3 - Policy analysis as a profession: the interaction between knowledge production and policy making

Summary

Introduction

In this chapter, we will inquire about theoretical developments in public policy analysis (PPA) in Argentina, the main supportive conceptual and methodological guidelines and their probable incidence in public intervention design. Our guiding questions are: How was PPA structured in Argentina as a field of study? Did it present original developments or rather did it take up PPA approaches produced in the academic centers of the Northern hemisphere? What interactions took place between the theoretical production and policy formulation in the country? To this end, we will analyze the academic, intellectual, and professional trajectory of five referents of the PPA field in the country: Oscar Oszlak, Carlos Acuña, Nerio Neirotti, Carlos Vilas, and Mabel Thwaites Rey.

In an attempt to contribute to the knowledge of the constitution of the PPA field in Argentina, other works that have proposed similar objectives have served as reference (Bulcourf et al, 2013; Cardozo and Bulcourf, 2016). Our distinctive contribution lies in the use of a novel technique: the study of trajectories.

The first hypothesis of this work states that the scope of PPA in Argentina emerges by taking up PPA approaches and theories developed abroad, both in the field of political science as well as sociology or economics, mainly in the Anglo-Saxon and French tradition (Wittrock, 1999). However, several authors have managed to reformulate these concepts to account for the national and regional reality and, thus, to generate original contributions to the field.

While the second hypothesis indicates that despite the fact that PPA has expanded and strengthened in the country, both in terms of institutional and conceptual development, multiple PPA approaches still prevail, though with limited contact among them. Instead, they tend to follow very different study lines depending on the constraint exerted by academic institutes, universities, and even top scholars in the field .

The expository PPA strategy applied in this chapter consists of an overview of the context of emergence and focus of the PPA field in Argentina. Second, a description of the analytical framework: main concepts, axes, and sources of information followed by the cases under analysis. Finally, results and conclusions are presented.

The development of public policy analysis in Argentina: why contextualization matters

The emergence and consolidation of PPA in Argentina should be analyzed within the realm of the social sciences, mainly political science.