Discourse analysis and strategic policy advice: manoeuvring, navigating, and transforming policy

ABSTRACT

Discourse analysis (DA) has established itself as a widely accepted and legitimate approach to policy analysis. It is used to study issues such as the role of knowledge in policymaking, political cleavages and coalitions, and legitimacy. However, the proponents of DA have generally been reluctant to provide strategic policy advice. This reluctance limits the utility of DA for providing new and partly alternative policy ideas and advice on how to propagate new policies and to consolidate existing ones. This paper aims to extend the scope of DA to include advice that may change or modify how discourses are utilised in shaping policy. It elaborates on seven types of discursive agency allowing policy actors (including politicians, policy strategists, public managers, and citizen groups) to either consolidate existing policy or propagate new policy by manoeuvring within a given discursive framework, navigating between different and conflicting discourses, or transforming existing discourses.

KEYWORDS:

• Discourse analysis
• discursive agency
• policy advice
• climate emergency
• COVID-19
• labour market policy’

Acknowledgements

We like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their constructive and very useful comments. We also like to extend our thanks to members of the Globalization & Europeanization Research Group (GERG) and the Roskilde School of Governance (RSG) at Roskilde University for their very useful comments on a draft version allowing us to move the paper forward

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kennet Lynggaard

Kennet Lynggaard is associate professor at Department of Social Sciences and Business at Roskilde University.

Peter Triantafillou

Peter Triantafillou is professor at Department of Social Sciences and Business at Roskilde University.