Interpretive Approaches to Policy Analysis Hermeneutics for our Times

This Brief provides researchers with an introduction to interpretive approaches for analyzing public policies. It introduces several real-world policy situations where the lack of an interpretive focus limits the analysis and precludes better policy responses. It takes an integrative point of view, with an openness to combining the insights from interpretive and positivist approaches in policy analysis, noting the ability of the interpretive approach to make sense of data while uncovering the otherwise hidden ideological and normative bases of other types of analyses. While not a 'how-to" methods book, this Brief provides sufficient discussion of different ways to find meaning in texts, such as narrative and discourse analysis, or cultural/ethnographic readings of the social and material artifacts found in a place, as well as uncovering meaning from direct engagement with subjects through interviews, action research, and other strategies. The main intent of the book is to convince policy scholars of the usefulness of interpretive thinking, which entails answering the questions: "what does it mean to interpret?" and "what do we gain from interpreting?"  As such, this Brief will be of interest to scholars in public policy, public administration, and political science as well as researchers in applied fields (e.g., environmental studies, race and gender studies, urban planning, sociology) engaged in policy analysis.

.- Why Interpret?.

.- What Does It Mean to Interpret?.

.- How and What to Interpret?.

.- Example: Relational Analysis of Vouchers for Social Service Delivery.

.- Where Do We Go from Here?.

Dr. Raul P. Lejano teaches public policy at the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology and is also professor emeritus at New York University. He has published extensively on policy analysis. In his first book, Frameworks for Policy Analysis: Merging Text and Context (Routledge), he describes both positivist and non-positivist modes of analysis. Most recently, he has employed particular interpretive methods (i.e., narrative and discourse analysis) to study environmental dilemmas, as in his co-authored book, The Power of Narrative: Climate Skepticism and the Deconstruction of Science (Oxford University Press), co-authored article, "A hermeneutic approach to explaining and understanding public controversies," in the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, and book chapter, "Postpositivism in the Policy Process" in the Routledge Handbook of Public Policy, among others.

Dr. Wing Shan Kan is an assistant professor in the Department of Social Work at Hong Kong Baptist University. Her foremost areas of research lie in social work theory and practice, social policy analysis, and social service delivery. She has published in the British Journal of Social Work, Ageing and Society, Journal of Planning Education & Research, and other highly ranked journals. She is also co-author (with Raul Lejano) of a book entitled Relationality: The Inner Life of Public Policy (Cambridge University Press), which highlights qualitative analysis. Her research on the use of vouchers for social service delivery is featured in the book as an extended example of interpretive analysis.