Introducing the Policy Transaction Perspective

This special issue of European Policy Analysis introduces the policy transaction perspective. As developed at length in the special issue article by Ansell et al. (2025), the policy transaction perspective seeks to combine ideas drawn from social constructivism and the philosophy of pragmatism to produce a distinctive approach to understanding the policy process. Social constructivist perspectives focus on how ideas (Béland 2009), discourses (Durnova et al. 2016), stories (Stone 1989), and narratives (Roe 1994) shape policy framing and problem definition (Rochefort and Cobb 1994). Pragmatism advances a relational and processual philosophy that greatly inspired early work on public policy, particularly the work of Harold Lasswell (Dunn 2019). Harnessing them together, social constructivism and pragmatism advance our understanding of the relational processes that give meaning to public policy and public problems. As set out by Ansell et al. (2025), the pragmatist idea of transaction is the central linchpin of this approach. To emphasize what is distinctive about the transaction from a pragmatist perspective, it may be helpful to insert a hyphen between “trans” and “action” to remind us of the term's particular meaning. While the term “transaction” often refers to an exchange, the Latin prefix “trans” implies something that cuts through or runs across. John Dewey and Arthur Bentley (1946) used the term to describe the difficulty of decomposing a relational process into its separate elements (in contrast with the term “interaction”). In social constructivist terms, a transaction is a relational process that produces a “co-construction” of elements, which may be narratives, identities or frames. The fundamental idea of the policy transaction perspective is to pay close attention to how public policy elements—interests, values, identities--are co-constructed through a relational process. From a static or structural perspective, it is difficult to perceive the co-constructed nature of public policy. From such a perspective, interests, values and identities appear primordial or essential and thus as fixed starting points for analysis. By contrast, as Ansell et al. (2025) elaborate, pragmatism adopts a strong process orientation and presumes greater fluidity of policy interests, values and identities. As a result, it focuses on “problematization” as a process rather than on “problem” as a fixed object, or on “valuation” as a process rather than on “value” as a given entity. By doing this, the policy transaction perspective prioritizes understanding how things become what they are. To achieve such insights, the policy transaction perspective suggests that we must zero-in on the situations where these co-construction processes occur. Such situations might include planning meetings, parliamentary hearings or public conventions, which are governed by different rules and norms of access and debate. Public policy is shaped by transactions that occur in these specific situations. As a result, the policy transaction perspective views the policy process as a “fragmented constellation” of policy situations. These ideas are nicely illustrated by Sébastien Chailleux and Philippe Zittoun (2025) in their analysis of the development of shale gas policy in France. Although these authors present a more extensive account of this development in an earlier book (Zittoun and Chailleux 2022), they reanalyze the case here through a policy transaction lens. The puzzle they pose is how to understand why and how the French government, over the course of about a year and a half, produced three different policy statements on shale gas. In the first, it licensed two companies to engage in shale gas exploration and then supported that decision when it prompted protest; in the second, it suspended these licenses; and in the third, it banned shale gas production altogether. To analyze these policy shifts, Chailleux and Zittoun focus on how shale gas was problematized or reproblematized. Problematization, they argue, requires at least three elements: first, a problem definition that lends itself to being solved by the proposed policy (a claim to tame the problem); second, a definition of the collective actors impacted by the policy (the victims); and third, a definition of the policy actors proposing the new policy (problem ownership). The identity of problem owners lies at the heart of this problematization process because problem owners are simultaneously defining a policy proposal and their own identity. However, they engage in this process in specific transactional situations (spaces where the “problem” is debated and addressed) that constrain and shape problem statements. The first policy position was advanced by bureaucratic experts in the Ministry of Energy who were responsible for the licensing. In response to criticism that shale gas development would lead to environmental impacts, the Ministry experts sought to define the problem in such a way that domesticated it, reaffirmed their ownership of the issue, and validated the permitting process and their own technical expertise. Essentially, they said that environmental impacts were possible only in the poorly regulated American shale gas industry. This position was immediately attacked by the media, triggering a meeting between the directors of the cabinets of the Ministries of Energy and of the Environment. In this policy transaction, the Ministries concluded that the expert's position was indefensible and left the Ministers responsible. As a result, they reproblematized shale gas as an issue of scientific uncertainty (as opposed to a routine regulatory issue) and they suspended the licenses until a commission of high-ranking civil service experts could fully examine the issue. With continuing protest and media attention, the third policy transaction took place in parliament where the shale gas issue became embroiled in partisan wrangling. Political one-upmanship led to defining the technology of fracking as the culprit, which resulted in a complete ban on shale gas development. Chailleux and Zittoun make a number of general points about the policymaking process as viewed through the policy transaction lens. First, they note that these different problematizations were advanced by different political actors (regulatory experts, Ministries, and parliamentarians) and, in each case, the problemization was co-constructed with the identities of the primary actors. Second, they point out that these three different problematizations cannot be traced back to different coalitions. Rather, at each stage there was a reconfiguration of who was mobilized to claim ownership over the problem. Finally, this perspective illuminates the institutional fragmentation and fluidity of actor interests and values. Sophia Wickberg (2025) article on the evolution of conflict-of-interest regulation in the French Parliament reveals similar dynamics. This regulation institutionalized “interest registers” that required legislators to formally declare any potential conflicts of interest. To understand how these interest registers were introduced, and eventually institutionalized, Wickberg combines policy transaction and policy translation perspectives. The latter focuses on how policy is transformed as it is “translated” across organizations, borders or policy venues. In this case, the idea of interest registers came from North America and Britain and from international organizations like the OECD. Wickberg emphasizes the “contingency” of the policy process as it develops through time. A key dynamic in the translation of these ideas to the French context was a scandal—the alleged hidden bank account of a Socialist Minister (the “Cahuzac scandal”)—that shaped the venues where interest registers were discussed, producing different kinds of policy transactions. Before the scandal, a policy discussion about interest registers was already occurring in a closed transactional arena (an “atrium”); after the scandal, the discussion shifted to a more public and mediatized arena (a “forum”). Wickberg focuses on the process of problematization that occurred as the scandal unfolded into a crisis to be managed. The key shift in this unfolding policy dynamic was a questioning of the ability of parliamentarians to self-regulate their own conflicts-of-interest, a problematization that both justified and was reinforced by the movement of debate outside of closed expert sessions. The scandal, in turn, served as a cudgel to subdue the resistance of parliamentarians to this claim. We witness a similarly complex policy evolution in Emilija Pundziūtė-Gallois (2025) policy transaction account of a major policy change in NATO in response to the Russian takeover of the Crimea. While the challenge of Russian aggression was evident in this case, what was at stake and what to do about it was far from initially clear. As a result, before policy change could occur, a process of problematization had to take place. The key protagonists in this process were Poland and the Baltic States, who sought reassurances that NATO would defend them in the case of Russian attack. While the treaty clearly expresses a principle of solidarity, the strategic and operational implementation of this principle is far murkier. An active process of valuation, interessement and enrollment ensued where different groups of NATO members debated the threat and NATO priorities, and where fluid member coalitions emerged. Pundziūtė-Gallois describes how the process of problematization, valuation, interessement and enrollment took shape across a variety of more closed atriums or more open arenas or forums. At a summit meeting in Wales in September 2014, these processes culminated in a rapprochement of sorts around the value of expanding NATO rapid response forces. These forces, however, were conceived as a general-purpose resource for responding to a range of threats. As a result, Poland and the Baltic States continued to push for the stationing of NATO troops in their region. Due to their lobbying and several important media developments, the issue was “reproblematized.” The new focus was on the difficulties that rapid response forces would have to overcome to reach and defend the Baltic States in a timely fashion. As the idea of having “boots on the ground” in the Baltic region gained support, southern European members decided to engage constructively but to limit the size of such a force. In this context, the concept of “deterrence” emerged as leitmotif that allowed NATO member to envisage forward bases of rotating troops as a general principle of NATO defense. Noting the fluidity and complexity of how NATO arrived at a Forward Presence policy, Pundziūtė-Gallois (2025, 10) concludes that “The pragmatist reading of the policy making process in NATO … usefully illustrates that interests, including what we traditionally call ‘national interests’ in IR, are not objectively obvious or fixed, but emerge in multiple diplomatic situations in which the representatives of states find themselves.” Szilvia Nagy (2025) core mission in her contribution to this special issue is to set out a distinctive methodology for investigating the situated and relational processes emphasized by the policy transaction perspective. As an important starting point for this analysis, Nagy relates the policy transaction perspective to the “policy worlds” perspective developed by Shore et al. (2011), which counterposes a more anthropological and interpretivist understanding of “policy worlds” to the conventional concept of “policy system.” A policy world is a “where policies belong to—and are embedded within—particular social and cultural worlds” that are understood to be “performative and continually contested spaces” (Nagy 2025, 4). Drawing inspiration from Adler and Pouliot's (2011) elaboration of practice theory, Nagy also argues that policy transactions can be understood as practices. She writes that a policy world can be analyzed as consisting of a “constellation” of interacting practices, shaped by “communities of practice.” These practices are “strategic transactions” that need to be understood both “synchronically and diachronically” (Nagy 2025, 8–9). What is an appropriate method for understanding the situated and relational transactions in a policy world? Nagy argues that policy ethnographies are ideal for “accessing the hidden dimensions of meaning-making” implied by the policy transaction perspective (Nagy 2025, 9). She is particularly interested in “multi-sited” ethnographies because they help to capture the transfer and translation of policies across institutional and national boundaries. Perhaps the most important contribution of the paper is Nagy's suggestion that policy ethnography can work along three dimensions: situational, dispositional and positional. From a methodological point of view, the situational dimension “maps” the relevant stakeholders, their strategic transactions and their communities of practice. The dispositional dimension refers to an investigation into the “underlying knowledge and background of practices” of these actors to reconstruct the meaning that actors give to their work (Nagy 2025, 12). Finally, the positional dimension investigates practices and discourses in terms of how they emerge from within a particular social configuration. Taken together, these three dimensions suggest a framework for using multi-sited ethnographies to study policy transactions. While the policy transaction perspective is still in its infancy, it builds on and extends a rich history on policy process analysis. Its main inspiration is to bring together the social constructivist attention to meaning making with the pragmatist understanding of relational processes. The papers in this special issue have suggested how we can begin to realize this perspective in practice and why it might be valuable for understanding policy outcomes. As suggested by all three empirical papers, processes of problematization are particularly central to this perspective. We have long known that problem definition is central to the policy process. A policy transaction perspective suggests that we can advance our understanding of problem definition by delving deeper—more situationally--into the relational processes by which problems are socially constructed. Future policy transaction research could pay similarly close attention to how interests, values, and identities are co-constructed. 本期《欧洲政策分析》特刊介绍了政策交易视角。正如Ansell、Hassenteufel和Zittoun(2025)在本期特刊文章中详述的那样, 政策交易视角旨在融合社会建构主义和实用主义哲学的思想, 从而形成一种独特的政策过程理解方法。社会建构主义视角聚焦于观念(Béland 2009)、话语(Durnova et al. 2016)、故事(Stone 1989)和叙事(Roe 1994)如何影响政策框架和问题定义(Rochefort and Cobb 1994)。实用主义则倡导一种关系性和过程性的哲学, 极大地启发了早期的公共政策研究, 尤其是Harold Lasswell的研究(Dunn 2019)。社会建构主义和实用主义的结合, 有助于我们更好地理解那些赋予公共政策和公共问题意义的关系过程。 正如Ansell、Hassenteufel和Zittoun(2025)所阐述的, 实用主义的交易理念是这种方法的核心。为了强调实用主义视角下交易的独特性, 在“trans”和“action”之间添加连字符或许有助于我们记住该术语的特定含义。虽然“transaction”一词通常指交换, 但拉丁语前缀“trans”暗示着某种贯穿或跨越。John Dewey和Arthur Bentley(1946)使用该术语来描述将关系过程分解为各个组成部分的难度 (与“互动”一词相对) 。用社会建构主义的术语来说, 交易是一个关系过程, 它产生要素的“共同建构”, 这些要素可以是叙事、身份或框架。政策交易视角的基本理念是密切关注公共政策要素——利益、价值观、身份——是如何通过关系过程共同建构的。 从静态或结构性的视角来看, 很难理解公共政策的共同建构本质。在这种视角下, 利益、价值观和身份认同似乎是原始的或本质性的, 因此被视为分析的固定起点。相比之下, 正如Ansell、Hassenteufel和Zittoun(2025)所阐述的, 实用主义采取了强烈的过程导向, 并假定政策利益、价值观和身份认同具有更大的流动性。因此, 它关注的是“问题化”这一过程, 而非“问题”这一固定对象；关注的是“评估”这一过程, 而非“价值”这一既定实体。通过这种方式, 政策交易视角优先考虑理解事物是如何形成的。为了获得这样的洞见, 政策交易视角认为我们必须聚焦于这些共同建构过程发生的场景。这些场景可能包括规划会议、议会听证会或公共大会, 它们都受制于不同的准入和辩论规则及规范。公共政策的形成受到特定情境下发生的交易的影响。因此, 政策交易视角将政策过程视为一系列政策情境的“碎片化组合”。 Sébastien Chailleux和Philippe Zittoun(2025)在其对法国页岩气政策发展的分析中很好地阐释了这些观点。尽管这两位作者在之前的著作(Zittoun and Chailleux 2022)中对这一发展进行了更详尽的阐述, 但他们在此仍以政策交易的视角重新分析了该案例。他们提出的问题是:如何理解法国政府为何以及如何在一年半左右的时间里就页岩气问题发布了三份不同的政策声明？第一份声明中, 政府向两家公司发放了页岩气勘探许可证, 并在引发抗议后仍然支持这一决定；第二份声明中, 政府暂停了这些许可证；第三份声明中, 政府彻底禁止了页岩气生产。为了分析这些政策转变, Chailleux和Zittoun着重研究了页岩气问题是如何被“问题化”或“重新问题化”的。他们认为, 问题化至少需要三个要素:首先, 需要对问题进行定义, 使其能够被拟议政策所解决 (即声称能够“驯服”问题) ；其次, 需要对受政策影响的集体行动者进行定义 (即“受害者”) ；第三, 需要对提出新政策的政策行动者进行定义 (即“问题所有权”) 。问题所有权者的身份是这一问题化过程的核心, 因为问题所有权者在定义政策提案的同时, 也在定义自身的身份。然而, 他们是在特定的交易情境中参与这一过程的 (即在特定情境中, “问题”被讨论和解决), 这些情境限制并影响了问题的表述。 第一个政策立场是由能源部负责许可证发放的官僚专家提出的。面对页岩气开发会导致环境影响的批评, 这些专家试图以一种既能使问题本土化, 又能重申自身对该问题的掌控权, 并为其审批流程和自身技术专长辩护的方式来定义问题。本质上, 他们认为只有在监管不力的美国页岩气行业才有可能造成环境影响。这一立场立即遭到媒体抨击, 并引发了能源部和环境部部长之间的会晤。在这次政策磋商中, 两部委一致认为专家的立场站不住脚, 并将责任推给了部长们。因此, 他们将页岩气问题重新定义为一个科学不确定性问题 (而非常规监管问题), 并暂停发放许可证, 直至一个由高级公务员专家组成的委员会对该问题进行全面审查。随着抗议活动和媒体关注的持续, 第三次政策博弈发生在议会, 页岩气问题陷入了党派纷争。政治上的相互较量导致水力压裂技术被认定为罪魁祸首, 最终导致页岩气开发被全面禁止。 Chailleux和Zittoun从政策博弈的视角出发, 对政策制定过程提出了若干总体观点。首先, 他们指出, 不同的问题化是由不同的政治主体 (监管专家、各部委和议员) 提出的, 而且在每种情况下, 问题化都与主要主体的身份认同共同构建。其次, 他们指出, 这三种不同的问题化并非源于不同的联盟。相反, 在每个阶段, 被动员起来争夺问题主导权的主体都发生了重新配置。最后, 这种视角揭示了制度上的碎片化以及主体利益和价值观的流动性。 Sophia Wickberg(2025)关于法国议会利益冲突监管演变的文章揭示了类似的动态。该监管制度将“利益登记册”制度化, 要求立法者正式申报任何潜在的利益冲突。为了理解这些利益登记册是如何引入并最终制度化的, Wickberg结合了政策交易和政策转化两种视角。后者侧重于政策如何在跨组织、跨国界或跨政策场所“转化”的过程中发生转变。在本例中, 利益登记册的概念源于北美和英国以及经合组织等国际组织。 Szilvia 2025, 2025, 2025, 2025, European Policy Analysis Zittoun (2025), ideas social ideas (Béland 2009), 2016), (Stone (Roe 1994) a (Rochefort 1994). particular Harold Lasswell (Dunn 2019). social a a Zittoun (2025), idea central a a John Dewey Arthur Bentley (1946) (a produce idea fundamental a Zittoun (2025), a debate. ideas Sébastien Chailleux Philippe Zittoun (2025) gas (Zittoun 2022), gas a gas gas Chailleux Zittoun gas a define a define a fundamental debate a gas gas gas a gas a a gas Chailleux Zittoun a Sophia Wickberg (2025) a a Wickberg idea Wickberg a ideas debate debate a Wickberg a crisis fundamental a debate a a a Emilija Pundziūtė-Gallois (2025) a Crimea. 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