In this view critical thinking involves putting 'problems' into question rather than learning how to 'solve' them. Arguing that such a paradigm denies the shaping that goes on in the process of problematisation, it offers a 'what's the problem represented to be?' approach to policy analysis as a counter-discourse. The book mounts a challenge to the problem-solving paradigm currently dominating the intellectual and policy landscape, a paradigm manifest in 'evidence-based policy'.

This form of analysis, it suggests, is crucial to understanding how policy works, how we are governed, and how the practice of policy-making implicitly constitutes us as subjects.

It introduces a set of six questions that probe how 'problems' are represented in policies, followed by an injunction to apply the questions to one's own policy proposals. It features examples of applications of the approach with topics as diverse as obesity, economic policy, migration, drug and alcohol policy, and gender equality to illustrate the growing popularity of this way of thinking and to provide clear and useful examples of poststructural policy analysis in practice.This book offers a novel approach to thinking about public policy and a new, distinctive methodology for analysing policy. To enable this form of critical analysis, this book introduces an analytic strategy, the “What’s the Problem Represented to be?” (WPR) approach. According to the authors, interrogating policies and policy proposals as problematizations involves asking questions about the assumptions they rely upon, how they have been made, what their effects are, as well as how they could be unmade. Governing, it is argued, takes place through these problematizations. Instead of treating policy as simply the government’s best efforts to address problems, it offers a way to question critically how policies produce “problems” as particular sorts of problems, with important political implications. This book offers a novel, refreshing and politically engaged way to think about public policy.

Fear of Food by Carol Bacchi