Comment: In the last entry [25 December 2017] I forecast that I would be considering alternative terminology to “problems”, a concept that I consider vague and, in some cases, dangerous [https://ndri.curtin.edu.au/events/cdp2017/]. To anticipate my argument, I suggest that any term we decide to use to identify the target of our analysis (e.g. “problem”, “issue”, “matters of concern”) needs to be put in question. I contrast a form of thinking that interrogates presumed starting points for analysis to a form of thinking that takes such starting points for granted. I wish to contest the latter form of thinking – that which takes designated starting points for granted. This form of thinking is most readily observed in the problem-solving paradigm; hence, my “declaration of war” on the concepts “problem” and “problems” (Bacchi Declaring War abridged).

The previous entry (25 December 2017) ended by noting that all concepts need to be considered within the projects to which they are attached. I accept Tanesini’s argument that concepts have no fixed meaning but are “proposals about how we ought to proceed from here” (see Tanesini, A. 1994. Whose language? In K. Lennon & M. Whitford, Eds. Knowing the difference: Feminist perspectives in epistemology. NY: Routledge, p. 207). Proposals are not necessarily intentional; rather, they represent the logic of an approach. The task here becomes sorting through the form of proposal associated with the uses of adopted concepts.

As an example, elsewhere [see above “Declaring War Abridged”] I note the recent tendency to argue that people face “challenges” rather than “problems”. Here “problems” are conceptualized as entailing some intrinsic difficulty. Turning them into “challenges” can imply that a person is to take charge of a situation, regardless of how difficult it may be, always remembering the importance of context. I find this usage of the term “challenges” worrying because it appears to depoliticize complex situations, turning it all back onto individuals. Hence, I actually prefer “problems” to “challenges” in such cases.

However, in the main, the terms “problem” and “problems” are themselves depoliticizing. “Problems” are presumed to simply exist. They are taken-for-granted conditions that need to be “solved”, denying the politics that goes into their shaping.

I have been asked if the term “issues” would be preferable to “problems”. It certainly appears to be a better choice since it does not carry the negative weight and hence judgment associated with “problems”. In Science and Technology Studies (STS; see Callon, M. 2009. “Civilizing markets”, Accounting, Organizations and society, 34: 535-548), a distinction is drawn between issues – called “stem issues” – and “problems”. “Stem issues” are described as “situations of initial shock” (p. 542), which are gradually “split into a series of distinct problems” (p. 543). STS theorist, Michel Callon, reserves the term “problematization” for the process of transforming “unsolvable [stem] issues into solvable problems” (p. 547; emphasis added).

I would clearly have difficulty with the second part of this argument since it adopts the very “problem-solving” logic I have challenged in Analysing Policy (2009) and elsewhere. However, I can also see reasons to object to the notion of “stem issues”. The question I am prompted to ask is – who decides what is a stem issue? I am wary of Bruno Latour’s “matters of concern” for similar reasons (see “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern”, Critical Inquiry, 30: 225-248). Callon (2009, p. 536 and throughout) treats “matters of concern” as synonymous with “stem issues”, indicating their conceptual affinity.

Clearly Latour’s sophisticated challenge to “matters of fact” and his endorsement of “matters of concern” requires more attention that I can give to it here. However, it seems to me that the term “matters of concern” still invites the question – who gets to decide what “matters of concern” involve? As I forecast at the outset, I wish to contrast a form of thinking that interrogates presumed starting points for analysis (including “issues” and “matters of concern”) to a form of thinking that takes such starting points for granted. I believe that interrogating the “problems” or “challenges” or “issues” or “matters of concern” set by others (using the WPR questions; Bacchi Chart) marks an important step towards critical thinking.

Comment: On 21 October 2017 I gave a short address at the University of Umeå where I was awarded an Honorary Doctorate. The full title of the address is: “Declaring war on problems: A call to rein in the concept”. In this entry I provide a brief summary of the argument and also attach an abridged version of the talk in Umeå [Bacchi Declaring War abridged]. I have labeled this entry #1 because I intend to follow it up in a week’s time with a second entry that considers the questions – “if we are not to refer to problems, are there alternative terms that are preferable? What about ‘issues’? ‘challenges’? ‘matters of concern’?” The goal in that second entry will be to identify what is at stake in selecting one of these options and why I recommend avoiding all of them!

I start the Umeå paper by explaining that the title – “Declaring war on problems” – does not imply that I am crusading against conditions commonly labeled as “problems”, for example, homelessness, discrimination, violence against women, etc.

Rather, I am declaring war on the concepts “problem” and “problems”. I proceed to list five reasons for my disquiet with these terms.

First, I am concerned by the ubiquity of the terms. Almost every discussion of government policy, by politicians and in the media, is peppered with references to “problem” and “problems”. Have a listen and see if you agree!

Of course, if it were clear what was intended by the usage of the terms, I would be happier about the situation. However, I suggest that the terms are at best vague and at worst meaningless – my second qualm!

Third, I note the worrisome negative valence attached to the terms, seen in the common association with the notion of “social problems”.

Fourth, I turn to the policy domain and the common characterization of policy as reacting to and solving problems. I proceed to offer the “What’s the Problem Represented to be?” (WPR) approach as a new way to think about how policies do their work.

Fifth, I turn my critical gaze to “problem-solving” as a paradigm dominating the intellectual and policy landscape. My examples are the “evidence-based” movement and education. Here I challenge the view that “problem-solving” is the basis of critical thinking.

I end the paper by noting that, as with all concepts, “problem” and “problems” need to be considered within the projects to which they are attached. Hence, the argument is not to eliminate the terms but to rein them in.

Comment: This entry is prompted by the recent Report on policy innovation produced by the Commonwealth Department of Agriculture & Water Resources, ABARES. Written by Susan Whitbread, Katie Linnane and Alistair Davidson, it is entitled: Policy innovation: New thinking. New skills. New tools [Policy innovation: New thinking. New skills. New tools].

The authors and the Department are to be complemented for the breadth of perspectives they engage, from “wicked problems” (p. 11) to “deliberative democracy” (p. 29) and (indeed) to WPR (pp. 20-21). The inclusion of WPR is exciting because it suggests that this poststructural analytic strategy can be useful in on-the-ground policy deliberation. I reflect further on this point below.

The ABARES Report defends a need to break free from conventional notions of evidence and rationality that dominate mainstream policy approaches. For example, it introduces the notion of “post-normal science” where facts are uncertain (p. 13). It also puts forward a more complex understanding of human behaviour that looks beyond “the traditional view of citizens as being rational and logical in their behaviours and decisions” (p. 19). To this end it introduces the Narrative Policy Framework, which includes discourse analysis and critical theory (p. 19).

However, the Report continues to operate within a problem-solving paradigm, the focus of critique in WPR (see Bacchi, Analysing Policy, 2009). As just one example, in the Report, new tools and policy innovations are offered to “identify innovative policy instruments to solve specific policy problems” (p. 2; emphasis added). The Report identifies “wicked problems” as “resistant to straightforward solutions” (p. 11) and draws links to complexity theory (p. 12). However, as I have argued elsewhere, both “wicked problems” and “complexity theory” understand policy in terms of solving problems, which continue to be spoken of as if they simply exist – even if in these accounts “problems” are portrayed as “messy” and “fuzzy” (seeBacchi Problematizations Health Policy pp. 7-8). In addition, the goal of behaviour modification, seen in the endorsement of “nudge theory” in the Report (pp. 22-25), leaves little room to interrogate the “problems” assumed as desirable targets in this stance (see entry in Research Hub on “Nudge Theory”, 26 November 2017).

Given its remit to interrogate (rather than solve) assumed policy problems, WPR, therefore, sits as an outlier in the Report. Helpfully, the authors call upon policymakers to ask themselves the questions in the WPR approach to identify their “implicit assumptions and cognitive biases”. In this way they draw upon Step 7 in the approach, which elicits researchers and others to “Apply this list of questions to your own problem representations”. Unfortunately Step 7 is omitted from Box 7, p. 21 of the Report (compare Bacchi WPR CHART).

To increase the impact of this welcome call for “policy innovation” I suggest the need to apply WPR across the board – that is, to the theories that assume and endorse a problem-solving rationale, including “wicked problems”, “complexity” and “nudge theory” (see Lancaster et al., “More than problem-solving: Critical reflections on the ‘problematisation’ of alcohol-related violence in Kings Cross”, Drug and Alcohol Review, 2012, 31(7): 935-927).

Comment: This entry is prompted by Luigi Pellizzoni’s provocative book – Ontological Politics in a Disposable World: The New Mastery of Nature (Surrey, Ashgate, 2015; available as a free download online) – and by my own deployment of the term “ontological politics” (see “Strategic interventions and ontological politics: Research as political practice”. In A. Bletsas and C. Beasley (Eds.) 2012, Engaging with Carol Bacchi: Strategic Interventions and Exchanges. Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press, pp. 141-56; https://www.adelaide.edu.au/press/).

My use of the term relies on my reading of Annemarie Mol’s work on the topic (see in particular Mol, A. 1999. Ontological politics: A word and some questions, in Actor Network Theory and After, edited by J. Law and J. Hassard. Oxford: Blackwell, 74-89.) Mol points out that “ontological politics” is a compound term, relying on meanings of “ontology” – what is posited as “real” – and “politics”. At a basic level the term “ontological politics” signals a close connection, of some form, between ontology and politics, with “the ‘real’ and the ‘political’ being deemed to be directly implicated in one another” (Pellizzoni, 2015, p. 7). A broad definition of politics as the heterogeneous strategic relations that shape lives leads to the contention that the “real” is a political creation, doubtless a confronting proposition! How is this view supported?

“Ontological politics” can be considered part of the new wave in social theory referred to as “the turn to ontology”. The use of “turn” in relation to theoretical developments signals a particular new focus of some kind. The “turn to ontology” is associated with an expressed dissatisfaction with the preceding “linguistic turn”, based on claims about excessive reliance on language to understand social relations. Susan Hekman, for example, says that the error of the “linguistic turn” was the assumption that discourse alone is constitutive of reality (see Hekman, S. 2010. The Material of Knowledge: Feminist Disclosures. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, p. 24). In her view the “new ontology” (sometimes described as “the new materialisms”) resurrects “reality” to its rightful place, without lapsing into modernist conceptions of “the real”.

However, the “ontological turn” in social theory is a “variegated phenomenon” (Pellizzoni, 2015, p. 72) and some perspectives – consider for example “feminist new materialisms” and “speculative realism” – may not sit happily together. There are nuances among the numerous contributions to “the ontological turn” that ought to be considered should one decide to engage with these debates.

Annemarie Mol (1999, p.74), in association with John Law and Actor-Network Theory, takes as a starting point that the reality we live is “one performed in a variety of [socio-material] practices” – an illustration of another contemporary theoretical direction, referred to as “the turn to practice”. Because practices are plural, it is argued, so too are the realities they enact. “Reality” is, in effect, multiple (see Mol’s book, The Body Multiple: Ontology in medical practice, Duke University Press, 2002). However, we do not experience the world as multiple, raising the question – how do plural realities become produced as a singular “real”? The answer to that question directs attention to the play of politics in coordinating aspects of reality as the “real”, making “the real” an accomplishment – or in my terms a political creation. It follows that what is deemed to be “real” and fixed, can be challenged. WPR initiates this kind of questioning of presumed fixed problems.

Some difficult theoretical issues invite further analysis. Pellizzoni (2015) identifies a shared problematization between neoliberalism and some versions of the “new ontology” or “new materialisms” that requires attention. He (p. 77) also stresses the need for conceptual development of practices, which, at times, tend to be treated as “self-evident givens rather than perspectival “cuts” in the spatio-temporal flux of events”. If practices are treated as unmediated in this way, a kind of materiality is reinstated, undermining attempts to establish a “non-dualist, ‘post-constructionist’ understanding of material reality and human intermingling with it” (Pellizzoni, 2015, p 7). This conclusion reinforces the call by Woolgar and Neyland (2013) in the earlier entry on “Mundane Governance” for constitutive interpretations to be further developed. In recent work I have emphasized the place of problematizations in the constitution of “objects” and “subjects” (https://ndri.curtin.edu.au/events/cdp2017/].

Comment: We have here a contribution to Edward Elgar’s Handbooks of Research on Public Policy series. This volume is edited by Michael Howlett and Ishani Mukherjee (2017). The publisher’s blurb (http://www.e-elgar.com/shop/handbook-of-policy-formulation) describes the book as a “pioneering effort to consolidate the state of knowledge on policy formulation”. The blurb also locates the book within what I describe elsewhere (see Analysing Policy, Pearson Education, 2009, p. 1) as a reactive approach to public policy in which governments are seen to be reacting to fixed and identifiable problems that are exogenous to (outside of) the policy process: “In attempting to resolve pressing public problems, governments devise, deploy and develop policy tools in many different ways in different sectors and jurisdictions”. It is of course this whole notion of exogenous problems that are purported to exist separate from policies that WPR is designed to challenge!

Chapter 5 in the Handbook by Arnost Veselý deals explicitly with “Problem delimitation in policy formulation”. Veselý (2017, p. 85) suggests that “scholars from all strands do not take policy problems as ‘objective entities’ that are to be found, but as constructs that are defined”, while acknowledging that authors differ in “how this construction should be understood”. He (2017, p. 83) draws a distinction between rational (positivist) approaches and interpretive (post-positivist) approaches to “problem structuration”, while acknowledging the contrasts I identify between post-structural perspectives and interpretivism, due to the latter’s focus on different actors’ problem definitions (see Bacchi The Turn to Problematization. Veselý (p. 92) sees promise in two recent conceptual developments in the field, “wicked problems” and “problematization”. Unfortunately, he has little to say about these developments (on these topics see Bacchi Problematizations Health Policy. Moreover, he concludes that “problematic situations” “must be labeled and clustered into sets of problems that can be subject to policy actions”, a proposition that appears to affirm the reactive stance of the Handbook (see above) with policy problems as simply existing and waiting to be solved – a disappointing conclusion.