Seven - How to Research Policy?

Summary

As we have detailed in the previous chapters, policy assemblages are continually re/de-territorialized in a variety of ways, either through being ‘plugged into’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2005, p 4) other assemblages or having other assemblages ‘plugged into’ them. We certainly do not want to shy away from this complexity, both in terms of the (concrete) assemblages’ mutability or, for that matter, the way policy researchers then seek to empirically understand them. To suggest otherwise is to imply that policy assemblages are forever static (which they obviously are not), or that codification as policy text is the final stage and telos in a long process of policy (re)negotiation (which no policy has ever yet achieved). Indeed, embracing this challenge of the continual becoming of policy is a core motivation for developing PMAT.

However, this admittedly requires more than a positive disposition to plough on ahead, regardless of the difficulties. It is here that Orientation #4 (see Figure 7.1) provides some concrete vantage points from which to gain purchase and perspective in what might otherwise feel like a swirling mass of desires, beliefs and forms of content and expression. We see this as a concern for questioning and problematizing assumptions around how to do policy research? Again, using Pacific regionalism in education policy as our illustrative example, we highlight the methodological issues that researchers face when considering policy-as-a-problem without a definitive ‘origin point’ (when/where it started) or a clearly defined limit, which necessarily exceeds our limits of knowingness. The notion of ‘in the middle’ also foregrounds the entanglement of the policy research(er) and the socio-material constitution of the research(er), in ways that inevitably contribute to how policy-as-a-problem is sensed, experienced and (re)produced. We thus use this chapter to consider the thoroughly assembled and produced nature of policy, not to mention the policy research(er), that seeks to make sense of these empirical phenomena in different ways.

What delimits the policy assemblage?

PMAT stresses that policy ideas and practices do not simply flow ‘fully formed’ into new environments but instead undergo complex forms of rearrangement that are shaped by and, in turn, rearrange the space into which they are moving.