Understanding the policymaking enterprise:

ed, detached and synoptic. What is required is knowledge in the form of practical insights and cunning intelligence, which Scott (1998) identified as the Greek concept of metis. In Scott’s (1998, p. 6) analysis, metis refers to the ‘fund of valuable knowledge embedded in local practices’. He contrasts metis with ‘thin, formulaic simplifications imposed through the agency of the state’, which fail to deliver effective policy outcomes (Scott 1998, p. 309; Rhodes 2017).This form of knowledge has an ‘indispensable role’ in the actual functioning of social systems that state actors, working from within an ‘imperial and hegemonic planning mentality’, either cannot see or set aside to their cost. Decentring the analysis of policy and bringing the process of policymaking to the fore, this chapter seeks to map the terrain of the policymaking system using Foucault’s concept of dispositif as a guide. In doing so, it provides a desperately needed analytical model that facilitates four things: first, an understanding of policymaking as an integrated and dynamic system or enterprise; second, interrogation of policymaking at an enterprise level; third, identification of key points of interaction within the policymaking system and critical intervention points for system recalibration; and, fourth, and perhaps most importantly, it advances an overarching role for culture in policymaking. LEARNING PoLICy, DoING PoLICy 226 The contemporary context The contemporary policymaking landscape in Australia is an interesting mix of terrain. We remain dominated by the managerialism we inherited from the new public management reforms of the last quarter of the twentieth century. Predicated on predictability, authority and control, this mode of policymaking seems likely to maintain its hegemonic position, especially in light of the most recent prime ministerial address to the Australian Public Service (APS) (Morrison 2019), with its retreat to Blairite imperatives around delivery (Barber 2008, 2015). Anxiety about improved delivery is matched with an enduring anxiety about the policy capacity of the APS, although it is fair to say that this anxiety is shadowed by the delivery-at-all-costs mentality at work in Australian administrative and political classes. In terms of political imperatives, contemporary Australian political life is beset by a furious and unrelenting competition among major political players for ‘the centre’. This competition has some interesting consequences. In policy terms, it has led to virtually indistinguishable policy prescriptions from both sides of politics, as politicians and parties abandon doctrinaire ideological positions in pursuit of pragmatic outcomes. This blurring of political ideologies further reinforces the need for a deeper understanding of the philosophical, conceptual and theoretical substrata of the policymaking enterprise. Foucault’s dispositif as a framework for understanding The concept of dispositif first appeared in Foucault’s The archaeology of knowledge, in which he was concerned to set out the ‘density of the accumulation’ or the contextual dynamics in which statements as embodiments of knowledge are enmeshed, shaped and transformed (Foucault 1972, p. 141). For Foucault, the dispositif was the central mechanism in the construction and deployment of knowledge. He defined the concept of dispositif in the following way: