The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning.

Over the past two decades, traditional approaches to policy studies have been criticized on epistemological and practical grounds. Incorporating flawed conceptions of science and knowledge and producing technocratic policies incompatible with participatory democracy, traditional policy analysis and planning have been stripped of their pretenses to neutrality and objectivity. If the old approaches have lost their legitimacy, what conception of policy analysis and planning should replace them? In The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning, Frank Fischer and John Forester bring together a number of articles designed to map the contours of postpositivist policy studies.

At the heart of this work lies a simple premise: "policy analysis and planning are practical processes of argumentation" (p.2). Thus, according to the editors, an approach that foregrounds argument affords a better description of what policy analysts and planners do, while also opening up new areas for inquiry in academic policy studies. Attention to the substantive content of policy arguments as well as the practical performance involved in advancing policy arguments illuminates dimensions of policy occluded by instrumentalist conceptions of policy analysis. The "argumentative turn," the, calls attention to the constitutive role of policy planners and analysts in defining a policy "problem" and structuring viable "solutions." It also examines agenda-setting and the social construction of target audiences by participants in the policy process (politicians, lobbyists, citizens, as well as professional policy analysts). It investigates the framing assumptions informing competing policy arguments in adversarial politics and traces the production of consensus in the policy process. Moreover, attention to argumentation offers rich insights into policy "failures" construed not only in terms of policies that fail to meet their stated objectives, but also in terms of policy options that fail to win political support. Several of the authors also suggest that a discursive approach to policy may also foster strategies for heightening citizen participation in policy formation.

The articles included in this collection illustrate a range of potential uses of the argumentative turn in policy studies. The first section includes case studies from Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States that reveal the fruitfulness of discursive analysis in explaining the perpetuation of policies that are perceived to be inadequate even by those most involved in their production. To avoid such outcomes, Jennings explicates a "discourse of counsel" devised to produce "efficacious and just solutions" to the difficult problems confronting contemporary policymakers (p.103). The articles in the second section familiarize readers with techniques of rhetorical analysis that can be usefully applied to policy studies. Throgmorton's analysis of survey research as rhetorical trope is by far the most sophisticated and insightful in this section, raising important ethical issues about the use of statistics in structuring "expert" solutions to policy dilemmas.

The final section, "theoretical perspectives," is the most disappointing in the volume, for rather than examining the theoretical implications of discursive analysis for policy studies, the authors tend to reproduce well known arguments from Habermas on communicative rationality and from Toulmin on the structural model of argument under new labels. Perhaps this limitation stems from the editors' concern to avoid the excesses of postmodernism: "our concern with argumentation stops far short of turning all policy issues into textual matters" (p.5). Whatever the reason, readers are deprived of an opportunity to consider some of the more important insights and techniques afforded by sustained attention to rhetoric. If the book does not altogether fulfill its promise to present a systematic alternative to traditional policy studies, it should nevertheless be lauded for taking an important step in the right direction.

Mary Hawkesworth
University of Louisville

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