Discursive policy webs in a globalisation era: a discussion of access to professions and trades for immigrant professionals in Ontario, Canada

This article explores the link between discourse and policy using a discursive web metaphor. It develops the notion of policy as a discursive web based on a post‐positivist framework that recognises the way multiple discourses from multiple voices interact in a complex web of power relationships to influence reality. Using Ontario's Access to Professions and Trades as the policy example, it demonstrates how globalisation and neo‐liberalism facilitate a ‘brain drain’ discourse, which in the Canadian, and specifically Ontario, context evolved into a ‘skills shortage’ discursive web. Deconstructing the discourses in this web, I expose how their interactions facilitate policy solutions such as assessment or training while constraining others.