Four - Where (and When) Is Policy?

Summary

As noted in the preceding chapters, we have chosen to demonstrate the utility of policy mobilities and assemblage theory (PMAT) via a focus on the respective orientations for thinking that it makes possible and emphasize the ways PMAT destabilizes more conventional comparative and international education (CIE) research assumptions and approaches. Orientation #1, summarized in Figure 4.1, is a key feature of PMAT, insofar as it focuses on two central issues: space as becoming and emergent (rather than a priori), and policy and space as recursively and mutually co-constituted. We see this as a concern for questioning and problematizing assumptions around the question, where (and when) is policy? That is, what are the space-times in which we find policy? Put differently, PMAT approaches space and policy as a concern for the ongoing and intertwined processes of movement and (re)production. At the risk of repeating ourselves, we feel that these assumptions not only undergird PMAT but also, significantly, the empirical ‘realities’ of what we typically conceive of as distinguishable space-times of policy processes, including policy making, movement, contestation and enactment. Such orientations then provide new ways of thinking about existing policy spaces and scales (for example, the role of the State and State power in shaping the mobilization of policy) and help to complicate solely geographical, State-centric accounts of policy making. To this end, we will now consider a specific policy assemblage – the Pacific Regional Education Policy, or PREP – to first show the relevance of the broad research interests before then exploring how each of our specific research questions can take shape as actual policy research.

Although the broader question of what policy does will be discussed more in Orientation #2, we focus here on just the dimension of space. To this end, Orientation # considers how policy problems produce certain configurations and categories of space (and, at the same time, not others). For instance, PREP evidently animates a particular concern for becoming-regional As a policy assemblage, PREP both responds to and – among other effects – (re)produces a regional policy space that brings together vastly different nation-states, concerns and contexts into a singular geo-political bloc (that is, the Pacific) for the purpose of developing and enacting common education policy initiatives.