Troubling Policy

We expect good government to be guided by clear and coherent policies on the key issues of the day. But in reality things are a lot messier.

There may be administrative reasons, or gaps in state capacity when it comes to turning policies into practice. There may be powerful interests promoting outcomes at odds with the public good, or a range of conflicting interests which make determining a common interest difficult. There may be a lack of integrity by elected politicians determining policy choices, or a lack of public buy-in for some policies widely regarded by policy experts as desirable. Indeed the expertise of those designing policy itself may be challenged, especially in the current context of declining trust in the authority of many existing institutions and their associated experts. There may be new technologies or modes of regulation whose workings are poorly understood. Then again, policymaking is always shaped by competing values and imaginations of what constitutes the ‘good society’. It is not surprising, therefore, that so many policy challenges seem to be difficult to resolve and are sometimes called ‘wicked problems’.

The School of Government’s ‘Troubling Policy’ theme focuses both on controversial, intractable policy challenges and on asking difficult questions about the policymaking process itself. It comprises three core activities:

• Scholarly work on expertise and expert knowledge. This flows from our 2018 conference ‘A Crisis of Expertise?’
• A ‘Troubling Policy’ seminar series which asks difficult questions about controversial or intractable policy challenges, seeks to find new ways of looking at these, and embraces insights from across disciplines.  The series aims to explore the societal and political context in which policy is developed, including the knowledge and expertise used, the technologies deployed, how these combine to shape regulation, the relationship between controversy and the policy process, and the effectiveness (or otherwise) of policy implementation.
• Supporting a network of scholars at the University of Melbourne (STS@UoM), from across faculties, who draw upon the discipline of Science, Technology and Society (STS). These are scholars engaging critically with developments in one or more areas where science and technology is central, and where the relationship to society is complex and contested.  Please contact jbaskin@unimelb.edu.au for further information.

Knowledge and expertise