A CONCEPTUAL SYSTEMS APPROACH TO POLICY PRODUCT INTEGRATION TO OVERCOME POLICY FRAGMENTATION

a workable integrative propositional analysis approach

Abstract

The policy integration and design literature have been divided into two separate, but complementary analytical domains: policy process integration and policy product integration. Studies on the former are vast, while studies on the latter are scant, even though a policy’s textual content is an important mediating factor. Due to the limited study of policy product integration and the lack of valid and reliable methods, this paper contributes by adding a conceptual systems perspective to policy product integration, to overcome policy fragmentation. Policy content is an abstractable unit of analysis in both policy design and policy product integration, which makes it amenable to the systems-based integrative propositional analysis, which studies policy content as conceptual systems. The theoretical point of departure is that there are deep structural similarities between the domains of systems (including physical, conceptual, social etc.) and that the insights of one system allow for similarities to be exploited and transferred to understanding the other. These include the systems concepts and ideas such as, systems as open/closed, nestedness, interacting, emergence, evolving, and so on. This paper proposes that policy product integration should be studied as conceptual systems using the IPA method for analysing policy interaction and to build policy landscapes based on the policy mapping capability enabled by the IPA. To this end, an illustrative case of 3 Nigerian policies aligned to nutrition was used for the application of the IPA to study policy product integration. Based on the case and existing insights from the literature the study found: (1) the propositions in policy content provide a ‘universal language’ to facilitate policy product integration (2) there are various modes of interaction between policies in a policy landscape; (3) there are various degrees of integration based on the structure of the policy landscape, and (4) practical mapping can be used for collaborative policy making in parallel with the study of policy structure.