A Comparative Analysis of the Contemporary “Policy Sciences” Ecology

Seventy-five years after Harold D. Lasswell’s call for the policy sciences for democracy, this paper reconsiders what the policy sciences have become. Working backwards from contemporary practices, the article reconstructs the field as a dynamic configuration of knowledge sustained by enduring tensions – between knowledge of and for policy, explanation and interpretation, neutrality and engagement. Drawing on the sociology of professions and science and technology studies, it shows through a conceptually driven review of key repertoires that these controversies, often read as fragmentation, form the field’s generative grammar and reveal pluralism as the condition of its vitality.