The sedimentary layers of policy
When living in the UK, a favourite trip away of my children’s was to visit the Jurassic Coast — because who doesn’t love stories about dinosaurs and pioneering women? These days my daily walks take me past beautiful sandstone cliffs with strata lines that evoke a sense of the wonder of Sydney, a familiar sight that I longed for on those odd days I missed ‘home’.
Wherever you are in the world, it is only in this type of beautiful and intriguing sedimentary formation that you will find evidence of a past life.
Evidencing the past
The nature of discovery and evidence is a critical touchstone in human history that can inspire, guide, warn, haunt or traumatise us for generations — and the cooption and distortion of wisdom and evidence has been, and continues to be, weaponised against the world’s most marginalised.
Our policies reveal to us the stratified layers of our history. In the complex world of policy reform, we too not only have this evidence before us but appear to be bound (and sometimes floundering) in the complexity of forces that form them. We demonstrate our decisions through the gathering of our most significant boulders and the movement of a variety of sediments; through the processes of time and the flow of forces, we shape our narratives and ultimately give colour to our socio-technical world. It’s in this form, we find the fossilised moments of how our values, actions and behaviours lived in the world.
Forming and reforming
The notion of a simple policy process with a neat cycle that moves through agenda setting, policy formulation, legitimation, resource allocation, implementation and evaluation; only seeks to create an illusion of control and belies the quagmire that is anything but linear or rational.
Associate Professor Lorna Hallahan, in a podcast episode wonderfully titled ‘Stirring Shit’, speaks of a commonality of tools that the State uses to intervene and control the lives of marginalised peoples. These boulders such as corrections, institutionalisation, disconnection to people, country and language mean we continue to build in layers of marginalisation, stigmatisation and discrimination that have such depth, that to redress the forces that created them is “the work of generations”.
In policymaking, typically we are layering our values, narratives and knowledge, not for the creation of the new, but to gather a unique combination of elements to support the evolution of our policies that guide our society. So how might we navigate the complexity of reform, to support new layers capable of evidencing a new story, one that details equitable and thriving communities, nations and environments into the future?
Conscious and reflective formation
I’ve outlined a series of questions to support reflection in action in the way in which we all, in our own networked way, contribute to policy formation:
1. Are we working with the forces, to learn of the prevailing winds, currents and icy blasts and to make radically visible their paths so that we learn to use them in positive ways?
2. Are we collectively create boulders big enough they ultimately reshape the nature of the makeup of our policies into the future?
3. Are we creating individual pebbles of work that positively contribute to the policy layers forming?
4. Are we carefully joining up the individual and diverse grains of sands; the voices and experiences of people that are integral to enabling policies that recolour our histories and reimagine our future?
5. Are we creating safe spaces to dance in the mud – honouring the important medium of the relational glue in how we work together in these forces?
6. Are we creating new spaces for reflection to imagine the fossils that we might be capturing and leaving for generations that come next?
How will we support these diverse, complex and potentially beautiful formations that will guide our future?
