Abstract:
The continued interest in political economy-inspired perspectives on
economic and social policies is an attempt to understand policymakers
as human beings who are influenced by values, votes and other factors
that were once thought to be exogenous to policy choices. However,
there is still little theorising about those on the other side of the policy
equation. This article seeks a better understanding of how ordinary people
engage in a very personal way with policy.
I present a model of participation grounded in empirical research
with members of a poverty-reduction project in Ghana, and a conceptual
framework informed by an interpretive or sense-making approach to
policy analysis. The model is based on the three principles of
‘subjectivity’, ‘temporality’ and ‘situatedness’: First, human beings
make subjective interpretations of policy grounded in their life histories;
secondly, temporality is an inherent aspect of how individuals
cognitively organise their lives; and thirdly, people experience policy
as one of many overlapping contexts in which they are situated.
