by Mandeep Singh (he/him)
MSc Candidate for Anthropology and Development, LSE
M.Singh37(@lse.ac.uk)
Anthways, 2024 © Mandeep Singh
DOI:10.5281/zenodo.13982255
INTRODUCTION
Policy is regularly understood as being shaped by politics but less so the other way around. Insofar as there has been a proliferation of critical thought in studying policy as a vehicle of social construction—notable examples being the argumentative turn (Fischer and Forester, 1993), interpretive analysis (Yanow, 2000), and value-critical analysis (Rein, 1983)—mainstream analysis remains dominated by the empiricist approach where policy is studied as a linear model of implementation guided by rational choice (Clay and Schaffer, 1984). The consequence of this neglect means that policy is still conceptualised as a technocratic problem-solving device, neglecting its ‘public’ ability of promoting democratic purposes and ushering just forms of political governance.
Taking ethnographies of development practice for example, anthropology shares an overlapping concern with critical studies of policy in understanding how local and transnational politics transform social realities lived by everyday people (Olivier de Sardan, 2005; Lewis and Mosse, 2006). However, while Shore and Wright (2011) used the term ‘authoritative instrumentalism’ to describe the technocratic bias of policy analysis, this assumption is still prevalent within popular discussions of policy within anthropology. Policies are either viewed as failed instruments of high modernism (Scott, 1998), anti-politics machines (Ferguson, 1994), or devices of control to establish new forms of governmentality (Ong, 2006). While these studies are cogent in outlining the machinations of the modern state, they only tell half of the story of the relationship between politics and the public.
The above explains briefly how modern politics shape policy. Yet I premise my argument on the fact that with the rising popularity of right-wing authoritarian tendencies amongst liberal democracies today (Applebaum, 2020), exploring the inverse relationship of how policy gets to shape mass politics—and subsequently affect democratic norms and beliefs—has become ever more crucial (Mettler and Soss, 2004; Campbell, 2012). The one-sided discourse of policy as authoritative instrumentalism means that it is frequently understood as simply a product of absolute state power. As much as this analytical lens coheres, it also overlooks the idea of policy as spaces of participatory governance (Fung and Wright, 2003) and as an organising principle of society akin to family, nation, class or citizenship through which people mobilise and structure their realities (Berger and Luckmann, 1966).
Hence, this essay is a call for a public anthropology that restores the purpose of policy for democratic participation. Picking from Arendt (1958), the public realm exists because of the human capacity to engage politically through action (praxis) and speech (lexis), out of which arises a “common world [that] gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other” (p. 52). Where Arendt (ibid.) established that the public realm can only exist by the political capacity of its people, the rapid decline of democracies today into authoritarian tendencies ought to be taken as a critical inquiry into the process through which politics transforms the capacity of a ‘public’ and vice versa. As this essay will later show, policy-making, through its discursive abilities, is precisely an example of this dynamic process taking place.
More importantly, I am advocating for anthropologists of policy, as first-hand witnesses to the experiences of subjection faced by impacted communities, to be a politically engaged participant who insists on upholding the ‘public’ as an agent for social change (Scheper-Hughes, 1995; Borofsky and De Lauri, 2019). It is recognising the public sphere as an epistemic space where socio-political values are actively shaped and negotiated amongst different ‘publics’ (Habermas, 1991; Calhoun 2010) and that making policy a ‘public’ tool is part and parcel of preserving this democratic function of the public sphere. Following Cornwall’s (2018) example of her work for the British National Health Service, this would mean leveraging anthropological knowledge and methods to “identify and then use whatever levers existed for change, to prise open doors and create spaces for [people] to have a voice” (p. 10). If modern politics is potent because of its ability to dictate who and what gets represented as a social fact (Rabinow, 1986), it becomes essential for anthropologists to identify the social categories that are encompassed within its practice of governance and assess the consensus (or its lack thereof) through which their condition gets defined. Instead of taking policy as a tool of ‘authoritative instrumentalism’, it should be viewed as constituting our ‘collective will to govern’ (see also Foucault, 1991; Li, 2007).
To pursue my case for the above, I begin by revisiting the epistemological dilemma that exists within the social sciences in realising Harold Laswell’s (1951) ambition for a ‘policy sciences of democracy’ and bring it home to the tensions within the anthropology of policy. While it is beyond the scope of this essay to proffer a solution to the dilemma, I propose that to navigate this conundrum, a renewed understanding of policy needs to be established, which I do so by exploring the idea of policy as influencing the democratic functions of the public sphere. Having restored the ‘public’ conception of policy, I discuss what this could mean for anthropologists working with impacted communities on the field and identify examples that are already in practice. Finally, I conclude with the urge for anthropology to make policy ‘public’ as an agenda for collective change.
POLICY SCIENTIST OF DEMOCRACY: AN EPISTEMOLOGICAL DILEMMA WITHIN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
The origins of policy analysis as an emergent area of study can be traced back to Harold Laswell (1951) who saw the need for a ‘policy sciences of democracy’ as an interdisciplinary movement that integrates knowledge across the social sciences with public action. With the 20th century ushering in a new world rapidly altered by technological advancements, Laswell proposed that the overriding goal of policy has to be directed towards maximising the dignity of freedom for all that lives as a response to the profound new challenges that democratic leaders were bound to face. As succinctly put by Farr, Hacker and Kazee (2006), “it was the charge of the discipline to embrace a new ideal of scientific achievement—–not the monastic, value-free practitioner of technical research, but the engaged, value-focused ‘policy scientist of democracy’” (p. 580).
Despite that, the ideal nature of Laswell’s vision also lays bare the contradictions that exist within policy analysis until today. The primary of them is that the very vision represents an oxymoron of the fact-value divide prevalent within the social sciences, something which Farr, Hacker and Kazee (2006) further discussed in their review of Laswell’s discipline. On one hand, taking an objectivist stance, social scientists engaging with policy are expected to be expert practitioners who use the methods of general science in solving real-world problems. On the other hand, taking a value-laden position, they are also expected to actively engage with ambiguous and contested spaces characteristic of a democratic society. Facing the risk of “an epistemological blur between a rigorous approach and a normative drift”, social sciences have always kept an ambivalent relationship with public involvement (Fassin, 2013, p. 625). This thus leaves the ideal of an interdisciplinary, public-oriented policy scientist of democracy as “too demanding and contradictory a hero” (Farr, Hacker and Kazee, 2006, p. 586).
Nonetheless, the initial flourishing of contemporary policy analysis did come on the back of a grand political vision, namely US President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty in the 1960s. The massive scale and urgency set by the Johnson administration created an immediate demand for policy specialists to design and quickly deploy an array of socioeconomic programmes focused on eliminating poverty in all forms (Fischer, 2003). Compounded with the dominant influence of Keynesian economics and its positivist methodologies inherited from the Kennedy administration, the field of policy studies thus turned towards a technocratic approach. Given America’s hegemonic influence in setting the norms of the international political economy during this period (Finnemore, 1996), the technocratic approach to policymaking was simultaneously adopted by Western Europe in its post-war reconstruction (Krige, 2006) and other nations benefiting from Western development aid (Escobar, 1995; Woolcock, Szreter and Rao, 2011). Social problems were positioned to be a matter of having the right policy strategy rather than politics (Bell, 1973).
However, the mixed outcomes of the War on Poverty followed by public outrage at the political deception behind America’s involvement in the Vietnam War threw into doubt the credibility of a technocratic orthodoxy for administration. A critical text of this time was Arendt’s (1972) ‘Lying in Politics’ published shortly after the release of the Pentagon Papers. Reflecting on the nature of action in politics, she wrote:
Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings. Whoever reflects on these matters can only be surprised by how little attention has been paid, in our tradition of philosophical and political thought, to their significance, on the one hand for the nature of action and, on the other, for the nature of our ability to deny in thought and word whatever happens to be the case.
Arendt, 1972, pp. 4-5
This conflicted legacy thus led to the advocacy amongst scholars of a post-empiricist approach, which calls for a critical study of social and political values in determining the functions of policy, as an alternative to mainstream policy analysis.
It is within this broader intellectual backdrop that an anthropological study of policy shares with the post-empiricists a common goal to understand what policy means for different audiences and the ability of policy-relevant actors to shape social and political values. With an awareness of its political nature, both similarly strive to develop a more inclusive and democratic conception of policy (Yanow, 1996; Shore and Wright, 2011). Indeed, it is through this analytical framework that anthropologists of policy have contributed productively to many issues of widespread political concern—some relevant ethnographic examples include Mosse (2005) on the practice of aid as shaped foremost by the need for development actors to maintain a coherent representation of their actions which were then packaged into an authorised policy, Greenhalgh (2008) on the scientisation of sociopolitical life that guided China’s one-child policy, and Andersson (2014) on Europe’s border crisis as an illegality industry.
The increasing presence of anthropologists as ethnographic witnesses to issues of public concern, oftentimes with direct implications on democratic discourse, adds a new imperative for them to be a politically engaged intellectual (Scheper-Hughes, 1995; Borofsky and De Lauri, 2019). Anthropologists of policy thus face an inverse problem of the fact-value divide compared to policy empiricists, where having unveiled the continuous process of contestation over the policy in question, they now “sit at the juncture of tensions within the discipline as a whole, over how to produce and assess academic and public-oriented ethnographic knowledge and how to act on the urgent political commitments produced through ethnographic study” (Tate, 2020, p. 92). In other words, bringing back the epistemological dilemma of Laswell’s (1951) policy scientist of democracy, having blown the whistle on policy processes that subject democratic values to authoritative control, how can anthropologists of policy then enunciate and address real-world problems in a way that justly treats the value system of their interlocutors?
To navigate this conundrum, a renewed understanding of how policy influences the democratic functions of the public sphere is needed, which the next chapter explores.
MAKING POLICY ‘PUBLIC’: POLICY INFLUENCING THE DEMOCRATIC FUNCTIONS OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE
At this stage, it is worth taking a brief detour into unpacking the concept of the ‘public’. Taking a stance similar to Bangstad (2017), it is often striking to see that anthropologists participating in arguments about public anthropology are more concerned about the ‘anthropology’ than the ‘public’ part of the equation. The flourishing of multiple ‘publics’—some with complementing while others with competing claims over the public sphere—reflects the broader problem across the social sciences in capturing the contingencies through which the boundaries of the ‘public’ get defined (Calhoun, 2010). If Arendt (1958) merits the consideration that a public realm can only exist by the political capacity of its people, it becomes essential to recognise the extent to which the emergence of a ‘public’ is contingent on the nature of politics and vice versa. In doing so, I find the Habermas-Foucault debate on the functions of the public sphere as a good starting point for the discussion.
As Bangstad (2017) rightly pointed out, central to Habermas’s (1991) idea of the public sphere was his normative emphasis on its potential to function as the arena for the articulation of a critique or a corrective to the power of the state. This can be realised from, what Habermas (1984) developed as, communicative action in which different actors in society aim to reach a mutual understanding by coordinating their actions through reasoned argument, consensus, and cooperation. The promise of Habermas’s vision has inspired a flourishing of studies to establish the theoretical foundations and practices for deliberative democracy—some examples being Dryzek (1990), Cohen (2003), and Fung (2003).
Amidst that, Habermas’s vision of a public sphere as discursive spaces that exist outside of power collides head-on with Foucault’s (1980) idea that power and discourse produce one another. In other words, to paraphrase from Taylor (1992), this poses the serious question of whether the public is political because it is “a discourse on and to power” or because it is a discourse “by power” (p. 233). Even though I do not wish to revive the philosophical discussions behind the Habermas-Foucault debate, I do see a need to succinctly interrogate both schools of thought in establishing the democratic functions of the public sphere.
In doing so, I shall refer to points made by Buchstein and Jörke (2012) who have extensively reflected on later works made by both thinkers and identified the implications from their findings on critical policy studies. While Foucault initially described power as disciplinary, he did eventually reconceive power as working in and through individual freedom. In that sense, the power that shapes political subjectivities to be disciplined—techniques of domination—and the power that shapes individual identities for social participation—techniques of the self—are two sides of the same coin. Governmentality is not so much a way of top-down coercion, but a versatile equilibrium achieved between both sides of power. This then provides room for the act of governing to be moulded in the Habermasian aim of advancing a deliberative democracy. As put by Buchstein and Jörke towards the end of their article:
Of course, on a rhetorical level, Foucault still distances himself from Habermasian discourse ethics. But what are the institutional consequences of Foucault’s claim to limit relations of domination in the field of public policy? Is it not to give the people a voice in those political fields where the social conditions of their lives are decided? And is this not the aim of Habermas’s theory of deliberative democracy? In other words, Habermas’s ethical and political theory offers a normative foundation for those institutions and practices that Foucault postulates to minimise the relations of domination.
Buchstein and Jörke, 2012, p. 297
To put it another way, the political attitude of a public can vary depending on the extent they are empowered to participate in collective decision-making. As outlined by Goenaga (2022), in representative democracies, public spheres are expected to perform the normative functions of providing a voice to alternative perspectives, empowering citizens to criticise political authorities, and disseminating information on matters of public interest. More crucially, he also found that citizens can develop differentiated views on the relative importance attached to each function based on the democratic problems they care about and their ability to influence political decisions through public debate. An example from his study based on European democracies is that while more educated citizens equally cared about all three functions, members of minority groups were more likely to emphasise on the importance of giving voice to alternative perspectives. Borrowing from the title of his paper, knowing ‘who cares about the public sphere’ allows one to follow the strategies that exist for the public to push against techniques of domination.
Policy, in this respect, gets to influence the democratic functions of the public sphere through its allocative and interpretive ability to alter the capacities and interests of affected publics (Pierson, 1993). To corroborate this, further studies found that the design of a policy can directly affect how the public coheres through the following pathways: defining membership of a political community, directing levels of resources relevant for agenda-setting, affecting feelings of political engagement, and determining the likelihood of political mobilisation (Mettler and Soss, 2004; Campbell, 2012). Reminiscent of Cody’s (2011) argument then, policy has the technological, linguistic and conceptual ability to shape ‘public culture’ which then informs how individuals identify themselves within the public sphere and engage in political debate. Succinctly put, policy determines how the public works.
WHAT MAKING POLICY ‘PUBLIC’ MEANS FOR ANTHROPOLOGISTS
Before I advance further into the heart of this essay, I shall lay out some key takeaways that have been established so far from the preceding chapters. Firstly, the epistemological tension faced by anthropologists of policy to be a politically engaged intellectual plays itself against a broader historical ambition for a ‘policy sciences of democracy’ as an interdisciplinary movement that integrates knowledge across the social sciences with public action. Secondly, it is in cognisance of this tension that, through a renewed understanding of policy as influencing the democratic functions of the public sphere, I establish policy as determining how the public works. This means the goalpost for policy design can shift depending on which public it interacts with. The problematisation of a policy is a politically dynamic process. This finally leads to the critical point that shall guide the remaining discussion—that policymaking is an act of deliberation. It is guided by a strategic choice from multiple alternatives that are viable within the public domain instead of a linear causality of problem/implementation.
It is no coincidence that policy-making as a modern form of governmentality came with the birth of liberal democracies for, to echo Dewey (1927), political knowledge can only come about through conversation among and between citizens which policy has the crucial role to facilitate. The transformation of policy to become tools of authoritative instrumentalism then is a broader sign of the decline of public involvement in political life in recent decades (Sennett, 1977).
Anthropologists of policy, as first-hand witnesses of political alienation and democratic decline, bear a moral responsibility to regain the democratic functions of the public sphere. To do so, I follow Fassin’s (2013) call for the politicisation of ethnographic works by contributing to debate and action amongst publics. To quote him from a later writing, this would mean:
In the case of public ethnography, the first operation—debate—entails, on the side of the ethnographer, the translation and dissemination of knowledge and, on the side of the public, its appropriation and contestation, while the second operation—action—involves the transformation of the knowledge thus discussed into practical orientations and decisions, which can be taken by institutions or individuals.
Fassin, 2017, p. 6
To make a case for anthropologists of policy realising Fassin’s (2013; 2017) call for a politicisation of ethnographic work, I shall adopt from Tate (2020) where she proposed two paths that can be considered: (1) anthropology of policy that emerges in dialogue and relationship with impacted communities, and (2) anthropology of policy focused on the ethnography and critique of powerful policy-making elites.
Starting with the first path—engaging in dialogue and relationships with impacted communities—much progress has been made through practices of decoloniality. A brilliant example of this is the ethnography on the rights of undocumented immigrants in the United States by Bejarano et al. (2019), in which they created an alternative method by conducting ethnographic work together with immigrant activists. This therefore enables local people to become subjects in the research process and leverage on this platform to produce knowledge that they can then use as instruments of social resistance, transformation, and liberation. This, in a way, is also reminiscent of Hale’s (2007) case for an activist anthropology which “align[s] oneself with an organized group in a struggle for rights, redress, and empowerment and a commitment to produce knowledge in collaboration and dialogue with the members of that group” (p. 105).
Since Nader’s (1969) appeal to ‘study up’, the second path—focusing on powerful policy-making elites—has gained significant traction amongst anthropologists looking to uncover the complex machinations of the modern state. This is especially the case for scholars from the Global North where Cabot (2019) suggested that “a more responsible way of dealing with problems of power and co-optation may be to focus not on border crossers but on police, border guards, bureaucrats, and humanitarian actors” (p. 271). Such an approach has been instrumental in understanding the pattern of disasters that occur across the Western hemisphere as shaped by the intersecting interests of powerful actors (Keen and Andersson, 2018).
While the two paths that Tate (2020) proposed made significant strides in public engagement, I find it crucial to add a third suggestion: the anthropology of policy that collaborates across different life-worlds. As Low and Merry (2010) highlighted, engagement is about transforming the way anthropologists do fieldwork, the work they do with other scholars, and with those they study. In this case, I add that policy is a potent tool for engagement because of its ability to bring together and connect multiple lived experiences of a shared reality. This is especially the case for transnational issues like environmental policy, an example being Haenn and Casagrande (2007) where they acted as cultural brokers who had to navigate various functions of policy-making including public advocacy, multidisciplinary research, and collaborations with environmental managers, natural resource exploiters, and government agencies. From this experience, both authors advocated for anthropologists to be active in policy-making work itself by helping policy experts and local people to find common ground in defining problems.
The ability of anthropologists of policy to collaborate across different life-worlds adds a new dimension of practice to the existing tools available for public engagement. While ethnography remains central as the means for knowledge production and methodological rigour, Cornwall (2018) made the case to look at anthropology as a mode of practice that can have real-world effects in the absence of textual production—what she called as ‘acting anthropologically’ through her own experience as a development anthropologist engaging between local communities and bureaucracy. Acting anthropologically is thus a critical engagement with culture and with power, leveraging on one to change the other. This is where she overlaps with scholars of deliberative democracy as mentioned in previous chapters where both see policy as spaces for critical interaction between public culture and institutional power in advancing social and political change (Cornwall and Coelho, 2007).
CONCLUSION
I write this essay as a call for anthropologists to make policy ‘public’. Yet, with democratic institutions under constant threat today, I also see the need to emphasise for urgency of action. On a few occasions throughout the essay, I have touched upon the technocratic turn of policymaking as a bellwether of how political processes have withdrawn from the public sphere. The blatant chasm created between a supposedly public-oriented tool of governance and the opacity of political discourse has rendered a severe trust deficit in the ideals of liberal democracy (Applebaum, 2020). This stark reminder of unfulfilled promises of utopia—and the lack of alternatives—left societies even more vulnerable to the advent of post-truth politics (Mishra, 2017). We are living in an age of polycrisis where rigorous methods of policymaking are used to justify maintaining the status quo, instead of implementing reforms for change, as a solution to multiplying shocks across societies (Tooze, 2022). If we put this in a historical narrative starting from Laswell’s (1951) advocacy for a policy scientist of democracy, it becomes clear that the authority of policy is problematic not because of how it works, but because of how we as a collective get to decide on how it ought to work.
To pick from Dewey (1988), a true democracy is far from a set of institutional arrangements that exist outside of its people; it is an ongoing social project that requires constant public vigilance and engagement. This means puncturing the aura of authority and helping the public to realise the processes of political subjection, what Shore and Wright (2011) succinctly put together as producing a ‘creative stutter’. Following that would be to translate this awareness of creative stutter into an agenda for collective action. This means recognising policy as a critical method to make change a possible reality and thus empowering the public to participate in its processes and create alternatives which are aligned with their shared values. The essay should be read with this eventual goal in mind.
This leaves one last question—why are anthropologists best suited for the above? To answer that, let us ponder the following note from Bangstad (2017):
Anthropology presents us with a set of methodological and conceptual instruments, and a potential set of normative commitments to the equal worth of humans across the divides of ethnicity, faith and beliefs, gender and sexual orientation, which makes anthropology more suited than most other disciplines to explore and to understand the troubled contemporary and interconnected world in which we happen to live. To speak about anthropology’s potential contribution to understanding this world fraught with fractures and fragilities requires a public which has to be created and created anew over and over again”.
Bangstad, 2017, pp. 20-21
Policy shows us that change can happen by reshaping our reality using the tools of our common world. In the words of the late David Graeber (2015), “the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently” (p. 89). Making policy ‘public’ thus represents the possibility of us—in that ‘us’ here refers to a diverse set of epistemic communities gathered as a collective—coming together in ‘equal worth’ and taking part to determine how our reality ought to be reshaped. Keeping this undertaking perpetual will be the task for anthropology ahead.
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