Steering or Following? The Changing Field of Public Policy and the Use of "Action Research"

• In Event: 61.056 - Toward a Taxonomy of Collaborative Research in Education and the Social Sciences

Abstract

This paper summarizes the history and current state of collaborative research within the discipline of public policy and public administration. I examined broad trends in public policy and administration scholarship that appear to be reflected in, or receive heightened attention in, collaborative research. Public policy and administration is itself an interdisciplinary field, so it naturally shares some history and background with its core disciplines in the use, treatment, and acceptance of collaborative research.
Through the literature review, I found that some forms of collaborative research in public policy and administration date back to the late 1940s. Collaborative research is discussed widely in the field most commonly being referred to as “action research” and “participatory research.” In general, the methodology for collaborative public policy research is grounded in practice as opposed to theory. Much published work concerns case studies in the context of a specific public policy, though I also identified some scholarship that did, in part, address the methodology of collaborative research in relation to democracy and governance such as Jurian Edelenbos, Nienke van Schie and Lasse Gerrits 2010 article entitled ‘Organizing interfaces between government institutions and interactive governance.”
In general, the literature lacks significant theoretical treatment of the role of collaborative research in the development of public policy. This sets public policy apart from the other disciplines/fields in our study, and highlights its focus on the implementation of public policy using action-oriented research. In other words, collaborative research is aligned with public policy and administration’s core democratic ideals in the sense of citizen participation in policy implementation. I also found that meta-level analyses of the methodology appeared in the literature in the early years of its practice and again more recently in the past five years with authors such as Koen P.R. Bartels and his article on “The Actionable Researcher: Cultivating a Process-Oriented Methodology for Studying Administrative Practice.” Attention to the link between the methodology and democratic practices appeared in the 1990s as the ‘reinventing government’ movement sought to improve government performance. Another focus of attention has been the use of service learning to develop linkages between community-based organizations and universities (Reardon, 2000) and the use IT to develop public sector knowledge networks (Dawes, Cresswell, and Pardo, 2009)
Collaborative methodologies have received intermittent attention in public policy research; a few periods of intense scholarship were interspersed within extended periods in which there were no writings and little development of the field. This may have contributed to an uneven acceptance of collaborative research as a rigorous form of scholarship. Nonetheless, there are a number of major public policy and public administration journals that regularly publish collaborative research including The Millbank Quarterly and the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. It is a noteworthy finding that the public policy and administration scholarship does not address equity and social justice issues within the context of collaborative research in the same way as other core disciplines. The emphasis, rather, is on the way collaborative research can increase democratic participation and administrative efficiency.

Author

• Perri Sondra Leviss, University of Massachusetts - Boston