Interpretation in the Study of Australian Politics and Policy

Amid the clamour of recent calls for evidence-based policymaking, citizen-centred governance, open government, and any number of other international trends in the business of public administration, another, less-heralded one has quietly taken root in Australia: a call to put interpretation at the centre of our analysis. As the self-made image of the objective civil servant slowly erodes in Australia, as elsewhere, there is growing acknowledgment that what the evidence says, how citizens should be involved, what open government means and entails, or indeed the significance and implications of any other trend in public administration, must be subject to interpretation of the actors involved. This is not to advance the notion of a new post-modern orthodoxy in thinking about Australian politics and policy—as fairly obviously no such orthodoxy exists—but rather to point out that an interest in subjective meaning is no longer the domain of the academic fringe. To mainstream policy and public administration scholars and practitioners alike, then, increasingly interpretation matters. That is not to say it didn’t matter before – our contribution to this collection aims to show that to some extent it always has – but that the advent of ‘interpretivism’ (the inevitable ‘ism’ that emerged to attach itself to a particular interest of scholars in interpretation in politics and policymaking) has brought sharper focus to its significance, both in theory and practice.