Five - What Is Policy?

Summary

The previous chapter explored how a PMAT approach directs our attention to the ability of policy assemblages to produce space-times. In this chapter, we extend this disruption of the ontology of space-time to the ontology of policy itself and explore how a concept of policy assemblage requires us to focus on what policy does (or produces) in our worlds and why it does so, rather than simply describe which components or actors (pre-existing) comprise policy (see Figure 5.1). We see this as a concern for questioning and problematizing assumptions around what is policy; that is, rather than assuming policy has a fixed identity, we ask instead what policy does to better understand what it is. Through concrete examples, we demonstrate how PMAT offers different ways of understanding the apparent inconsistencies in intentions, rationalities and outcomes in a given policy, which provides new insights into why we so often persist with policy that we ‘know’ to be ineffective at achieving its stated outcome, or else accept policy that may appear to be against our ‘interests’.

Within comparative and international education (CIE), a conventional ‘rationalist’ definition of education policy is that of an institutional (State and non-State) instrument intentionally designed in response to a ‘real’ educational problem.1 It is then deemed to be (more or less) effective at solving this problem, influenced by the extent to which it is ‘flawed’, be that by context (it doesn't work here), poor implementation (it wasn't enacted properly) or poor design (it wasn't conceived properly). If we adopt a more critical lens, education policy can instead be defined more in terms of an act or process of the ‘authoritative allocation of values’ (Prunty, 1985): an attempt to intervene both in the way we understand education problems and solutions, and the means of defining acceptable or valued ways of being educational or educated. This way of thinking rejects the rationalist, linear and teleological notions of policy offered in more conventional policy studies and situates the actors of policy as discursive subjects, operating within and reproducing (or resisting) discursive norms and the conditions of possibility they produce.