Introduction

This chapter addresses the problem of how to engage with the politics of public policy in the current period of cuts, austerity and retrenchment. As Hay and Wincott (2012) argue, the slow pace of economic recovery in Britain and beyond means that hard times are likely to continue, with further pressure on welfare provision and public services. But what does this mean for our understanding of public policy? Can the theoretical frameworks developed for analysing the New Labour years in the UK suffice? The chapter takes up the challenge of this book by offering critical reflections on the implications of austerity governance for the politics of the policy process. But it also argues that critical reflections are insufficient, and goes on to explore the potential of new methods, new actors, and new framings of the policy process to generate new solutions, and to suggest how far actors with ‘progressive’ social or political commitments are able to enact new worlds within the confines of the present.

The policy reforms traced in this chapter refer to the UK Coalition government in 2011/12, but the chapter traces what I consider to be underlying logics that are likely to be longstanding. These are discussed in a series of short sections whose aim is to provoke ideas and critical dialogue rather than to offer a full account (or critique) of the topic concerned. By bringing them together in a single chapter I hope to suggest both potential synergies and important disjunctures. The chapter then assesses how alternative rationalities and scripts might be performed against this backdrop. As established institutional pathways are fractured there may be some space for ‘progressive’ interventions to take shape. A final section revisits the vexed question of how far new and emergent performances might be considered as sites of governmentalisation and neoliberal appropriation, and how far they might constitute new terrains of political engagement.

Reframing the policy process

Austerity is not of course a new topic in the political and policy literatures (see for example Clarke and Newman, 2012; Farnsworth, 2011; Jordan and Drakeford, 2012; Lowndes and Pratchett, 2012; Richardson, 2010, Taylor-Gooby and Stoker, 2011; and special issue of Critical Social Policy, 2012, 32, 3).