Public policy without people: technocracy and power in Chile

In the 1970s and 1980s many critical policy scholars challenged the dominant traditional approaches to policy. Inspired by recent advances in social theory, they began to emphasize the role of interpretation, power, language use and context as key dimensions for understanding policy. However, despite the growth of critical approaches across the globe, their development has been uneven. In numerous countries, traditional approaches and the prevailing economic rationale associated with them still serve as the dominant lens through which public policy is understood and analyzed. This research examines how policy experts understand and frame public policy. The study focuses on the case of Chile, analyzing the views of the leading members of the Chilean Society of Public Policy (CSPP). Results reveal the predominance of a rationalist approach to policy analysis, where problems are perceived to exist ‘out there,’ waiting to be solved through technical expertise. The prevalence of a deeply rooted economic common sense configures an isolated field where public policy is commonly framed as a technocratic and apolitical activity that does not require consideration of the local knowledge held by people or attention to their diverse ways of making sense of the world in which they live.