9:30am - 10:30am Wednesday 29 November 2023 - Day Two Opening Keynote
Writing about policy ecology
Presented by Professor Tess Lea, Dean of the School of Social Sciences, Macquarie University
In my quest to answer a simple question about Australian settler social policy as it applies to Indigenous issues—namely, can it be ‘good’—I first had to confront the negative task of confronting how policy is conventionally approached. In the place of a focus on policy decisions and ramifications, I proposed approaching policy as a wilder configuration, one where every effort needed to be deployed to resist its claims to superior rationality and coherency. I tried to experiment with the writing, and to some extents, succeeded in a monograph called Wild Policy (Stanford, 2020).
Since its publication, others wanting to apply an ecological approach to policy ethnography have asked for guidance. Being petitioned for advice on ‘how’ to apply the concepts, I told myself I needed to write a simpler paper explaining what policy ecology means to me, how it can be approached, and what techniques could be handy. But instead of this being an easy task, I stalled for at least two years. This paper gives an account of my journey to explain policy ecology by resorting to policy’s coherency tricks, defying my original desire to write against its deceptions.