as a site in which forms of personhood may be made up.
The development of this systematic account of the WPR approach is welcome and the book offers rich exemplification of its productivity. At the same time, the book offers glimpses of possibilities that are not followed up – and this is frustrating. The first of these emerges from the title: the book reads more like ‘Foucauldian Policy Analysis’ given that there are many strands of poststructuralism that go missing. My concern here is less about the philosophical and theoretical diversity of poststructuralism in general (where's Derrida?) than with those strands that can enrich policy studies. Emerging work that uses concepts of networks, assemblage and rhizomatic articulation unsettles the apparent solidity and coherence of policy as an object. Similarly, work inspired by other feminist, queer and postcolonial approaches has opened up critical views of policy – and changed what becomes visible as problems and solutions in the process. Such orientations take the analysis of policy beyond governmentality whilst still problematizing its capacity to ‘make things up’. So too does an interest in policy as translation: in which words may change their meanings (and their effects) as they move, rather than forming stable policy texts.
My second sense of unfulfilled promise concerns the consequences of making things up. What do the made up things (the places, the objects and the subjects) do, once they have been made up? Do they do the things they are supposed to do, behaving like the objects, subjects and places inscribed in policy? Or are they less well-behaved? At points, Bacchi and Goodwin suggest that the subjects of subjectification may not be the reliable or stable embodiments of policy (noting for example, that subjects emerge in practice at the intersection of multiple, overlapping and possibly contradictory discourses). But this is not followed up systematically: only one empirical illustration of this issue is mentioned amidst the large array of exemplary studies. For me, this misses the interesting empirical, conceptual and political heart of why one might wish to study policy – and the importance of looking at what happens as policy is enacted. For example, Tania Li's exemplary ethnography of governmentality (Li, Reference Li2007) in forestry management in Indonesia traces not just what it ‘makes up’ but how its desired subjects, objects, places and desired effects stubbornly refuse to materialise. Such failures incite further efforts to govern but such work is a reminder about the cluttered, contradictory and messy worlds (already ‘made up’ in different ways) that policy seeks to govern. The possibility of active and unruly subjects (not the coherent and essentialist ‘individual’, but messy and multiple entities) recur in relation to the proposals for interview analysis. There we might encounter what Holland and Lave (Reference Holland and Lave2001) call heteroglossic subjects that ‘answer back’ or act as ‘discursive practitioners’ (as in the work of Margaret Wetherell and her collaborators: see Wetherell and Edley, Reference Wetherell and Edley1999, for example). Such practitioners engage with the form (the interview), the setting (a distinctive sort of contact zone between experts and bearers of ‘subjugated knowledges’) and the discursive resources of the worlds they inhabit. We might then recognise that such subjects may have their own forms of ‘scepticism’ about policy and its forms of knowledge and power.
Finally, the critical edge of the model of policy analysis so clearly set out here combines its recognisable starting point – the sceptical uncovering of how things are being made up – with a rather more troubling promise: that the critical analyst will be able to identify which policies are less ‘harmful’ or ‘deleterious’ in their effects. But how are we to assess and evaluate different ‘harms’ in the spaces being made by policy? What do harms look like? How do we discover or even imagine alternatives – policies otherwise – that might be less dangerous or damaging? Here, I think that the Guide needs to take us beyond the limits of policy and policy analysis into more unsettled and unsettling encounters.
