Policy Analysis in High Inequalities in Asia

"This book represents a welcome and much needed addition to the public policy literature. Distinguishing deliberative settings and apt responses, the authors extend interpretive, argumentative, and critical pragmatic approaches to policy analysis from epistemological critiques to imagine fresh process designs in institutional contexts of hierarchy and inequality."

-- John Forester, Professor Emeritus of City and Regional Planning, Cornell University

"This book is an important contribution to Public Policy in Asia. Sacramento, Boossabong, and Chamchong propose an 'epistemic emancipation' that integrates Asian context-sensitivity within highly unequal societies. By exploring how actors, narratives, and deliberative spaces shape policy, they offer a compelling reflection on critical pragmatism and the centrality of the pragmatic perspective in understanding the policy process in Asia."

-- Philippe Zittoun, Research Professor of Political Science, University of Lyon & General Secretary, International Public Policy Association

"This book makes an important intervention in the literature on policy studies in Asia. Adeptly employing a critical policy studies approach, it questions established norms of power and shows how deliberative policy designs can articulate the voices of newly empowered young people in Asian nations. For public policy scholars, this work is enlightening by elaborating how different cultural norms inform policy engagements outside the Western liberal-democratic mainstream."

-- Nick Turnbull, Professor of Rhetoric and Public Policy, University of Manchester

"This book offers an important contribution to critical policy studies by examining how policy-analytic practices operate under conditions of deep socio-economic, cultural, and epistemic inequalities. Drawing on Asian case studies of how youth policy issues are problematized in policy labs, the book illustrates how policy analysts, together with other participants like civil society stakeholder organizations and citizens, navigate power, institutional and cultural constraints, and uncertainty in practice. While grounded in global majority Asian contexts, its core contribution is in advancing a critical-pragmatic and deliberative approach to policy analysis, which clearly speaks to global minority Western debates. The volume will be of interest to scholars and advanced students in critical policy analysis, comparative governance, and Asian studies."

-- Robert Hoppe, Professor Emeritus of Knowledge and Policy, University of Twente