Geography and public policy: the case of the missing agenda

The past two decades have seen a wholesale rethinking and reworking of public policy, and have provided geographers with a major opportunity to enter and help shape the policy debate. Yet, disappointingly, the impact of geography on the policy realm has been limited. Increasingly, it seems, other social, political and environmental scientists, and even media pundits, shape public perception and government policy in areas where we as geographers could – indeed should – be having much greater influence. In this article I examine the reasons for this state of affairs. The fundamental problem, I argue, is that for a variety of reasons much contemporary social and economic geography research renders it of little practical relevance for policy, in some cases of little social relevance at all. The more significant reasons for this lack of relevance to, and influence on, the policy realm include: the effects on the subject of the postmodern and cultural ‘turns’; the consequential emphasis on ‘sexy’ philosophical, linguistic and theoretical issues rather than on practical social research; the retreat from detailed, rigorous empirical work; the intellectual bias against policy studies; and the lack of political commitment. The article makes a plea for a new ‘policy turn’ in the discipline, and concludes with some tentative suggestions for how we might move towards a ‘geography of public policy’.