LIST OF PANELS

As humans, as cultures, and as humanity we confront relentless challenges—experienced in everyday ephemeral moments and as pervasive environmental crises or manifestations of fragile economies and democracies. These challenges, and how we encounter them, play out in a dynamic, interdependent, relational space. It is a space that people make together and that remakes them. Relationality provides people a sense of how their lives are going, while also offering resources to glance forward to what may plausibly be—informed by experience—in order to act as if it were the case, and thereby increase the chance of it actually being the case. Therefore, relational policy analysis, most simply stated, accepts relationality as a key characteristic of our contemporary condition and seeks to reconfigure the policy process accordingly. The intention is to advance governance toward more sustainable futures.

For much of human history, the relationality of people and the world has been conceived as philosophically foundational. The concept is retained in numerous indigenous concepts, such as kotahitanga for Māori, meaning unity or oneness, or the Andean concept pacha as a totality of being that overcomes space and time. The Western tradition sought to prioritise substantive entities over relationships, and static being over fluid becoming. This view continues to heavily influence the practice of policy analysis, the recognised shortcomings of which have motivated a stream of study of relational approaches to policy analysis. Of particular note is work in deliberative policy analysis, critical policy studies, practice theory, relational process ontology, policy networks and systems thinking. On the one hand, relational approaches reflect the everyday realities of people—citizens and professionals alike—who endeavour to create better futures in a complex and uncertain world. On the other hand, much scholarship stops short of fully synthesising lessons for how relational ideas might be more easily and more sustainably practiced.

The time is ripe, therefore, for fresh consideration of the lessons to date from theoretical discussions and empirical case studies (in interpretive and action-research forms). Depending on one’s perspective, a relational approach either complements or supplants analytical approaches based on technical, ‘evidence-based’ responses to decision making under uncertainty with the practical, experiential and practice wisdom honed through interactions and embedded in common sense.

The aim of this panel is to advance the theory–practice interface in relational policy analysis. The intention is to focus on the practice of methodologies that are helpful in honing citizens’ and practitioners’ everyday capacities for anticipating futures and creating desirable pathways to realise them. Taking relationality centrally means embracing the dualities of subjectivity and objectivity, interdependence and autonomy and (re)conceiving policy analysis as a situated, embodied, and unfolding practice. Such a ‘turn’ is truly radical—both in the sense of breaking with accepted ways of thinking and in pointing to the fundamental nature of human experience and sensemaking.

Relational approaches are not easily summarised in a general overview. For present purposes, we are interested in how relational approaches are, or might be used, to support and demonstrate the way people come together in the pragmatic project of inquiry and action. Problems are addressed in doing, where doing is engaging, learning, sense-making, conflict-resolving, value clarification, and reflexively adapting to the emergence of possibilities and constraints. Thus, doing relational policy analysis entails the integration of numerous practices, which unfold in time, between people, and with some emergent measure of directed purpose and ethical imperative. In all cases, we are concerned with how shared experiences ground encounters and interpretations, flow through them, and ultimately have the potential to transform how policy acts on the human–environment system.

Relational approaches share a number of distinguishing concepts. A relational ontology takes shared experiences as given, leading participants in any policy context to have already, tacitly or explicitly, a sense of ‘we’ experiencing how things are, and more importantly, anticipating how things might (or should) be. In relational approaches there is a fundamental awareness that we are inescapably woven into ecological and social webs. What is, and is possible, arises from living together, with relationships and interrelationships as constitutive not only of meanings but of the actual emergent materiality of real structures and processes. Intervening, knowing, learning and transformation are inextricably linked in practice and inquiry. Knowing is conceived as an action or behaviour that occurs in relation, or in the ‘in-between’ of encounters between individuals and entities involved in some policy process. It is fundamentally dialogical and provisional, and aims at shared understanding and joint transformation.

Papers are invited that consider how relational concepts are translated into, or demonstrated in, policy-oriented practices. Among possible questions are the following, which may be addressed at the micro, meso or macro level:

What does a relational approach to policy analysis look like? What ‘lenses’ enable a participant or observer to detect key events and changes?

What, exactly, does a researcher or a practitioner come to understand when an advance in understanding is perceived to have occurred?

How do, or could, relational practices recreate or reconceive the field of policy analysis? If something needs to change in conventional policy practice, how might that change be facilitated?

What is required to foster and sustain relational practices?

Within specific relational spaces, what are observable indicators for political, economic, societal, ecological or cultural transformations?

What does relational policy analysis look like when anticipating the future in some policy domain?

What does the unfolding duality of interdependence and autonomy look like as people chart a course of action in a particular policy situation?