Reparative public policy

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper aims to map out a framework for thinking critically about race and coloniality in policymaking, through utilizing what I am calling a reparative public policy procedural approach. Demands for reparations have long aimed to address racialized inequalities set up through slavery, genocide and colonialism. Yet while being sort as an outcome of public policy by those impacted by colonization, slavery and genocide, reparations can also inform the process of policy making in liberal democracies. Through drawing on insights from the literature on reparations, I seek to illuminate the way coloniality and racism are written into aspects of liberal democratic policymaking, but also how a reparatiive approach to public policy making can help policy makers in liberal democracies find ways to challenge and transform such practice. This is what I am calling a reparative public policy approach – a framework for policymakers that draws attention to a presumed neutrality of policy-making processes which are maintained through methodological nationalism, deployment of liberal time, accumulation through dehumanization and racialization, and the universalism of liberal democratic governance.