Studying Policy: a dialogue between anthropology and political science Taliking Notes for Interest Group on the Anthropology

of Public Policy Roundtable Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association San Francisco, CA 16 November 2012 Paul Stubbs1 The Present: dialogue or contact zone?
+ I am here as a rather hybrid self commited to a post-disciplinary approach to policy. In Jessop and Nielsen's terms post-disciplinary approaches reject the legitimacy of established disciplinary boundaries and adopt a more problem-oriented approach. They therefore tend to be more open-textured, more eclectic, and more interested in political and ethical issues2. I usually describe myself as a sociologist with anthropological tendencies. I work primarily, thankfully not exclusively, on the topic of social policy, a field where, as John Clarke has remarked, there is a sense that complex concepts are best left to others and, hence, arrive late, if at all, and invariably in highly simplified form3. In Croatia, which has been my home since 1993, I work in an Institute of Economics and, recently, have begun to teach a module on a doctoral programme in Comparative Politics. + As I have been drawn ever more into the anthropology of policy, my work has explicitly set itself up against the orthodoxies of particular kinds of political science approaches. Of course, there is a certain irony in using the discipline which has explored othering most thoroughly for my own othering of political science scholarship, without seeing that the kinds of approaches I am advocating for can also be found there too, albeit on the margins. I want to capture here something of the current situation, akin to a contact zone, in which instead of dialogue there is more, in James Cliffords terms, a power-charged set of exchanges4 when scholars who rarely meet find themselves in a state of co-presence. It is not all one way, and disciplines have their closed minds and their open ones, of course. I recall being assailed once by an anthropologist for using ethnography in my work: for you it is a luxury, Paul; for me, I have no choice was the gist of the argument. And even I cannot resist retelling that, as I agreed to speak at this event, the controversy over the American Political Science Association (APSA) holding its conference in New Orleans despite the State of Louisianas non-recognition of gay marriage loomed large in my mind (did not the AAA also hold its own convention in New Orleans a couple of years back?). Ttwo quotes struck me as pertinent. One APSA member said that, unlike sociology or anthropology, gender and gay themes were not of great concern to political scientists. My favourite however, was an APSA member who said on the whole, political scientists arent very political. + Two areas where I have explicitly confronted orthodox political science analyses, approaches, and concepts are in terms of multi-level governance and policy transfer. In my 2005 critique of the multi-level governance literature5 which I was recently asked to revisit in a Regional Studies Association event in Brussels6, my concern initially was how the work, mainly by UK and US political scientists studying the European Union, really did not fit from a vantage point of South East Europe. But, as I dug deeper, it was the idea of a world of neat, anchored levels moving from the local to the regional, to the national, regional (again) and global which worried me. Where were the understandings of fluidity, of processes of scaling and re-scaling, of what Doreen

Paul Stubbs, Senior Research Fellow, The Institute of Economics, Zagreb, Croatia. pstubbs@eizg.hr Bob Jessop and Klaus Nielsen (2003) Institutions and Rules, http://es.pekea-fr.org/p.php?c=comm/5-1-FT-R-JESSOP.html (accessed 8 November 2012). 3 John Clarke (2004) Changing Welfare, Changing States Sage, p. 3. 4 James Clifford (1997) Routes 5 Paul Stubbs (2005) 'Stretching Concepts Too Far?: Mutli-Level Governance, Policy Transfer and the Politics of Scale in South East Europe', Southeast European Politics VI (2); 66-87, http://www.seep.ceu.hu/archives/issue62/stubbs.pdf (Accessed 8 November 2012) 6 Troubling Multilevel Governance: Coordinating Spatial Interventions, Video at http://scic.ec.europa.eu/streaming/index.php?es=2&sessionno=51e6d6e679953c6311757004d8cbbba9 (Accessed 8 November 2012)
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Massey terms co-presence7, and of the power of networks, which were so much a part of my lived reality? I think it got worse when some leading theorists of multi-level governance started being asked to advise the European Union on, guess what?, its multi-level governance. Neat anchored levels and competences now dovetailed into fixed policy sectors (have they not read Chris Shore and Susan Wright on re-domaining8?) which could be ranked, over time, as mainly national, mainly EU, or shared competences. I also have to say that political scientists of policy in general, and those of multi-level governance in particular, do seem to love typologies (which always seem to be 2 x 2 for some reason) and abstract modelling of the policy process. As heuristic devices, of course, both can be incredibly useful but the danger, I think, is that the really interesting things about policy are increasingly in the lines, cracks, edges and missing elements of the typologies and models. Political science students, even very good ones, do have a habit of picking up these models and making them central to their work without, it seems, reading the small print of the danger of transferring them to very different conjunctures and contexts. This really matters in a small country like Croatia where only a very few books on policy get translated so that the models of Hal Colebatch9, Hill and Hupe10 and Hoppe11, get reproduced in rather uncritical ways. + Probably the best known of my critiques of political science approaches to policy is work I have done with Nomi Lendvai, and in a forthcoming book also with David Bainton and John Clarke, on the way that the transnational dimension of policy can better be considered in terms of the concept of policy translation than the more orthodox approach in terms of policy transfer12. We are hardly alone in this enterprise and, indeed IGAPP Panels on 2009 and 2011 were arranged, precisely, around this idea13. The idea of policy as translation questions, above all, the concept of policy transfer as a linear process of policy diffusion or transplantation, challenging assumptions of an objectified or commodified knowledge, to quote Dora Yanow, extrapolated from its context14. Translation is a crucial concept within an anthropology of policy which emphasises what Chris Shore and Susan Wright have termed the messiness and complexity of policy processes, as a set of imaginaries or narratives moving through time and space non-linearly, with attempts to embed policies as authoritative, normative, forms15. The time seems ripe, here, for some rapprochement and synthesis, precisely because the policy transfer literature has adapted and developed and, in any case, was never as one-dimensional as we stated. Indeed, a recent text by Diane Stone, in attempting exactly this, argues that the literature on policy translation, mobilities and learning needs to form the basis of an increasing focus within policy studies on the soft transfer of knowledge, ideas and information via networks. + As Sinia Zrinak and I concluded in a recent text on clientelism in Croatia16, more political ethnography is certainly needed, although this needs to move away from only studying formal power and elite agency and delve much more into the shadow elite of what Janine Wedel terms flexians17 and the more mundane networked brokers, intermediaries and consultants increasingly important in transnational policy arenas. For me, it has always been ethnographys capacity to surprise, as Paul Willis and Max Trondman once framed it18, which is part of its attraction. Cross-disciplinarity, framed in terms of open research questions, rigorously theorised through an interrogation of scales, sites, agency, and discourses (the list is not exhaustive), might lead to new understandings of the work which policy does, as it moves, sensing and even, maybe, capturing, the paradox of both its fluidity and radical unfinished-ness and its capacity to produce and reproduce relations of domination and control. If we agree on this at least, we may move out of the contact zone and emerge into a space for engagement and dialogue.
Doreen Massey (1993). Questions of locality, Geography 78 (1993); 142-9 Chris Shore and Susan Wright (2011) Conceptualising Policy: technologies of governance and the politics of visibility, in Chris Shore et al (eds.) Policy Worlds: anthropology and the analysis of contemporary power Bergahn, pp. 1-25. 9 Hal Colebatch (1998) Policy MacGraw-Hill. 10 Robert Hoppe (2010) The Governance of Problems Policy Press. 11 Michael Hill and Peter Hupe (2008) Implementing Public Policy Sage 12 Nomi Lendvai and Paul Stubbs (2007) Policies as Translation: situating transnational social policies, in Susan Hodgson and Zo Irving (eds.) Policy Reconsidered. Policy Press, pp. 173-190 and Nomi Lendvai and Paul Stubbs (2009) Assemblages, translation and intermediaries in South East Europe: rethinking transnationalism and social policy, European Societies 11(5); 673-696. 13 Beyond Policy Transfer: transnational translations and the reconfiguring of technocracy and politics (2009) and Tracing Policy: translation and assemblage (2011). 14 Dora Yanow (2004) Translating local knowledge at organizational peripheries, British Journal of Management, 15(1); p.15.. 15 Shore and Wright (2011) op. cit. P. 11 16 Paul Stubbs and Sinia Zrinak (2011) 'Rethinking clientelism, governance and citizenship in social welfare: the case of Croatia', Paper to ESPANET Conference, http://espanet2011.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/st3a_stubbs-zrinscak_op.pdf (accessed 10 November 2012) 17 Janine Wedel (2009) Shadow Elite Basic Books. 18 Paul Willis, and Max. Trondman (2000) A Manifesto for Ethnography, Ethnography 1(1); 5-15.
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