How should policy actors respond to buzzwords? Three ways to deal with policy ambiguity

By Liz Richardson, Catherine Durose, Paul Cairney, John Boswell. This post introduces our new article in Policy Sciences. Many policy buzzwords seem to catch fire then fizzle out before their value is clear in practice. For example, we often hear that prevention is better than cure, that wicked policy problems require systems leadership or systems change, that we need to focus on place-based approaches, and that policy can be improved via co-produced and collaborative policy design. However, we hear less about the substantive impact of these phrases on policy and practice. As a result, people may wonder if they will go anywhere and if they should bother to make sense of them. The ambiguity of these buzzwords is initially helpful: it helps people to coalesce around the same broad aim before worrying about exactly what to do, how, and who would be responsible. Then, the ambiguity becomes unhelpful: people struggle to translate the buzzword into concrete objectives and sustainable action. This dynamic can become dispiriting to policy actors engaged in repeated cycles of such activity. How can and should people respond? We identify three common responses to dealing with ambiguity: defining the problem in an authoritative, top-down manner to prescribe meaning; deliberating about the problem with stakeholders to reach a new, shared meaning; or simply doing, whereby actors ‘crack on’ and enact meaning in their everyday practice. Each approach has a sound logic and appeal. However, the reality is that none of these responses typically resolves underlying ambiguity. - Attempting to define simplifies and provides a clear basis for the routines of policy work (communicating, replicating, measuring), yet this approach can fail to catch on, ossify meaning in ways that are not tailored to local context, or set an impossible bar. - Resolving to deliberate can address some of these downsides – ensuring buy-in, aligning with local context, or stall for time. Yet it can have significant downsides to – straining resources and energy, resulting in ‘talking shops’, and generally undermining any impetus for rapid action. - The final alternative – doing – in turn represents a remedy for these problems, enabling quick adoption by finding support ‘on the ground’ and providing renewed justification for old agendas and ideas. Yet this approach can lack cohesion, lead to inconsistency, and empower local actors to ‘hollow out’ disruptive or difficult ideas. Our conclusion is that the ambiguity of buzzwords cannot be eliminated by consulting a dictionary because it involves political choice. Further, no way of dealing with ambiguity is inherently better than the other. Instead, it is better to conceptualise efforts to grapple with buzzwords to inform a continuous cycle of action. This conclusion is not fatalistic. Rather, progress across cycles is possible. Most buzzword cycles do not start from scratch. For example, we show that policy actors working in public health have seen the buzzword ‘prevention’ wax and wane many times in recent decades. Over that time they have built up a shared set of assumptions and practices about what ‘preventive health’ entails. Policy actors have long memories, and their frames of reference are impacted by the shared experience of past initiatives. In this sense, our best hope is to better understand and enable the conditions for cumulative impact: multiple rounds of defining, deliberating and doing can, little by little, allow appealing buzzwords to realise greater tangible progress.