How action research can make deliberative policy analysis more transformative

ABSTRACT

Hajer and Wagenaar originally proposed Deliberative Policy Analysis (DPA) as an approach suited to transforming a policy world characterized by complexity, pluralism and unpredictability. Because its transformative ambitions have long remained unfulfilled, DPA has begun embracing a variety of Action Research (AR) approaches committed to generating policy change in a world beset by multiple sustainability crises. However, a systematic assessment of how AR can make DPA more transformative has been absent thus far. We argue that AR can strengthen the transformative ambitions of DPA in three ways. First, it helps clarify the purposes of DPA based on a critical and relational worldview emanating from their shared pragmatist foundations. Second, it unveils the structural challenges of becoming more transformative in the shadow of the hegemonic institutional organization of academic and policy systems. Finally, it provides a heuristic framework for engaging in the critical-relational dynamics of generating policy change and sustainability transitions. We conclude with a number of recommendations, based on AR principles, practices and experiences, that deliberative policy analysts can adopt to help their initiatives become more transformative.

KEYWORDS:

• Deliberative policy analysis
• action research
• transformation
• hegemony
• sustainability
• criticality
• relationality

Acknowledgements

We like to thank the Editors for their valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes on contributors

Dr Koen P.R. Bartels is Senior Lecturer in Public Management at the Institute of Local Government Studies, University of Birmingham. He teaches courses in leadership, democracy and participation, public management, and research design. His work aims to better understand and improve relationships between citizens and (local) government. Specific research interests are social innovation, participatory democracy, urban governance, relationality, practice, interpretive research, and action research. He has published on these topics in leading academic journals, including Urban Studies, Environment & Planning C, Public Administration, Public Administration Review, and International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. He has also published a monograph (Communicative Capacity: Public Encounters in Participatory Theory and Practice) with The Policy Press in 2015 and a co-edited volume (Action Research in Policy Analysis: Critical and Relational Approaches to Sustainability Transitions) with Routledge in 2018.

Davydd J. Greenwood is the Goldwin Smith Professor of Anthropology Emeritus (Cornell University, USA). He taught at Cornell University for 44 years. A Corresponding Member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, his work centres on action research, general systems and evolutionary theory, political economy, ethnic conflict, community and regional development, and neo-liberal reforms of higher education. He began his work in Action Research with the Mondragón Cooperatives in the Spanish Basque Country and continued it in Spain, Norway, and the United States, including working in three Norwegian PhD action research teaching programs. He is the co-author with Morten Levin of the book, Creating a New Public University and Reviving Democracy: Action Research in Higher Education (Berghahn, 2016). A complete list of publications and research activities can be found at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Davydd_Greenwood.

Dr Julia M. Wittmayer works as Assistant Professor at the Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences (ESSB) and as senior researcher at DRIFT, Erasmus University Rotterdam. With her background in Social and Cultural Anthropology, she is interested in roles, relations and interactions between actors in sustainability transition processes and initiatives in urban areas and on local scale. A specific focus is on the role of research and transdisciplinary engagements as well as (action) research methodologies. Next to being involved in or leading a variety of research projects, Julia has been engaged in policy advice for local and national government bodies across Europe and gives lectures to diverse audiences. She regularly acts as (guest) editor of book volumes and special issues in a variety of journals. Currently, she is involved in research into the social dimensions of and the role of social innovations in energy transitions.

Notes

1 It is no coincidence that AR gained tremendous traction in the same period. It is also important to recognize that this ferment was accompanied by the golden age of university funding and growth.

2 Most probably this is because AR and DPA scholars read different literatures and study different problems. As we will argue below, this is evidence of how neo-Taylorism keeps the troops in silos.

3 It is also grounded in General Systems Theory (GST). Greenwood and Levin (2007) discuss the synergies between pragmatism and GST at length. Curiously, GST has not really been of significant influence within DPA (but see Wagenaar 2007), something that is starting to change (Ison 2017; Foster et al. 2019; West, van Kerkhoff, and Wagenaar 2019). Drawing on the field of sustainability transition research, which is based on complex systems theory and GST (Rotmans and Loorbach 2009; Loorbach, Frantzeskaki, and Avelino 2017), could help to further move in this direction.

4 We are of course not claiming that DPA and AR are a panacea; their practices are by definition localized, their long-term impacts have not been systematically studied, and there are many other valuable approaches.

5 In a way, there is nothing ‘neo’ about neo-Taylorism. Reading F.W. Taylor gives a clear portrait of the neo-Taylorist world. Neo here really means a return to the past after a period of more collaborative, matrix-like organizational systems that limited arbitrary apical power. What is different is that unlike in Taylorism that justified it in terms of productive efficiency, academic Neo-Taylorism is justified by accountability and surveillance technology.

6 Examples are given in Greenwood and Levin 2007, chapter 3; see also Hepsø and Botnevik 2002; Bartels and Wittmayer 2018.

7 Journals specializing in action research include Action Research, the International Journal of Action Research, and Systemic Practice and Action Research. There are three Sage Handbooks of Action Research. In addition to specialized educational action research journals, increasingly, action research is published in mainstream social science journals and funded under regular funding schemes.

8 There currently are vanishingly few such institutions: the Mondragón University, the Department of Educational Anthropology at Aarhus, Berea College, Evergreen State College, and the emerging Cooperative College.