Policy as process: the construction and use of analytic formulations

‘The policy process’ is easy to say, but difficult to clarify. This is not only because of the lack of clarity about what counts as policy,and how it is related to the diversity of activities from which it emerges, but also because of the uncertainty about the extent to which – or the ways in which – these activities can be seen as part of a process. This paper approaches this question from the outside in, as it were, locating the concept of policy within a broader discourse about governing, and exploring the way in which policy is ‘put together’ in practice, how this practice has been analysed by social scientists, in what ways this can be seen as constituting a system, and how presentations of policy as system relate to the work of practitioners and the work of academic observers.