¿Tormenta en un vaso de agua? Hacia nuevas colaboraciones entre los enfoques convencionales de estudios de los procesos de política pública y los enfoques interpretativos de política pública

Una “tormenta en un vaso de agua” es una expresión para referirse a un problema al que se le ha dado una dimensión desproporcionada. Precisamente así vemos la supuesta división entre dos tradiciones de investigación: el estudio convencional sobre procesos de política pública y el análisis interpretativo de la política pública. En este texto exploramos ambas tradiciones de investigación, comparando y contrastando sus puntos de vista sobre la definición y los procesos de política pública, usos de teorías y perspectivas de investigación. Nuestro objetivo no es unificar las dos tradiciones o desestimar puntos clave del debate entre ellas. En cambio, proponemos estrategias para desarrollar colaboraciones más productivas, incluyendo la investigación paralela o lado a lado, la investigación integradora, la profundización en discusiones constructivas sobre técnicas de investigación y la investigación aplicada

COVID-19 and the policy sciences: initial reactions and perspectives

The world is in the grip of a crisis that stands unprecedented in living memory. The COVID-19 pandemic is urgent, global in scale, and massive in impacts. Following Harold D. Lasswell’s goal for the policy sciences to offer insights into unfolding phenomena, this commentary draws on the lessons of the policy sciences literature to understand the dynamics related to COVID-19. We explore the ways in which scientific and technical expertise, emotions, and narratives influence policy decisions and shape relationships among citizens, organizations, and governments. We discuss varied processes of adaptation and change, including learning, surges in policy responses, alterations in networks (locally and globally), implementing policies across transboundary issues, and assessing policy success and failure. We conclude by identifying understudied aspects of the policy sciences that deserve attention in the pandemic’s aftermath

From engaging publics to engaging knowledges: Enacting “appropriateness” in the Austrian biobank infrastructure

While there is consensus on the essential importance of public engagement in further developments of biobanking, the related investigation of public views predominantly focused on the concerns expressed by the publics, and the concrete format of public engagement, without delving into the ways these concerns are constituted. In this paper, we synthetize recent research on public engagement in order to describe the constitution of respective concerns as ‘engagement of knowledges’. By shifting from ‘publics’ to ‘knowledges’, we draw attention to the interaction dynamic through which citizens embed the new knowledge they receive during expert interactions into the stock of knowledge they already possess. Analyzing our recent investigation of public views on biobanking in the form of citizen-expert panels (CEPs) in the Austrian infrastructure of biobanks (BBMRI.at), we trace this dynamic through citizens’ recurrent concerns that the research and consent practices related to biobanking should be “appropriate”