What Is Policy Change?

This chapter sets the trajectory of the analysis, defining policy change as the establishment, consolidation, erosion, and termination of meaning within individual policy objectives and their relevant objects. The chapter grounds this distinctive conceptualization of policy change in a commitment to an ‘ontology of absence’, under which policy objectives, and their associated objects, exist within discursive configurations that help determine their properties and capacities by investing them with meaning and identity and which offers a stronger basis for undertaking the analysis and critique of policy change relative to alternative frames, principally neo-positivist social science, interpretivism, and realism.