7 th Interpretive Policy Analysis Conference
Dr. Christian Hunold
Katy Travaline, a Ph.D. candidate at Drexel, and I traveled to the Dutch city of Tilburg in early
July 2012 to attend the 7 th Interpretive Policy Analysis conference. This year’s theme: The Drama of
Democracy! We spent three days on the Tilburg University campus catching up with old friends and making new ones, and talking about the role of interpretive methods in policy analysis, where political ethnography, discourse analysis, and the like are causing a lot of excitement.
We also presented a paper on Philadelphia’s emerging ‘green’ approach to stormwater management we’d co-authored with Dr. Franco
Montalto (CAEE). The Philadelphia Water Department (PWD) is the first US water utility to propose a ‘green stormwater infrastructure’ (GSI) approach to managing urban stormwater. Given the many actors that individually make decisions regarding the surface texture of urban watersheds, planning and installing an urban-scale GSI program is both complex and uncertain.
Whether and how water utility officials interact with watershed stakeholders also introduces important questions about methodologies for inclusion, our focus in the paper. PWD has identified pilot neighborhoods for exploring the potential of GSI and eliciting community input into how to structure its GSI policies.
One such neighborhood – Point Breeze in South Philadelphia – is the focus of the PWDcontracted study we analyze in this paper. We critically examine various methods of public involvement, including both positivist strategies (surveys and questionnaires) as well as more interpretive activities
(participant observation and interviews.) We argue that policymakers who wish to design effective and democratic solutions for complex policy problems such as urban stormwater management ignore interpretive policy analysis at their peril.
The conference presentation and feedback we got from our colleagues there motivated us to revise the paper soon after we got back to Philadelphia. It’s under review by the journal Critical Policy
Studies . And, together with some British and Dutch colleagues, we’re getting ready to work on a book that examines the utility of interpretive policy analysis for water management policy. Katy, finally, looks forward to defending her Ph.D. thesis in October!