Introduction

The synthesis of public policy knowledge in the Thai research community has been produced using three main approaches: (1) analysing university curricula; (2) studying the core content of public policy textbooks; and (3) investigating graduate students’ theses or dissertations (Jarusombat, 2007; Yavaprabhas and Whangmahaporn, 2009; Siriwan, 2013). The first approach reflects the direction of public policy courses at various academic institutions. The second approach illustrates lecturers’ notions and intentions in disseminating public policy knowledge. The final approach presents the classification and categorisation of policy research by employing the policy process, research theme and methodology as the criteria. In other words, the three approaches aim to answer the questions of what kinds of policy knowledge do academic institutions intend to produce; who are the key knowledge providers and what kinds of content do they provide; and what types of policy research do the graduate students produce? However, the previous syntheses of policy knowledge cannot respond to questions such as what kinds of analytical perspectives or paradigms do the policy research community rely on and how do those perspectives or paradigms produce and develop policy knowledge? This chapter, therefore, focuses on the analytical perspectives and paradigms as a lens that scholars, researchers and the general public employ in analysing, understanding and evaluating public policy, as well as in creating policy content.

Addressing the previously mentioned questions, this chapter seeks to investigate public policy research conducted by academic institutions in order to identify the key analytical perspectives or paradigms that influence Thailand's policy research community. The digital archive from the Digital Research Information Center, National Research Council of Thailand, serves as the main data source. The centre began digitising policy research in 1985, which is why the selected timeframe for this chapter is from 1985 to 2019. To begin, searching ‘public policy research’ in the database resulted in 883 research pieces. The analysis focuses on the papers’ abstracts, which summarise the key content and findings of the research. If the abstract did not provide a clear summary of the content, more detail was sought in the complete research.