Policy Analysis

Policy analysis is a term that is applied to a wide variety of practices and intellectual approaches and that cannot be reduced to a neat definition. The relationship between intellectual approaches and practice is not clear. Certainly, there is a dominant paradigm that sees policy analysis as an exercise in applied social science, in which the analytic method of the social sciences is mobilized to enable governments to make the optimal choice, and graduate programs in policy (particularly in North America) elaborate and refine the knowledge and skills required for policy analysis in this sense. But even those who are trained and employed as policy analysts find a disjunction between the methodology in which they have been trained and the demands of the job, and there is an undercurrent of anxiety among analysts about the extent to which their analysis is used and uncertainty about whether, and in what way, they should involve themselves in policy practice. So it is difficult to give an unambiguous definition of policy analysis as a field of study or of practice. It is conventional to distinguish between analysis for policy and the analysis of policy, and we will begin with this distinction. But it will become clear that the diversity of perceptions of policy analysis reflects the different ways in which we think about policy, mobilizing multiple and overlapping frameworks of meaning to make sense of what we see and what we do, so we will need to dig deeper to get a fuller understanding of policy analysis. Working through these various usages of the term will be like peeling an onion, though we hope to do it without too many tears.