Reflective Research Design for the Interpretative Policy Analyst

Abstract

This paper presents a reflective research design to study a shift from government discourse to deliberative governance discourse in experiments with deliberative governance in land use planning. The shift from government to deliberative governance can be summarized as a shift from hierarchical government steering to network-cooperation of governmental and nongovernmental actors. Moreover, in deliberative governance these actors attempt to interact differently than in the normal policy practice. Rather than negotiate and act strategically; they engage in a dialogue and collaborative learning process.I studied this shift as being enacted in experiments that were designed to facilitate these deliberations between governmental and non-governmental actors in one pilot-case in the Netherlands, and in a comparison between an experiment in rural areas in the Netherlands and one experiment in the United States. To be able to study this shift being enacted discursively, I developed a theory of boundary work as a mechanism through which actors attempt to change dominant discourse, or attempt to maintain its dominance. Boundary work is the introduction of boundary concepts that sit at boundaries between discourses, and it is actors’ demarcation of discourses to gain credibility for these discourses. To increase the reflectivity of me as a researcher and of the knowledge constructed in this research, this theory was tested in a pilot case and applied in a comparison between the Netherlands and the United States. This research design was reflective in three ways. First, theory and empirics feed into each other and the iteration between the two helps to create ‘phronesis’: practical wisdom. Second, I turned to practice and organized the iteration between theory and empirics in a social process in which I interacted with actors from practice. In this interaction these participants were each others ‘parrhesiastes’(Foucault, 2001) (fearless-speakers). Third, a comparison of two international projects introduced a reflective exchange and a mutual inquiry in yet anothermanner.