Deliberative policy analysis

Deliberative Policy Analysis (DPA) integrates the process of public participation into policy analysis, and seeks to address the complexity, uncertainty, and divergence of values and understandings which characterize contemporary policy arenas. It emphasizes deliberation between citizens and officials as a strategy of policy inquiry and an orientation towards practice as the key component of policy analysis. The chapter considers the development of DPA since its original formulation by Maarten Hajer and Hendrik Wagenaar in 2003 and offers three distinct methodological approaches of DPA as frequently used by its practitioners: Designed Deliberative Platforms, the Enhancement of the Deliberative Capacity of a Policy System; and Institutional Design-in-Practice. The chapter describes the features of these three approaches and provides practical illustrations. The chapter concludes with outlining three limitations of DPA. First, DPA claims that it provides a strategy for dealing with complexity, but its theory of complexity, and its implications for policymaking are underdeveloped. Second, DPA describes itself as a normative-empirical programme, but it does not offer a coherent understanding of, and approach to, integrating contextualized values into policy inquiry. And third, for various reasons DPA runs the risk that its results are not adopted or acknowledged by officials in a policy system.