Revisiting deliberative policy analysis

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the authors who have contributed to this issue.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Ya Li is professor at the School of Public Administration, Beihang University, Beijing, China. He also serves as the director of the Laboratory for Deliberative Policy Analysis (LDPA). He is a visiting research professor at the Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflict and Collaboration (PARCC), at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. Among his recent books are Resolving Public Disputes Creatively (Renmin 2015) and Experimental Policy Research Methodology for Interest Analysis: Theory and Application (Peking University Press 2011). He can be reached via e-mail at [email protected]

Hendrik Wagenaar is senior advisor to the International School for Government at King’s College London and Adjunct Professor at the University of Canberra. He has published widely in the areas of participatory democracy, prostitution policy, interpretive policy analysis and practice theory, and has won different awards for best publication. He is author, among others, of Meaning in Action: Interpretation and Dialogue in Policy Analysis (Routledge 2011), and editor of the seminal Deliberative Policy Analysis (Cambridge University Press 2003). He can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].

Notes

1 A recent initiative to delegate the design and implementation of the Paris Climate Agreement in the Netherlands to a number of “climate tables”, deliberative platforms in which major societal stakeholders discussed the upcoming “energy transition” (from gas to green electricity), certainly smacks of the latter. The outcome resulted in increased corporate welfare to the carbon-industry to reduce CO2 levels, and the wholesale transfer of the transition costs to individual households, to be financed by additional mortgages. As a result of what they consider insufficiently ambitious CO2 goals and an unjust distribution of costs, climate NGOs and the unions walked away from the deliberations. (https://www.klimaatakkoord.nl; https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2018/12/20/vertrek-milieubeweging-klimaattafels-uiterst-pijnlijk-a3126655).

2 The Dutch climate tables mentioned in note 1 are a good example of the institutional misusage of deliberative forums through these mechanisms.

3 Niu and Wagenaar’s study of deliberation in the context of authoritarian policy making in China (2018) is an example of such an empirical investigation.

4 One reason for the neglect of the practice and deliberate dimensions of DPA could very well be that it presented itself, as the subtitle “Understanding Governance” suggests, as primarily an epistemological innovation. Create better, more “fitting”, knowledge in the vocabulary of DPA, and policy makers will be more willing to accept such knowledge. In hindsight this is an overly narrow, and rather naïve, interpretation of DPA, compromising its potential to renew the discipline of policy analysis.

5 The distinction between a weak and strong programme is taken from Nicolini (2012, 12. See also Bartels 2018).

6 The Law of Large Solutions states that “the greater the proportion of the population involved in a policy problem, and the greater the proportion of policy space occupied by a supposed solution, the harder it is to find a solution that will not become its own worst problem.” (Wildavsky 1979, 63).

Additional information

Funding

Ya Li’s editing effort is supported by the National Science Foundation of China [grant number: 71473016].