World Politics in Translation by Berger Tobias Esguerra Alejandro

Author:Berger, Tobias,Esguerra, Alejandro.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

New methodology for policy translation

Due to the historical links of policy translation with sociology and anthropology, some scholars have called for a greater use of ethnography in policy studies (Wedel et al. 2005; Peck and Theodore 2012). The anthropology of policy studies forms the ‘cultural and philosophical underpinnings of policy – it enables discourses, mobilizes metaphors, and underlies ideologies and uses’ (Wedel et al. 2005, 34). Critical ethnographies, it has been suggested, and such methods as ‘extended case study’, may shed light on the fluidity of the policy process and various translations within it (McCann and Ward 2012; Peck and Theodore 2012). On the other hand, there is also a greater focus on the language in studying politics as ‘policy is made in words’ (Freeman 2009, 431). Moreover, narratives are getting extra attention as they are powerful in framing the reality and structuring interactions (Mukhtarov and Cherp 2014; Mukhtarov et al. 2013; Lejano, Ingram and Imgram 2013). With the focus on these symbolic issues of politics, the key question is how to understand the policy process interpretively and yet make a useful contribution to the enterprise of institutional design (e.g. Mukhtarov et al. 2015; Thiel, Mukhtarov and Zikos 2015).

The broad framework of political ethnography is therefore useful in order to analyse policy translations, as discussed in Shore et al. (2011) and Schatz (2009). Within the broad theme of political ethnography, two recent proposals concerning the methods in studying policy translation warrant our attention: ‘mobile methods’ (McCann and Ward 2012) and the ‘extended case approach’ (Wedel et al. 2005; Peck and Theodore 2012). According to Büscher and Urry (2009), the research methods become mobile in two senses. First of all, they are mobile because researchers follow their subject to multiple sites and localities and therefore document the process of policy in the making and ‘on the move’. Second, the researchers pay attention to the moves in which policy makers participate, as in a game, where each event contributes to the development of another event and, as a result, a formation of a policy. Such ethnographic attention to policy making as ‘piecing together’ multiple events that are responses to one another is a novel way of conducting policy research (Büscher and Urry 2009).

A closely connected approach was developed by Burawoy (2001, 2009) – an extended case study method, which Peck and Theodore (2012) further refined and called the ‘follow the policy’ method, that is, one that enables mutations in policy meaning to be traced by following various actors and their movements. A researcher looks for a place in cosmopolitan policy networks in order to observe how policy is made and how policy success is produced (Mosse 2006). The work of a researcher is not devoid of difficulties such as staying at a distance from those networks and not taking things at face value. Peck and Theodore (2012) suggest that there are four requirements when applying the extended case study method to the study of the travel of ideas. First, researchers must become participants as well as observers of the process they study.

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