Ripoliticizzare le politiche: concetti e strumenti della "Historical Materialist Policy Analysis"

This paper introduces the Historical Materialist Policy Analysis (HMPA) approach to an Italian audience for the first time. This perspective offers an alternative lens in policy studies, examining individual policies while placing them within broader contexts, thereby enabling a comprehensive understanding of their interconnections. The article addresses both HMPA’s theoretical foundations and its empirical applications. Specifically, it clarifies three key aspects: (I) the significance of material interests among various social forces in the observed policy field, (II) the centrality of the integral state in shaping and reconciling these interests, partly through policies, and (III) how these policies fit into broader political and hegemonic projects. These points counteract depoliticizing approaches that conceive policies as isolated outcomes of abstract, non-conflictual, and ahistorical rationalities. Instead, HMPA highlights the importance of starting from real contexts and conflicts among social and political actors, fostering a more realistic analytical approach to understanding policies and their roles in social and political (re)production. The paper further shifts this theoretical discussion to empirical analysis and operationalization, focusing on HMPA’s three dimensions: context, actor, and process analysis. Combined, these dimensions establish a rigorous, realistic, and critical framework for studying policies and their dynamic interactions with sociopolitical processes across time and space. To illustrate the approach’s flexibility and methodological creativity, the paper also reviews existing HMPA studies, demonstrating their capacity to address the ongoing challenge of repoliticising policies.