Getting close to policy

What exactly do social scientists seek to achieve when they engage in policy work? Is it dialogue with, or influence over policy professionals? Is it a way for academics to shape the formation or implementation of public policy, or is it to analyze and deconstruct policy in order to explore deeper patterns and processes pertaining to the organization of society? In short, should social scientists follow the policy gaze or seek to critique it?

The answers to these questions necessarily depend on a host of other variables, including professional ethics, the nature of the policy in question, and one's own particular political disposition. These reflexive and epistemological considerations are central to social anthropology's methodology (Scholte 1972; Hammersley and Atkinson 1995; Meyerhoff and Ruby 1982; Davies 2007). But, while anthropologists excel in highlighting cultural complexity and the various sides of any argument (including their own subject-positioning), they frequently complain that government agencies and policy elites who commission research typically want simple conclusions and ‘quick fixes.’ For critical and interpretive social scientists, engaging with policymakers often seems like a ‘dialogue of the deaf.’ This has led some scholars to call for a change in the discourse and practice of the social sciences. As one prominent US professor summed it up, ‘we need to learn to think and talk more like policymakers.’

This chapter aims to critique that argument and question its underlying assumptions. Far from offering social scientists a way forward, learning to ‘think and talk like a policymaker’ may be the problem that good social science needs to overcome. What gives anthropology its analytical edge when confronting policymakers is precisely its capacity to challenge received wisdom and think outside of the conventional policy box. My ambition, therefore, is to illustrate how anthropological approaches and perspectives might help us to better understand what is at stake when we confront policy processes. Social anthropologists are experienced at tracking the genealogies and flows of particular policies and their impact on people's lives and everyday behavior. But they are equally good at interrogating the meanings that those policies hold for those actors whose lives they touch and the cultural logics that structure those ‘policy worlds.’ In this sense, they ‘relocate’ or ‘destabilize’ seemingly well-known phenomena like policy.