Understanding Policy Change as a Hermeneutic Problem

Abstract

Part one sets out the distinctive features of a post-positivist approach in policy studies, what it brings to policy scholarship and its relationship to extant positivist analyses. Post-positivism allows policy change to be stated as a hermeneutic problem that requires an interpretive approach: policy change occurs through the politics of establishing definitions and agreeing the meanings of societal problems over time. Two crucial questions of agency follow from this insight: first, how are agents constituted in the interpretive analysis of policy change? And second, how are the interpretive frames of agents communicated, reproduced and changed? I begin to answer these in the subsequent sections using the practical reason version of rationality.