Understanding Policy Failure as the Articulated Fields: Through the Lens of Poststructuralist Discourse Theory

The study of policy undoubtedly is dominated by the orthodox policy conjectures which depend upon positivism and empirical study. Policy failure study, in a like manner, spins round this line, as an exertion of distinguishing between policy success and failure in different forms via using multiple dimensions (such as technical and political evaluation), and identifying the crucial criteria for evaluating policy success and failure attributes through deep exploration of individual cases and comparing cases across the sectors. These developments demonstrate assuredly practical and technical policy facets and limited policy insights into examination of failures phenomena and embedded politics in the policy process. In spite the fact that many policy scholars, for example Fisher (1995, 2012), Bovens and Hart (1995, 1996, 2009, 2016) and Zittoun (2014, 2015), have developed increasingly multiple frameworks to account for controversial origin and inception of failure with the discursive frameworks, improvements are continually undertaken on the process and many approaches have been required to fulfil this. Poststructuralist discourse theory (PDT) is currently one of the dynamic approaches which can be used to profoundly analyse policy. With the assumption of PDT, considering policy as the articulatory fields (discursive and non-discursive can be a part of the relation of power), explaining political practices and strategies occurring with the failures by utilising hegemony concepts (political logics) and applying subject position and political subjectivity theory in interrogating why the failure can be maintained and grasped at a particular moment, it can been seen that these aspects exhibit differences to other contemporary approaches. Bringing in the noteworthy PDT approach will be clearly fruitful for policy scholars in looking into a failure. This paper, thus, aims to present an initial idea of utilising PDT in a framework for analysing the policy failure as the articulated area, and highlights the drawbacks and the advantages of adopting this approach realistically in the analysis.