The Argumentative Turn Revisited: Public Policy as Communicative Practice

Rejecting the notion that policy analysis and planning are value-free technical endeavors, an argumentative approach takes into account the ways that policy is affected by other factors, including culture, discourse, and emotion. The contributors to this new collection consider how far argumentative policy analysis has come during the past two decades and how its theories continue to be refined through engagement with current thinking in social theory and with the real-life challenges facing contemporary policy makers.

The approach speaks in particular to the limits of rationalistic, technoscientific policy making in the complex, unpredictable world of the early twenty-first century. These limits have been starkly illustrated by responses to events such as the environmental crisis, the near collapse of the world economy, and the disaster at the nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan. Addressing topics including deliberative democracy, collaborative planning, new media, rhetoric, policy frames, and transformative learning, the essays shed new light on the ways that policy is communicatively created, conveyed, understood, and implemented. Taken together, they show argumentative policy inquiry to be an urgently needed approach to policy analysis and planning.

Contributors. Giovanni Attili, Hubertus Buchstein, Stephen Coleman, John S. Dryzek, Frank Fischer, Herbert Gottweis, Steven Griggs, Mary Hawkesworth, Patsy Healey, Carolyn M. Hendriks, David Howarth, Dirk Jörke, Alan Mandell, Leonie Sandercock, Vivien A. Schmidt, Sanford F. Schram

Frank Fischer is Professor of Politics and Global Affairs at Rutgers University. He also teaches at the university's E. J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy and is a Senior Faculty Fellow at the University of Kassel in Germany. His books include Democracy and Expertise: Reorienting Policy Inquiry and The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning (coedited with John Forester), which is also published by Duke University Press.

Herbert Gottweis is Professor of Political Science at the University of Vienna and Visiting Professor at the United Nations University in Tokyo and in the Sociology Department at Kyung Hee University in Seoul. Among his books is Governing Molecules: The Discursive Politics of Genetic Engineering in Europe and the United States.