Poststructural Policy Analysis

This book offers a novel refreshing and politically engaged way to think about public policy. Instead of treating policy as simply the government’s best efforts to address problems it offers a way to question critically how policies produce “problems” as particular sorts of problems with important political implications. Governing it is argued takes place through these problematizations. According to the authors interrogating policies and policy proposals as problematizations involves asking questions about the assumptions they rely upon how they have been made what their effects are as well as how they could be unmade. To enable this form of critical analysis this book introduces an analytic strategy the “What’s the Problem Represented to be?” (WPR) approach. It features examples of applications of the approach with topics as diverse as obesity economic policy migration drug and alcohol policy and gender equality to illustrate the growing popularity of this way of thinking and to provide clear and useful examples of poststructural policy analysis in practice.<br>