Relationality: an alternative framework for analysing policy

Policy is ostensibly crafted upon an overarching notion of rationality, in the form of rules, roles and designs. However, sometimes policy deviates from formal templates and seems to be guided by a different governing ethic. Rather than categorising these as policy anomalies, we can understand them as the workings of what we will refer to as a relational model of policy. The relational model describes how policy outcomes emerge from the working and reworking of relationships among policy actors. We define relationality and develop its use in policy research. While the relational can be depicted as an alternative model for policy (e.g., Confucian versus Weberian), it is more accurate to understand it as a system that complements conventional policy regimes. To illustrate the concept, we examine examples from policymaking in China. We end with a discussion of how relationality should be a general condition that should be applicable to many, if not all, policy situations.

Authority Contests, Power and Policy Paradigm Change: Explaining Developments in Grain Marketing Policy in Prairie Canada

This article investigates the nature and role of authority contests—the claims and counterclaims about whose ideas matter on policy debates and via what procedures they should be heard—in policy paradigm contestation, reform and abandonment. Examining the authority contests around prairie Canada's grain marketing policy illustrates an additional pathway—a value-driven model—to Hall's model of endogenous policy anomalies. It further documents differences across governments in how they resolve contentious policy debates, showing that governments make fewer efforts to supplement their own representational authority with expert and/or popular authority when they enjoy majoritarian support from the affected region than when they do not and when their support for paradigm change is value-driven rather than a response to policy anomalies.