A Place at the Table: Policy Analysis, Its Postpositive Critics, and the Future of Practice

Policy analysis was conceived in controversy. Beginning in the 1960s, critics such as Lawrence Tribe, Edward Banfield, Charles Lindblom, Richard Nelson, and Martin Rein have attacked the way policy analysis skills are conceived, taught, and applied in practice. Within the field, policy analysts trained as political scientists have jousted with policy analysts trained as economists. Public policy schools have been evaluated and found wanting on various grounds by insiders and outsiders. Presidents of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management regularly urge new directions in research and practice on the profession. The contexts of policy analysis practice have, moreover, changed dramatically from the time when the Planning-Programming-Budgeting System first defined the activist role of what was then called systems analysis. Once centered in federal executive agencies, which monopolized relevant numbers, policy analysis practice is now dispersed throughout the polity. Though training and scholarship may seem unduly slow to recognize and adapt to such changes, policy analysis has nonetheless been shaped and reshaped by changes in the environments of policy making and by the ongoing discourse and debate over policy analysis training and practice.