Public Policy Actors and the Knowledge Based Social Order

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the changing dynamics of the public policy making against the background of the emergence and active participation of new actors defined primarily by epistemology in what is now widely perceived as the knowledge society. It shows that although, existing analyses of the new policy actors in the emerging knowledge society remains fuzzy, the rise of such actors has resulted in a gradual shift from policy making based purely on cost benefit analysis to policy learning and knowledge transfer. Thus, acting as the mediators of learning and knowledge transfer, these actors adopt various strategies to diff use new policy ideas across time and space