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Summary

Temporal policy analysis

In policy studies that draw on a positivist epistemology, time is treated as an objectively existing, fixed and independent variable. Pralle (2006) exemplifies this perspective through research into how and why interest-group conflicts alter in terms of their patterns of engagement and their strategies. Pralle (2006) argues that as time passes, opposing groups in a conflict are more likely to move from an expansion versus containment to a direct-engagement model. DeLeo (2016) adopts a similar framing in noting that the ‘imposition of time constraints can heighten conflict’ (p 6). Writing of his own work, but arguably with wider resonance across positivist-informed policy studies, DeLeo (2016) describes time as ‘both an important context – a frame … as well as a potential catalyst’ (p 7). Nonetheless, there are limits in this framing to the malleability of time; even the tactics of ‘extending deadlines or “buying time” ‘ (DeLeo, 2016, p 16) do not move time from being an independent variable into socially constructed terrain.

There is, however, a significant literature in policy studies which, through its post-positivist epistemologies, constructs time and temporality as contextually experienced, ‘institutionally structured and caught within complex webs of social networks, relations and inequalities’ (Bennett and Burke, 2018, p 914). Social actors live time differentially; their experiences are mediated by hierarchising power structures including race, class and gender (Bennett and Burke, 2018). Drawing on Heidegger, Bennett and Burke (2018) argue that ‘experiences of time are … intensely relational’ (p 915, original emphasis); they are constitutive of context, social encounters and consequently of identities. Temporalities are embodied and distinctive. Lapping (2017) and Thompson and Cook (2014), drawing on Deleuze's theorisation of time, are able to go further in stating that time does not itself exist, but constitutes through synthesis a present that alone exists, and that only ‘just as long as the contracted relations between the contemplated elements brought together in the assemblage’ (Lapping, 2017, p 910).