Reframing Evidence Synthesis As Rhetorical Action in the Policy Making Drama

Abstract

This paper presents a novel conceptualization of policy making as social drama. The selection and presentation of evidence for policy making, including the choice of which questions to ask, which evidence to compile in a synthesis and which syntheses to bring to the policy making table, should be considered as moves in a rhetorical argumentation game and not as the harvesting of objective facts to be fed into a logical decision-making sequence. Viewing policy making as argument does not mean it is