What is Public Policy?

Thought exercise: Think about what you did yesterday from when you woke up to when you went to bed. Which, if any, of these activities are shaped by public policy? If you said “all, or most, of them”, you’re right. Public policy impacts nearly every dimension of our lives, including how we structure our days, the activities in which we engage, the homes we live in – or not – the roads we travel, the food we eat, our intimate relationships, and so on. Much of what we would consider public policy can be described as “referentially transparent” (Reskin and Hartmann 1986), in that it has a significant impact on our everyday life, but it is often invisible; so invisible, in fact, that we rarely even question it. And that’s precisely why we need to study it!

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Public policy is often defined as “anything a government chooses to do or not to do”(Dye 1972). This textbook definition is useful in that it focuses attention on government (i.e., the public part of public policy) and the purposive choices, including the choice to not act at all, they make in response to public issues.

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But this definition is also limited. For example, focusing on ‘public’ in public policy obscures how ‘private’ decisions and social location are shaped by policies and vice versa, as well as influence from private actors and organizations. Moreover, while governments retain (and wield) considerable power in initiating, designing, and implementing public policy, several folks are involved in policy, including interest or advocacy groups, think tanks and academics, and individual citizens. In addition, during the past two decades, private- and philanthropic-sector actors have played a growing role in creating and implementing public policy. It is therefore more accurate to say that public policy emerges within networks, where governments often play a prominent, though not exclusive, role.

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This definition also implies that policy is applied problem-solving, a view that is heavily emphasized in policy textbooks. This means that governments ‘discover’‘problems’ and then choose from a range of options what to do about them. In other words, policy is instrumental; it is a response to a problem.There is a lot missing here. First, it ignores the unintended effects of policy. For example, an unintended effect of stay-at-home orders due to the COVID-19 pandemic, issued to limit social contact and the spread of the illness, was an increase in gender-based violence (OECD 2022). Similarly, school closures resulted in an exacerbation of the unequal distribution of care work within families (UN Women 2020).

Second, it assumes that ‘problems’ and ‘solutions’ are separate and separable. It assumes solutions exist out there, just like problems, and can therefore be picked up and applied as needed. But some researchers suggest that policy actually creates problems by framing or representing issues in ways that make them legible (e.g., Stone 2018, Bacchi 2009). Consider, for example, poverty. Addressing poverty through universal cash transfers tells us something very different about what we’re ‘fixing’ than addressing it through equal opportunities legislation. The market itself is problematized in the former, whereas individuals are problematized in the latter.

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And finally, this definition doesn’t tell us how ‘problems’ come to be recognized, who says they’re problems, or how ‘solutions’ are proposed and decided upon. In other words, it removes policy from power. But this obscures how social hierarchies based on class, gender, race, Indigeneity, ability, nationality, and sexuality shape (and are shaped by) access to policy spaces.

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Critical and feminist research on public policy makes power its focus, shedding light on how policy shapes our everyday experiences and the role it plays in (dis)empowering individuals, groups, and communities. We invite you to explore the other explainers to see how they do so.

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