Staging an Official Inquiry for Policy Change: the case of the Drug Evaluation Review in Australia

This paper provides a participant account of what was involved in Australia in using an official inquiry to produce a change in regulatory policy pertaining to therapeutic drug administration. The case study shows how the inquiry process was taken beyond formality and was focused on generating packages of bargains to which contending stakeholders could lend support. The centrality of these pragmatic and calculative dimensions of policy change did not mean that the attributes conventionally associated with official inquiries could be ignored. Accordingly we show how the process of conducting an inquiry came to consist of performances on three stages: ‘frontstage’, ‘backstage’ and ‘understage’.