LIST OF PANELS

Objective:

This panel seeks to encourage scholars to present their work on policy process analysis of long-term changes in policies through policy process elements in which two or more existing frameworks, theories, and models in policy process studies are able to explain the process of change. A comprehensive presentation of works included in this panel can offer some insight in moving towards a uniform generalised theory augment that remains elusive so far.  

Background and Scientific Relevance:

How and why public policies are made have been a subject of study ever since Harold Lasswell laid down his ambitious idea of ‘policy sciences’ in 1951 in his book ‘The Policy Sciences: Recent Developments in Scope and Methods’. From thereon, public policy has emerged as an important academic arena and its formal study can be said to have originated with the multi-disciplinary approach of Lasswell (Dunn, 2018).

However, Lasswell himself described ‘policy sciences’ as an area with two distinct but interwoven purposes concerning ‘knowledge of the policy process’ and ‘knowledge in the process’ (Lasswell, 1970). While the former is creation of knowledge about the process of policymaking, the latter is about the knowledge created in the process of policymaking, which can be used to improve the process itself.  

Scholars and academicians have embarked upon several frameworks, theories and models to understand and describe policy-making process or what may be seen as knowledge of the policy process. Some of such models have also attempted to analyse the long-term changes and evolution of policies under different contexts and settings creating knowledge in the policy process to improve the process itself. Nonetheless, in its last seven decades of development as an academic stream and even after a proliferation of frameworks, theories and models in the field of policy process studies, there is a lack of uniform generalised theory (Smith and Larimer, 2009) that can together explain all the causal relationships falling within the arena of policy studies.

Several scholars have attempted to compare such frameworks, theories and models of the policy process to find commonality among them and their ability to explain the policy process. A study by Heikkila and Cairney (2018) on comparison of important existing frameworks, theories and models figures out six policy process elements (actors, institutions, networks, ideas, context and events) that may explain the ‘knowledge of the process’. Similarly, Hall’s theory on levels of changes bring out three more policy process elements i.e. policy background, policy goals, and policy tools along with settings of the tools to explain the changes in policies.

Thus, an analysis of long-term changes in a policy through these nine policy process elements may offer insight into the applicability of existing frameworks, theories and models and also help in developing a generalised theory that can be uniformly applied to policy changes as an outcome of ‘knowledge in the process’.    

Call for papers in the proposed panel:

Policy change may be incremental changes in existing structure or new innovative policies. However, major policy changes and intentional intervention may be seen as policy reforms. Similarly, long-term changes in policies may be seen as policy evolution, like cumulative long-term development of policy structure, radical reforms in policy-making institutions, trial-and-error strategies adopted by policy-makers when adopting to policy environment, and bunching of multiple factors that create situations for major policy changes.

Long-term policy changes or evolution have been described by existing frameworks like Advocacy Coalition, Multiple Stream, Punctuated Equilibrium and others. However,  no description of evolution actually fathoms the size of policy changes or estimate the appropriate time frame for such changes. 

With the background of theoretical understanding on policy changes, and the the importance of policy process research for ‘knowledge of the process’ and ‘knowledge in the process’ this panel invites innovative studies and research on mapping and analysis of the policy process for long-term changes in policies studied through policy process elements in which two or more existing frameworks, theories and models are able to explain the process of policy changes. Submissions should be able to describe, map, and analyse the long-term changes with respect to policy process elements such as policy background or legacies, ideas or beliefs, events, goals or objectives, contexts or environment, institutions, networks or subsystems, actors, and tools or instruments following any method, trough primary or secondary data.