ABSTRACT

This article contributes new insights to research on the socio-spatial dynamics of policy production by synthesizing the concepts of “policy assemblage” and “scalecraft”. By conceptualizing scale as socially-crafted rather than pre-existing (a priori), we argue that assemblage and scalecraft provide generative means for examining how scale is imagined and assembled, and the boundary dynamics associated with these processes. To make this argument, we focus empirically on changes to the governance of schooling policy in the Australian federation over the past two decades. We argue that despite being a federation in which subnational (state and territory) governments maintain responsibility for schools, a new national policy assemblage has emerged that rests upon and produces new forms of boundary imagining, crossing and blurring. This is generating tensions and issues for policy actors, central to which is contestation about federal involvement in national reform. Drawing upon insights from semi-structured interviews with senior policy actors, we argue that new ways of imagining and seeking to govern schooling, at the national scale, grate uncomfortably against the realpolitik of Australian federalism, the principles underpinning the design of federal systems, and forms of scalar thinking that shape how policy actors perceive the “ideal” division of roles and responsibilities.

摘要

本文通过综合“政策组合”和“尺度工艺”的概念，为政策生产的社会空间动态研究提供新的见解。通过将规模概念化为社会创造的而不是预先存在的（先验的），我们认为组合和规模技术为检查规模是如何想象和组合的，以及与这些过程相关的边界动态提供了生成手段。为了提出这个论点，我们实证地关注澳大利亚联邦在过去二十年中学校教育政策治理的变化。我们认为，尽管是一个由地方（州和领地）政府对学校负责的联邦，但已经出现了一个新的国家政策组合，它基于并产生了新形式的边界想象、跨越和模糊。这给政策参与者带来了紧张和问题，其中核心是关于联邦参与国家改革的争论。根据对高级政策参与者的半结构化访谈的见解，我们认为，在全国范围内想象和寻求管理学校教育的新方法与澳大利亚联邦制的现实政治、支持联邦系统设计的原则以及标量思维的形式塑造了政策参与者如何看待角色和责任的“理想”划分。