Telling the whole story: using mulitple lenses for policy analysis

The poster outlines three critical lenses with potential to more explicitly inform social policy analyses. They are represented here as policy historiography, policy genealogy and policy archaeology. Without claiming absolute distinctions between their interests, the poster couples policy historiography with substantive issues of policy at particular hegemonic moments, policy genealogy with social actors’ engagement with policy, and policy archaeology with conditions that regulate policy formations. Essentially, this is a heuristic framework to reveal historical rules and regularities of policy that are peculiar to certain times and political governments or new leaderships; to position policy formulation process as a dynamic interplay of policy actors across local, national and international boundaries; and finally to synthesise findings generated from multiple perspectives to displace complexities and contradictions and arrive at a deeper understanding of policy at all its levels including fact-finding, formulation, implementation and evaluation.