Opening the Black Box of Communication Policy-Making : Analysing Policy Change Through the Lenses of Networks and Discourse

The paper adds a new perspective to the existing research on communication policy by proposing a methodological framework for the study of policy-making processes and the role of discourse within policy debates. The focus is on the creation of policy discourse on communication issues taking place in intergovernmental settings. In order to compare or evaluate policy initiatives, we need to understand how initiatives come about in the complex and highly politicized settings of international organizations that have the particularity of regrouping actors with very diverse backgrounds and interests. But instead of analyzing the interests, ideas and power relations of the individual and organizational actors involved, the paper proposes to look at policy ideas as the outcome of discursive struggles among networks of actors. It not simply asks which ideas are taken up in policy debates, but questions how it comes that certain ideas come to be adopted as the dominant thinking in intergovernmental policy-making bodies. Based on a critical review of Foucault's notions of discourse, knowledge and power, the paper elaborates a methodological approach that combines Argumentative Discourse Analysis (ADA) ­­– initiated as Argumentative Policy Analysis by Frank Fischer and John Forester and further developed by Marteen Hajer – with the conceptual ideas of Actor-Network Theory (ANT), as developed by Michel Callon, Bruno Latour and John Law. While the first approach is used to assess the argumentative structures and narratives constituting the discourses behind main policy ideas, the later is chosen in order to describe the actors, processes and practices leading to these ideas