Introduction

What is interpretive policy analysis? How did it become part of the landscape of policy analysis in the Netherlands? What do Dutch interpretive policy analysts do? Given that interpretive policy analysis has flourished in the Netherlands – by contrast, for example, with the US – one might wonder whether there is a particularly ‘Dutch School’ of interpretive policy research. Examining the data concerning interpretive policy-analytic scholars working in the Netherlands, their educational backgrounds and institutional affiliations, and their scholarly concerns, we do not find a distinctive, national approach. Instead, here, interpretive policy research seems to feature the contributions of different clusters of methodological and substantive issues in different institutional locations, reflecting the cross-national links that initially brought interpretive approaches to the Netherlands. We think that there is a strong, science studies-type ‘network’ analysis to be advanced here: that is, an epistemic community developing out of the happenstantial coincidences of persons, places and organisations, as seen in analyses of other modes of scientific undertaking (eg Nye, 2011; Kuhn, 1972). As we show, collegial connections enabled by the small size of the country and the intertwining of its universities’ faculties and students, alongside whatever circumstances brought interpretive policy analysis scholars from elsewhere, together with Dutch policy-analytic scholars, led to the spread of these ideas.

We begin with a brief account of what it means to take an interpretive approach to policy analysis and then turn to follow key scholars and their institutional locations, showing the development of this epistemic community much as Latour and Woolgar (1979) followed ‘the facts’ that constituted the laboratory of their study. We then consider the main areas of policy research to which Dutch interpretive scholars have offered contributions. Although many of these have been topical (for an overview, see Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, 2012; Yanow and Schwartz-Shea, 2013: xxiii), we organise this presentation around analytic approaches characteristic of interpretive policy research, taking up five of them: discourse, framing, category, narrative and practice-theoretical analyses.

An interpretive approach to policy research

Averchenko (quoted in Charon, 1989: 1–2) tells of an encounter among three characters – a woman, her husband and a second man – who, each speaking in turn, relate its details to the story's narrator.