LIST OF PANELS

One of the major characteristics of “super wicked problems” (Levin et al., 2012; Auld et al. 2021) lies in the disconnect between, on the one hand, the framing of the problem through expert and academic knowledge, on-streets mobilizations and litigation, and on the other hand, the range of public policy solutions aimed at making the climate issue governable. In this regard, a substantial amount of academic work accounts for the way in which risk dramaturgies deployed by whistleblowers have managed to put the Anthropocene paradigm on the agenda. Policy research across the social sciences has also been able to account for why public policies have, so far, failed to overcome sectoral clashes, paths dependency and competing issues and are never up to the challenges deployed by cause entrepreneurs.

Yet the dynamics pertaining to the knowledge production for public policies, the way in which it mutates and transforms according to circulations, tensions and criticisms, the enlistments to which they contribute, the arenas they navigate and the changes in public policies they produce, are yet to be examined. 

Drawing on the notion of policy analysis as an overarching concept (Geva-May, Howlett 2012; Cairney 2022), this panel focuses on the production of knowledge for public action (policy analysis) to re-examining transformative change in public policy processes (policy studies). It proposes to build a research agenda aimed at documenting and understanding how, by whom and in which arenas policy analysis to address the climate crisis is being produced and selected. More specifically, it examines how Policy analysis, as a specific type of knowledge, historically concentrated within the state apparatus and produced by large specialized bureaucracies or professions, takes up the ecological and climate problems, and generates acceptable policy solutions.

This panel will take place onsite.

Proposals addressing one or the other of the following questions are welcome : 

1) The production of policy analysis, which consists in putting insoluble problems back onto the agenda, redefining them to make them governable, domesticating them to ensure their compatibility with the repertoire of instruments and actions available, transforming them into vehicles for recruiting problem owners and shaping coalitions, supporting the redefinition of possible futures and legitimizing governments in their capacity to act. 
2) A theoretical discussion addressing how discussions and disputes about policy analysis and the study of policy processes contribute to shaping both knowledge production dynamics. This will also allow us to identify possible analytical and conceptual blind spots, as well as to explore existing attempts at revisiting them thanks to the development of new methods and datasets, as well as through interdisciplinary cross-fertilization including natural sciences.