Introduction

Knowledge is at the heart of our lives as social beings. It is how we order our society, and it is how we order our personal lives within that society. We embody knowledge as we learn to navigate our way through the world. We inscribe it in the instruments with which we structure our world, and we enact it as we create and recreate our collective reality. This is nowhere more true than in the sphere of policy, which is a form of action that is fundamentally, intentionally concerned with the ordering of society. Understanding how knowledge works in policy is thus crucial for understanding how knowledge is used to organise the world we live in. However, in order to understand how knowledge works, we need the means to think about what knowledge is, and how we may observe it.

This volume offers a first step towards providing such means. We must again make clear what we mean by this. We have not set out to articulate an epistemological account of how knowledge may be distinguished from other states of belief, for instance, by attending to the methods and circumstances of its making. Rather, recognising the range and variety of epistemologies that policy analysts may bring to their work, we have endeavoured instead to develop a phenomenology of knowledge that will be compatible with any and all epistemologies. The embodied, inscribed and enacted framework is thus not an explanation, but a means of seeing what is to be explained. It might best be thought of as an exercise in what others have described as ‘epistemography’ (Drouhard, 2010). The empirical chapters that make up the bulk of this volume show what may be gained by seeing knowledge in this way.

We should also recall why we embarked upon this project. In common with many others in policy studies and related fields, all the contributors to this volume have become interested in the extent to which the work of policy consists in the production and mobilisation of knowledge. This interest in knowledge in policy is in part a function or effect of the move from government to governance. In a world of networks and partnerships of quasi-autonomous actors, what matters is what those actors think and know in relation to each other.