Abstract
Abstract This article aims at presenting a narrative of Critical Policy Studies as a school of thought that is built, reflexively, within the Policy Studies field, consolidating and pluralizing it. This approach, although little known in Brazil, represents, increasingly, an alternative and a consistent path of studies, that distinguishes itself by assuming the centrality of language as an unit of analysis in policy processes; choosing interpretation as a method; taking the arguments as the main research material and post-positivism as its purpose. Methodologically, this article has been built through a narrative review of the literature and it adopted, as a starting point, the discussion forum on “what is critical?”, published in the Critical Policy Studies Review (2016 edition), and the Handbook of Critical Policy Studies itself (Fischer, Torgerson, Durnová & Orsini, 2016). In five sections, we narrate the development of Critical Policy Studies School passing, mainly, through interpretative and argumentative approaches, seeking to establish fertile dialogues with analysts, bureaucrats, managers and researchers. As well as with all those interested in facing the challenges of producing other narratives and developing new research and teaching processes in this field of studies, with the objective of making the Policy Studies field more diverse and more consistent with the Brazilian reality. We conclude that, paradoxically, the plurality - disciplinary, epistemological, methodological, theoretical and thematic - that characterizes the development of the Policy Studies field, in Brazil, still falls short of meaning more participatory, inclusive and democratic public policies. In this sense, we believe that the effort to contribute to the introduction of this literature in the Brazilian Policy Studies field not only presupposes the adoption of a critical-reflexive research stance, but also represents a first step towards the adoption of increasingly democratizing practices in the Policy field.
Highlights
The field of Policy Studies is currently gaining momentum in Brazil
It is the cases of recent works published by Rebecca Abers, Marcelo Kunrath Silva and Luciana Tatagiba (2018), on the relations between social movements and public policy or, still, of the researches they have developed on state-society repertoires of interaction (Abers, Serafim & Tatagiba, 2014), institutional activism (Abers & Tatagiba, 2015) and bureaucratic activism in the environmental field (Abers, 2019)
In the same direction goes the work of Roberto Pires (2017) on the reproduction of inequalities in the research agendas about state agents and social representations and the works gathered in the book Teoria e análises sobre implementação de políticas públicas no Brasil, edited by Lotta (2019) and authored by Gomes (2019), Koga, Viana, Camões and Filgueiras (2019), and Spink and Burgos (2019)
Summary
The field of Policy Studies is currently gaining momentum in Brazil. On the one hand, an increasing number of scholars have been triggering important theoretical-methodological dialogues with other disciplinary or interdisciplinary fields, producing an increasingly plural and interesting set of applied studies in public policy; on the other hand, though, these dialogues usually fall short of taking reflexivity as a principle, making it difficult to return the results of such reflexivity to the Policy field, what may end up curbing both its necessary expansion and its further deepening. Bernstein's appeal turned to the assumption of “practice” as the building locus of social meanings and his 1976’s work proposed a restructuring of social and political theories, presenting and discussing, philosophically, four new paths of study: empiricism, language, alternative phenomenology, and social critical theory With these two works, he was able to reorganize, in only half a decade, the limits of social sciences philosophy and to offer theoretical and analytical ground for further developments, which were soon to be taken over by a growingly consistent group of policy scholars. There is no doubt that Habermas' critical theory contributions were fundamental for the development of the rational-empiricist tradition critique It was his concept of “public sphere” – as a locus of discussion and discourse construction – that most contributed to paving the way for a new approach, which assumed language centrality as the most important relational dimension among public actors. The assumption of this reflective dimension has probably been the main guiding thread for the construction of an identity in critical policy studies, functioning as a modelling dimension of democracy and, in turn, being modelled by it
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