Performative policy studies: realizing “transition management”

Abstract

The paper analyses the relations between policy studies and public policy. It traces how they are constitutively entangled. Conceptually, this builds on a notion of performativity that has been developed in science studies. The performativity of policy studies is explored in a case study of the innovation journey of “transition management” as a model for governing sociotechnical change. The paper shows how practices of knowledge production and policy-making take shape in interaction with the model and how a specialized research field coevolves with political alliances and policy programs. They interact in the process of realizing transition management, both by establishing the model as collective knowledge and by materially enacting it. In this interweaving with public policy, policy studies contribute to creating the reality that they describe. The conclusions discuss “realizing” as a mode of governance.

Keywords:

• policy instruments
• innovation
• governance
• performativity
• co-production
• expertise
• sustainable development

Acknowledgments

I thank my colleagues in the Innovation in Governance Research Group for a stimulating context of discussion for the broader issues that are treated in this paper and appreciate specific comments on earlier versions of this paper by Thomas Pfister, Arie Rip, Philipp Späth, Derk Loorbach, Arno Simons, Carsten Mann, and Chantal Ruppert-Winkel. Research work for this article was funded by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) under its program of social-ecological research, through [grant no. 01UU0906].

Notes

1. For an introduction, see the seminal article Rotmans, Kemp, and Asselt (2001) and a recent review of the development of the model (Voß, Smith, and Grin, 2009).

2. Even though the concept of performative science developed in view of the natural sciences’ material constructions in the laboratory I propose to use the notion of “laboratory” for any kind of confined research context, for example, also a seminar with humanist scholars which assembles selected references to passages of text in an attempt to create a knowable reality of human culture. Also here, findings are valid only locally, in the particular setting of a scholarly discourse. Expanding the validity of truth claims requires the expansion of the discourse which incorporates the set of references that make up the world that it describes.