{"title":"The Transactional Trajectories of Policy Solutions How French Government Domesticated the Shale Gas Problem and Its Owners","authors":"Sébastien Chailleux, Philippe Zittoun","doi":"10.1002/epa2.70027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/epa2.70027","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>The article examines the development of three successive policy proposals for shale gas exploration in France, highlighting the transactional trajectories of each. Using a policy transactional perspective, it demonstrates how policy solutions are shaped by both definition and appropriation. Policy proposals emerge through the redefinition of the problem they address, with this process also assigning roles and identities to various actors, casting them as victims, culprits, or heroes within a causal narrative. This definitional work is further influenced by the appropriation (or lack thereof) of key allies. As such, each proposal reflects a sense of ownership. The rules of appropriation differ depending on the primary debate space in which the proposal is developed. This variation accounts for why some policymakers can adapt their positions, while others cannot.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":52190,"journal":{"name":"European Policy Analysis","volume":"11 4","pages":"460-474"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145887364","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Christopher Ansell, Patrick Hassenteufel, Philippe Zittoun
{"title":"Introducing the Policy Transaction Perspective","authors":"Christopher Ansell, Patrick Hassenteufel, Philippe Zittoun","doi":"10.1002/epa2.70028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/epa2.70028","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This special issue of <i>European Policy Analysis</i> introduces the policy transaction perspective. As developed at length in the special issue article by Ansell et al. (<span>2025</span>), the policy transaction perspective seeks to combine ideas drawn from social constructivism and the philosophy of pragmatism to produce a distinctive approach to understanding the policy process. Social constructivist perspectives focus on how ideas (Béland <span>2009</span>), discourses (Durnova et al. <span>2016</span>), stories (Stone <span>1989</span>), and narratives (Roe <span>1994</span>) shape policy framing and problem definition (Rochefort and Cobb <span>1994</span>). Pragmatism advances a relational and processual philosophy that greatly inspired early work on public policy, particularly the work of Harold Lasswell (Dunn <span>2019</span>). Harnessing them together, social constructivism and pragmatism advance our understanding of the relational processes that give meaning to public policy and public problems.</p><p>As set out by Ansell et al. (<span>2025</span>), the pragmatist idea of <i>transaction</i> is the central linchpin of this approach. To emphasize what is distinctive about the transaction from a pragmatist perspective, it may be helpful to insert a hyphen between “trans” and “action” to remind us of the term's particular meaning. While the term “transaction” often refers to an exchange, the Latin prefix “trans” implies something that cuts through or runs across. John Dewey and Arthur Bentley (<span>1946</span>) used the term to describe the difficulty of decomposing a relational process into its separate elements (in contrast with the term “interaction”). In social constructivist terms, a transaction is a relational process that produces a “co-construction” of elements, which may be narratives, identities or frames. The fundamental idea of the policy transaction perspective is to pay close attention to how public policy elements—interests, values, identities--are co-constructed through a relational process.</p><p>From a static or structural perspective, it is difficult to perceive the co-constructed nature of public policy. From such a perspective, interests, values and identities appear primordial or essential and thus as fixed starting points for analysis. By contrast, as Ansell et al. (<span>2025</span>) elaborate, pragmatism adopts a strong process orientation and presumes greater fluidity of policy interests, values and identities. As a result, it focuses on “problematization” as a process rather than on “problem” as a fixed object, or on “valuation” as a process rather than on “value” as a given entity. By doing this, the policy transaction perspective prioritizes understanding how things become what they are. To achieve such insights, the policy transaction perspective suggests that we must zero-in on the situations where these co-construction processes occur. Such situations might include planning meetings, parliamentary heari","PeriodicalId":52190,"journal":{"name":"European Policy Analysis","volume":"11 4","pages":"438-440"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/epa2.70028","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145887363","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Kerstin Eriksson, Evangelia Petridou, Gertrud Alirani, Roine Johansson
{"title":"Putting Out Fires With Institutional Reforms: Experts as Policy Entrepreneurs in the Swedish Fire and Rescue Policy Sector, 1986–2021","authors":"Kerstin Eriksson, Evangelia Petridou, Gertrud Alirani, Roine Johansson","doi":"10.1002/epa2.70015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/epa2.70015","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article examines the fire and rescue services sector in Sweden in the period 1986–2021, and explains the timing of bureaucratic reforms using the Multiple Streams Framework (MSF). In this study, we insert institutions in MSF by employing a two-level analysis; we highlight the interactions among experts acting as policy entrepreneurs over time and during a large window of opportunity, and we show that in a programmatically complex policy during a large window of opportunity open for a long period of time, policymakers may become proactive and engage in commissioning.</p>","PeriodicalId":52190,"journal":{"name":"European Policy Analysis","volume":"11 3","pages":"420-432"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-08-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/epa2.70015","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144910114","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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