Model or Metaphor? A Critical Review of the Policy Network Approach

Policy network analysis has become the dominant paradigm for the study of the policy-making process in British political science and has assumed great importance in Europe and America. Recently both Governance and European Journal of Political Research have had special issues on policy networks: whilst Policy Sciences and International Organization have each devoted one issue to the related concept of ‘advocacy coalitions’ and ‘epistemic comm~nities’.~ Two British Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Initiatives were theoretically driven by the network approach and policy networks were a core theme of the 1994 Political Studies Association conference.6 It is time to take stock: to see how much we have learned about policy-making from this approach, to judge whether it can develop into a genuine and fruitful theory of the policy process or whether a more fundamental theory is required. In this review I argue that whilst we have learned much about the policy process by cataloguing the policy world into different types of network, the approach will not, alone, take us much further. Policy network analysis began as a metaphor, and may only become a theory by developing along the lines of sociological network analysis.