Fracasopolicy: toward a critical typology of policy failures

Abstract

ABSTRACT Policy failures in response to crises become visible, and the social reactions they trigger change the world. Building on critical failure studies and ontology of Spanish fracaso in policy research we propose to approach policy failures as ‘fracasopolicy’ – regimes for which the issue of failure is inherent. Published work on policy failures in the pandemic allows us to map out three such regimes: (1) someone has to fail, (2) the failure that isn’t there and (3) everything we touch turns into failure. We discuss how policy-failure relationships reveal the entanglement of past oppressions and power configurations; and how they provide fertile soil for currently emerging kinds of domination – vaccine nationalism, pandemic necropolitics. Revealing the manifestations of fracasopolicy, we show, will allow us to develop critical knowledge about our world and demystify failures, though we should also be aware of the risks of developing a narrative that romanticizes and overrepresents these.