Revisiting Making Policy Move: Towards a Decolonial Politics of Translation

The co-authored book Making Policy Move (Clarke, Bainton, Lendvai and Stubbs 2015) was an attempt to apply insights from theories of translation and assemblage to the field of policy studies. The mantra “when policy moves it is always translated” was based, as much if not more, on postcolonial and decolonial theories as it was on the ‘interpretive turn’ in policy studies and on the idiosyncrasies of Actor Network Theory and the work of Deleuze and Guattari. In this paper, revisiting the book, we suggest that the conceptual, empirical, moral-ethical and political implications of taking colonialism and racism seriously were underdeveloped and we outline, in broad brush stroke terms, some of the ways this could be remedied in future work. We emphasize, in particular, the importance of a politics of translation for understanding coalescing crises, the rise of authoritarian neoliberalism, and the collapse of democracy and the associated rise of techno-politics. We seek to situate reconstituted racialised hierarchies, patriarchal and heteronormative ideologies, and forms of class oppression within policy assemblages co-constituted through colonialism and neo-colonialism.