The Urban Politics of Policy Failure

John Lauermann, Cristina Temenos, John Lauermann, Cristina Temenos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781032268583
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000623925
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This book contributes to debates in geography and urban studies by analysing the spatial dimensions and politics of urban policy failure. Attention is most often paid to successful urban policies. Policymakers go to great lengths to emulate success by importing policy 'models', implementing best practices, or pursuing 'silver bullet' solutions. Yet, stories of failure are at least as common as those of success. Some policies fail to launch in the first place. Others struggle to deliver their goals. Many collapse under the weight of poor administration, insufficient funding, or political opposition.

This book establishes a vocabulary and set of analytical approaches for researching the spatial dynamics and impacts of urban policy failure. With a geographically diverse set of cases, the authors explore topics including policy (im)mobility, urban policy experiments, and governance initiatives ranging from sustainability to housing to public health, across Europe, North America, and Asia.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Urban Geography.

Going bust two ways? Epistemic communities and the study of urban policy failure

Mark Davidson

ABSTRACT

Urban geographers are becoming more concerned with “policy failure”. This raises questions about how “policy failure” should be conceptualized. The public policy literature, with its detailed classifications and categorizations of policy failure, is an obvious potential resource for urban geographers. However, supplementing predominant urban geographical analysis with public policy frameworks presents significant epistemological challenges. The literatures belong to different disciplinary traditions, making a simple combination of the two difficult. To demonstrate, the paper presents two contrasting accounts of a recent case of “policy failure”: the 2008 bankruptcy of the City of Vallejo, California. The accounts are distinguished by their epistemological orientations, one based in theoretical explanation (geography) and the other concerned with practical explanation (public policy). When we acknowledge these epistemological differences, we are forced to assess the limits to synthesizing different types of urban policy failure analysis. In conclusion, the paper discusses the pragmatic approach to epistemological choice.

“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.” – variously attributed.¹

Introduction

The above adage summarizes the problem urban geographers face in their consideration of “policy failure” (Jacobs, 2012; Lovell, 2019; McCann & Ward, 2015; Webber, 2015). Theorizing about urban policy making and understanding how policies are practiced are prospectively not incompatible. But, in practice, they often are. The reason, I argue, is that undertaking these tasks usually involve employing different types of reasoning; theoretical and practical. In urban geography, a longstanding concern with how urban policies reflect dominant ideologies has meant the intricacies of policymaking and implementation are often not the focus of collective epistemological projects. Policies become successful in their realization of ideology: stadia are built, waterfronts reinvested, neighborhoods gentrified (Lovell, 2019). Urban geographers therefore tend to write critical accounts of realization, not detailed studies of policy formulation and implementation (e.g. Newman & Ashton, 2004).

Examining policy failure represents a different challenge. Often a policy fails precisely because it does not create change (Jacobs, 2012). Or a policy partially fails, making it difficult to assign responsibility for complex urban changes (Clarke, 2012). These challenges have led some to adopt conceptual and methodological approaches from other (sub)disciplines. For example, Lovell (2019) has borrowed from political science, science-and-technology studies (STS), and economic geography to study policy mobilities failure. Lovell argues these fields offer the conceptual and methodologies resources required for urban geographers to understand policy failure:

“political science, economic geography and STS scholarship provide direction and insight for the study of policy failure mobilities … the way forward involves not just better methodological balance and attention across policy successes and failures, but also further conceptual development within policy mobilities research.” (ibid. 13)

These arguments (Lovell, 2019; also see, 2016, 2017b) for interdisciplinarity are convincing. However, there are significant epistemological challenges that come along with this project.

Some of these epistemological challenges are reflected in prior debates about policy relevance (Hamnett, 2003; Markusen, 1999). These debates were instigated by claims that urban geography had become progressively disconnected from the world of policymaking (Dorling & Shaw, 2002; Martin, 2001). The result being that geographical knowledge is now rarely heard or understood by policy-makers (Dorling & Shaw, 2002). Imrie (2004) developed a more sympathetic critique, arguing that the epistemological orientation of urban geography has often made it inapplicable to the world of “evidence-based decision-making”:

“ … urban geographers ought not to be defensive about their subject, or necessarily apologetic to those who claim that they fail to engage with the real world of policy and practice. Such claims tend to be made on the basis of ill formed judgements, which lack evidence about what geographers are doing, or how and where geographical ideas are making a difference to policy and practice.” (705)

This paper picks up the connection between sub-disciplines and epistemological traditions by exploring recent attempts to incorporate methods and theories from other (sub)disciplines into urban geography’s examination of policy failure.

The paper begins by comparing the study of policy failure in urban geography and public policy. Public policy offers urban geographers a range of tools for understanding policy failure (see Bovens & ‘T Hart, 2016; Dunlop, 2017; Howlett, Ramesh, & Wu, 2015; McConnell, 2010). However, in illustrating the epistemological orientations of the two fields, the paper shows how the two subdisciplines tend to develop distinct knowledges. Urban geographers are often concerned with the development of theoretical explanation (Bridge, 2014), whereas public policy is concerned with understanding governmental action within specific contexts (Gibbons, 2006; Taylor, 1989). To illustrate the consequent epistemological differences, the paper develops two contrasting interpretations of the 2008 bankruptcy of the City of Vallejo, California (Davidson & Kutz, 2015). In conclusion, the paper discusses the need for urban geographers to think about policy failure reflexively and calls for an assessment of how epistemological choices impact utility.

Epistemic communities and explanations of policy failure

Across the social sciences and humanities, there is an ongoing conversation about the potentials and pitfalls of interdisciplinary research (see Jacobs, 2014). This conversation often highlights the problems associated with bringing together research communities who operate with differing epistemologies. Some have suggested that an embrace of “epistemic pluralism” is permissible and necessary due to the representational limits of language (Lyotard, 1984) and the role of epistemological privilege in colonialism (Teffo, 2011). Others are more cautious (Boghossian, 2007). Brister (2016, p. 89) has argued that epistemological traditions create significant challenges for interdisciplinary research, highlighting “disciplinary capture” as a pressing problem. This problem involves facets of a disciplinary approach conditioning the overall design and findings of interdisciplinary research: “Disagreements about facts, evidentiary standards, the nature of causal claims, and the role of values are often exacerbated through the research process because they form integrated bundles of self-reinforcing epistemological commitments and beliefs.” As urban geographers mine other fields to study policy failure, an concern about disciplinary capture is pertinent. We must identify (a) the modes of reasoning in urban geography and related fields, (b) understand how epistemological frameworks orientate us towards certain forms of explanation, and (c) develop the requisite practices of epistemological reflection.

There is no single understanding of policy failure within urban geography (see Jacobs, 2012; McCann & Ward, 2015). However, there is a predominant concern with how urban policy is determined by neoliberal ideologies. This has meant policy failure is usually discussed in the context of certain policies producing problematic social outcomes, as opposed to analysis assessing whether policy objectives are achieved (e.g. Hubbard & Lees, 2018). Where more detailed policy analyses are performed, urban geographers have tended to view policies as derivative of governmental context (Cook, 2015). This often shifts focus onto policy programs that are acutely reflective of prevailing regulatory regimes. Rarely are policies studied as practice-based interventions, where cause and effect are assessed in isolation from broader processes of social (re)production. Urban geography therefore tends to understand policy success/failure using heterodox politico-economic theories that situate policy outcomes within, and as resulting from, processes of economic and social reproduction (Brenner, Peck, & Theodore, 2010).

This reflects Bridge’s (2014) view that “[T]he theoretical wellspring of critical theory in urban studies has been Marxism and neo-Marxist theory” (1–2; also see Oswin, 2018). Bridge (2014) elaborates by locating urban geography’s theoretical orientation within the Western Marxist traditions of the Frankfurt School:

“ … in this approach critique had to be theoretical and separate from practical reason because practical reason operated in everyday contexts of domination and deceit. Critical theory was comprehensive and scientific and beyond the limits of lay knowledge. It did not require validation from any particular audience. This was a moment of epistemological privilege. The task, then, was to take the critique to others who may well have false beliefs about their practices.” (4-5)

Frankfurt School theorists, such as Horkheimer and Adorno, famously took up the challenge of developing Marx’s concepts of alienation and false consciousness at the dawn of advanced capitalism. As Bridge (2014) suggests, this meant critiquing exploitative social processes that the working classes could not themselves identify. In the absence of exploitation being an intelligible part of the everyday, Horkheimer and Adorno (2002[1947]) would work to reinvigorate theoretical explanation, claiming:

“ … the blocking of the theoretical imagination has paved the way for political delusion. Even when people have not already succumbed to such delusion, they are deprived by the mechanisms for censorship, both the external ones and those implanted within them, of the means of resisting it” (xvi).

Although Bridge (2014) identifies theoretical reasoning as a distinguishing part of the critical theory tradition (also see Brenner, 2009), the distinction between practical and theoretical reason does not originate in mid-twentieth century Western Marxism. In philosophy, the distinction is often associated with Aristotle’s division of knowledge into practical and theoretical (Anagnostopoulos, 1994). Disciplines that are practically orientated focus on understanding how to act. This imposes conditions on what kind of knowledge ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: the urban politics of policy failure
• 1 Going bust two ways? Epistemic communities and the study of urban policy failure
• 2 Policy-failing: a repealed right to shelter
• 3 Urban policy (im)mobilities and refractory policy lessons: experimenting with the sustainability fix
• 4 Beyond failure: the generative effects of unsuccessful proposals for Supervised Drug Consumption Sites (SCS) in Melbourne, Australia
• 5 Playing with time in Moore Street, Dublin: urban redevelopment, temporal politics and the governance of space-time
• 6 The relational co-production of “success” and “failure,” or the politics of anxiety of exporting urban “models” elsewhere
• Conclusion
• Index