2 How Can I Better Engage With The Policy Process?

If you want to enhance your engagement within policy processes, the best way to do so is to enhance your understanding of those processes.

In other words: Understanding the policy process is key to influencing it (Weible et al., 2012 ).

A generative way to better understand the policy process is to reflect on real instances of how policy processes have unfolded and to try to make sense of those instances in relation to policy process theories (Cairney, 2015). From those reflections, insights about how to influence policy processes might be drawn.

Policy process theories, if chosen carefully, can provide us with the language to describe and analyze the policy situations we find ourselves in (Lindquist, 2024).

Policy process theories can also function to challenge the assumptions we hold about policy and prompt us to think differently and ask different questions (Cairney, 2015).

Policy process theories are tools to inform your thinking, not a ‘how to’ guide (Cairney, 2023). Reflecting on theories can be more useful to you than receiving ‘how to tips’ on a particular policy problem, as those tips may only be relevant to you in that particular situation (if that), whereas understanding policy theory can provide the heuristics to better understand (and hopefully navigate) any future policy problem, whatever shape it takes.

Please remember, however, that each policy process theory reflects just one perspective for understanding policy (albeit a well-studied one!), and, in this way, can potentially hinder creativity (Weible & Carter, 2024). Other theories, and your own thinking, may offer you different insights.

The following videos share some policy problems of practice from physical education stakeholders and suggest practical lessons that might be drawn from those stories by considering them through policy process theories.