Understanding Policy Change as a Discursive Problem

In understanding policy change, classical approaches generally treat public policy as an object which can be studied directly and whose change can be measured objectively. In this article, we will show how this objectification process involves difficult to surmount epistemological problem because objectification, in the classical approaches, involves the researcher in the use of normative analytical techniques which usually distort the object, i.e. public policy, beyond recognition. To avoid such a distortion, it is proposed that analysts should focus not on an "objective" notion of change, but on a "subjective", "discursive" one; on the way participants define policy and identify change in the construction and de-construction of "policy statements". Not yet well developed and still relatively heterogeneous, discursive approaches to policy analysis attempt to reintegrate the subject, in this case the participant, into the heart of the analysis of policy dynamics. Their idea is not to separate the subject and the object, i.e. the actors and the policy, but to consider discourse as an ontological link between both. The question of change as such does not disappear but is recomposed. The production of a discourse of both change and its causes is considered as a fundamental activity for actors trying to influence other actors in order to transform public policies.