What is the focus of this conference?

The conference focuses on the interpretive turn in policy studies, exploring theoretical and methodological approaches to understanding policy processes through meaning-making, discourse, and social construction.

14th Interpretive Policy Analysis Conference – European Edition

Name: 14th Interpretive Policy Analysis Conference – European Edition
Start: 2027-01-13T00:00:00Z
End: 2027-01-15T00:00:00Z
Location: Budapest

Jan 13–15, 2027Budapest, HungaryIn-person

Registration open

The 14th Interpretive Policy Analysis Conference – European Edition is an academic gathering focused on the interpretive turn in policy studies. Hosted in Budapest, HUN, this conference provides a forum for scholars to engage with diverse theoretical and methodological approaches to policy analysis. The event emphasizes understanding policy processes through the lenses of meaning-making, discourse, and social construction. Participants will explore how interpretive methodologies can illuminate the complexities of policy formulation, implementation, and evaluation, offering insights beyond traditional positivist approaches. The conference aims to foster critical dialogue and advance the field of interpretive policy analysis within a European context.

Committees & topics

Topics
Averting Planetary Destruction and Developing a Sustainable World · Exposing and Reducing Intersectional Inequalities and Injustices · Building Democratic Capabilities Against Authoritarian Politics and Digital Technologies · When Democracy Strains: Rethinking Conflict and Collaboration in Turbulent Times · Knowledge, Emotion, and the Politics of What Counts as Truth · Restoring the Social Fabric and Transforming Governance Systems in Times of Societal Division · Recognising and Strengthening the Nature, Diversity, and Impact of Critical-Interpretive Research, Including Co-Producing Change · Teaching and Learning Critical-Interpretive Research Across Diverse Contexts

Why it matters

This conference is significant for several reasons. First, it underscores the growing recognition of interpretive approaches in understanding public policy, moving beyond purely quantitative or rational choice models. By focusing on how actors interpret and give meaning to policies, the conference addresses the subjective and cultural dimensions that often shape policy outcomes.

Second, the European edition provides a crucial regional focus, allowing for discussions on policy challenges and interpretive insights specific to the European political and social landscape. This localized perspective is vital for developing nuanced understandings of policy dynamics within the continent. Finally, the event serves as a platform for networking and collaboration among researchers, fostering a community dedicated to advancing interpretive policy analysis and applying its insights to contemporary governance issues.

How to prepare

For those preparing to engage with the themes of the 14th Interpretive Policy Analysis Conference, a strong understanding of various interpretive methodologies is essential. Familiarity with concepts such as discourse analysis, narrative analysis, and frame analysis will be particularly beneficial. Consider how these approaches differ from and complement more traditional policy analysis methods.

Reviewing case studies that apply interpretive lenses to policy issues within Europe can provide valuable context. Think about how cultural, historical, and political specificities of the region might influence policy interpretation and implementation. Additionally, exploring the works of key scholars in interpretive policy analysis will deepen your engagement with the conference's core themes. Consider how different theoretical perspectives, such as those discussed in the "Dynamic Analysis" lesson, can be applied to policy contexts. Understanding "What Is Stakeholder Mapping?" and the concept of "Hidden Stakeholders" can also provide a practical framework for analyzing the various actors and their interpretations within policy processes.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 1 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Hungary

As the host nation, Hungary provides a unique backdrop for discussions on interpretive policy analysis, particularly concerning democratic transitions and challenges.

Role in topic

Hungary's recent political trajectory and its position within the European Union offer a rich case study for examining policy interpretation in contexts of democratic backsliding and shifting governance paradigms. The host institution's location in Budapest facilitates a focus on Central and Eastern European perspectives within the broader interpretive policy analysis discourse.

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Averting Planetary Destruction and Developing a Sustainable World

The contemporary sustainability crisis is the cumulative product of two centuries of fossil-fuel-based industrialisation, post-war mass consumption, and a global economic order premised on continuous growth. Scientific consensus, codified through successive IPCC assessment cycles since 1990, has established that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are driving warming, biodiversity collapse, ocean acidification, and the transgression of multiple planetary boundaries identified by Stockholm Resilience Centre researchers. The 1992 Rio Earth Summit, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the 2015 Paris Agreement, and the 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework form the principal multilateral architecture, yet implementation has consistently lagged ambition. The core dispute centres on the distribution of responsibility and cost. Developing states invoke 'common but differentiated responsibilities' to demand finance, technology transfer, and loss-and-damage compensation from historic emitters, while industrialised states resist binding obligations and emphasise emerging-economy emissions, particularly from China and India. COP28 in Dubai produced the first explicit call to transition away from fossil fuels, but COP29 in Baku exposed deep north–south fractures over the New Collective Quantified Goal on climate finance, ultimately set at USD 300 billion annually by 2035 — far below the trillions developing states sought. Today the debate has shifted from whether to act to how to govern a contested transition: managing stranded assets, critical mineral supply chains, carbon border adjustments, just transition for fossil-fuel-dependent workers, and the role of interpretive policy analysis in surfacing whose knowledge and values shape 'sustainability' itself.

Key players

Exposing and Reducing Intersectional Inequalities and Injustices

The concept of intersectionality, articulated by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, has become a central analytical lens for understanding how race, gender, class, disability, sexuality, migration status, and other axes of identity compound disadvantage. Its policy uptake has been uneven: while the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action, the 2001 Durban Declaration against racism, and the UN 2030 Agenda's pledge to 'leave no one behind' embed equality commitments, structural inequalities have widened in many regions since the 2008 financial crisis and were further exposed by the asymmetric impacts of COVID-19. The core dispute concerns both diagnosis and remedy. Some governments and scholars argue inequality is best addressed through universal social policy and economic redistribution; others insist that without targeted measures attentive to intersecting identities, universalism reproduces existing hierarchies. The rise of 'anti-woke' political movements in the United States, United Kingdom, Hungary, and elsewhere has politicised diversity, equity, and inclusion frameworks, while feminist foreign policies adopted by Sweden (until 2022), Canada, Mexico, Germany, and others have sought to mainstream gender and intersectional analysis into diplomacy and development. Current debates focus on data disaggregation, reparative justice claims (including for slavery and colonialism), backlash against gender and LGBTQ+ rights, the racialised dimensions of climate vulnerability, and how interpretive research can make visible the lived experience of those whom aggregate indicators obscure.

Key players

Building Democratic Capabilities Against Authoritarian Politics and Digital Technologies

Democratic backsliding has been documented since the mid-2000s by V-Dem, Freedom House, and the IDEA Global State of Democracy reports, which now classify more of the world's population as living under autocratising than democratising regimes. The trend combines classic illiberal moves — judicial capture, media consolidation, civil society restriction — with novel digital instruments: algorithmic amplification of polarising content, micro-targeted political advertising, state-aligned disinformation operations exposed in cases from Russia's Internet Research Agency to coordinated campaigns documented around elections in the Philippines, Brazil, and the United States. The core dispute pits competing visions of digital sovereignty and platform governance. The European Union's Digital Services Act and AI Act advance a rights-based regulatory model; the United States has historically prioritised First Amendment protections and platform self-regulation; China and Russia promote 'cyber sovereignty' enabling state control; and many Global South states navigate between these poles while confronting platforms headquartered abroad. Generative AI, deepfakes, and the 2024 'super-cycle' of elections intensified concerns about synthetic media and foreign interference. The question before scholars and policymakers is how to build civic, institutional, and technological capabilities — media literacy, independent electoral bodies, interoperable platforms, protected encryption, whistleblower channels — that strengthen democratic resilience without replicating the surveillance architectures of the regimes they oppose.

Key players

When Democracy Strains: Rethinking Conflict and Collaboration in Turbulent Times

Across consolidated and emerging democracies alike, polarisation, distrust of institutions, and the fragmentation of public spheres have produced what scholars increasingly call a 'democratic recession'. Pippa Norris, Yascha Mounk, and others link the strain to economic dislocation since 2008, cultural backlash against rapid social change, the displacement of mass parties by personalised movements, and the procedural exhaustion of consensus-based policymaking on issues such as migration, climate, and identity. The core question is whether intensified conflict is symptomatic of democratic decline or a legitimate feature of pluralist politics that institutions must learn to channel. Agonistic democratic theorists, following Chantal Mouffe, argue that suppressing conflict in the name of technocratic consensus fuels populist revolt; deliberative democrats counter with experiments in citizens' assemblies, deployed on abortion in Ireland, climate in France and the UK, and constitutional reform in Iceland and Chile, that have shown capacity to produce reasoned agreement on divisive issues. Contemporary practice is searching for hybrid forms: mini-publics linked to legislatures, participatory budgeting, co-production with affected communities, and conflict-transformation methods drawn from peacebuilding. The interpretive policy analysis tradition contributes by examining how framings of 'conflict' and 'consensus' themselves shape what collaboration becomes possible.

Key players

Knowledge, Emotion, and the Politics of What Counts as Truth

Concerns about a 'post-truth' politics, named Oxford word of the year in 2016, predate the term: science and technology studies scholars from Bruno Latour to Sheila Jasanoff have long argued that authoritative knowledge is co-produced with social order, and that claims to neutral, value-free expertise have always been politically situated. The COVID-19 pandemic, climate denial, vaccine controversies, and contested election results have nonetheless sharpened public attention to how facts, expertise, emotion, and identity interact in shaping policy legitimacy. The core dispute is whether the appropriate response is a reassertion of expert authority and fact-checking infrastructure, or a more reflexive politics that acknowledges the affective and interpretive dimensions of all knowledge claims, including those of experts. Affect theorists and feminist epistemologists argue that dismissing public emotion as irrationality misreads the legitimate grievances animating distrust; risk communication scholars caution that emotion-blind technocracy fuels backlash. Meanwhile, generative AI threatens to industrialise the production of plausible-sounding falsehoods, while well-funded denial industries continue to manufacture doubt on climate, tobacco-style. The policy field is now contending with how to design institutions — public service media, science advisory bodies, participatory technology assessment, transparency regimes — that can hold space for both rigorous evidence and the emotional, ethical, and contextual dimensions of contested issues.

Key players

Recognising and Strengthening the Nature, Diversity, and Impact of Critical-Interpretive Research, Including Co-Producing Change

Critical-interpretive policy research traces its lineage to the 'argumentative turn' of the 1990s, associated with Frank Fischer, John Forester, Maarten Hajer, and Dvora Yanow, which challenged the positivist assumptions of mainstream policy analysis. Drawing on hermeneutics, discourse analysis, ethnography, and post-structural theory, it foregrounds meaning-making, framing, and power in policy processes. Over three decades the tradition has diversified to include decolonial, feminist, queer, disability, and Indigenous methodologies, as well as practice-based, narrative, and arts-based inquiry. The core dispute concerns recognition and impact within research ecosystems still dominated by quantitative metrics, randomised controlled trials, and 'what works' evidence hierarchies. Funders and assessment regimes — REF in the UK, ANVUR in Italy, ERC programmes, Horizon Europe missions — increasingly demand demonstrable impact, which can both legitimise engaged scholarship and constrain its critical edge. Co-production with affected communities raises further questions about authorship, accountability, intellectual property, and the risk of extractive 'participation-washing'. The field is now consolidating shared standards for rigour in interpretive work, building infrastructure for co-produced knowledge (community advisory boards, ethics frameworks beyond IRB compliance, open methods repositories), and contesting the institutional conditions under which critical research can flourish without losing its critical purchase.

Key players

Teaching and Learning Critical-Interpretive Research Across Diverse Contexts

Pedagogy in critical-interpretive policy analysis confronts a structural mismatch: while public administration, policy, and political science curricula remain heavily oriented toward quantitative methods, cost-benefit analysis, and rational-choice frameworks, students increasingly encounter wicked problems — climate, migration, AI governance, pandemics — that demand interpretive, reflexive, and ethically attuned approaches. Programmes in the Netherlands, the UK, Scandinavia, and parts of North America have built dedicated interpretive methods training, but globally such offerings remain uneven and often marginal. The core challenges are pedagogical and political. Pedagogically, teaching reflexivity, positionality, and embodied research practice requires small-group, dialogic formats that sit awkwardly with mass-lecture and online-scaling imperatives. Politically, in contexts including Hungary (Central European University's forced relocation), the United States ('anti-woke' legislation restricting curricula), Turkey, and India, critical scholarship faces explicit institutional pressure. In Global South contexts, debates over decolonising the curriculum — catalysed by South Africa's #RhodesMustFall movement — intersect with critical-interpretive pedagogy's commitments to plural epistemologies. Current practice is experimenting with case-based teaching, role-play and simulation, fieldwork-intensive courses, community placements, and reflective portfolios, while building transnational networks (IPA conference, ECPR standing groups, regional summer schools) that allow students and early-career scholars to develop craft across diverse institutional settings.

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for 14th Interpretive Policy Analysis Conference – European Edition.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

Rahul Gandhi Defends Tamil Nadu's Autonomy

India's 131st Amendment Bill

Ken Martin's DNC Autopsy Reveals Party Strugg

DNC Autopsy Reveals Democrats' 2024 Failures

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

Dynamic Analysis

Gender Dynamics Across Cultures

What Is Stakeholder Mapping?

Hidden Stakeholders

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Conflict Resolution

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

The states in play, with the data that shapes their stance

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

By committee

Frequently asked questions

14th Interpretive Policy Analysis Conference – European Edition

Jan 13–15, 2027Budapest, HungaryIn-person

Registration open

Committees & topics

Topics
Averting Planetary Destruction and Developing a Sustainable World · Exposing and Reducing Intersectional Inequalities and Injustices · Building Democratic Capabilities Against Authoritarian Politics and Digital Technologies · When Democracy Strains: Rethinking Conflict and Collaboration in Turbulent Times · Knowledge, Emotion, and the Politics of What Counts as Truth · Restoring the Social Fabric and Transforming Governance Systems in Times of Societal Division · Recognising and Strengthening the Nature, Diversity, and Impact of Critical-Interpretive Research, Including Co-Producing Change · Teaching and Learning Critical-Interpretive Research Across Diverse Contexts

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 1 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Hungary

As the host nation, Hungary provides a unique backdrop for discussions on interpretive policy analysis, particularly concerning democratic transitions and challenges.

Role in topic

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Averting Planetary Destruction and Developing a Sustainable World

Key players

Exposing and Reducing Intersectional Inequalities and Injustices

Key players

Building Democratic Capabilities Against Authoritarian Politics and Digital Technologies

Key players

When Democracy Strains: Rethinking Conflict and Collaboration in Turbulent Times

Key players

Knowledge, Emotion, and the Politics of What Counts as Truth

Key players

Recognising and Strengthening the Nature, Diversity, and Impact of Critical-Interpretive Research, Including Co-Producing Change

Key players

Teaching and Learning Critical-Interpretive Research Across Diverse Contexts

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for 14th Interpretive Policy Analysis Conference – European Edition.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

Rahul Gandhi Defends Tamil Nadu's Autonomy

India's 131st Amendment Bill

Ken Martin's DNC Autopsy Reveals Party Strugg

DNC Autopsy Reveals Democrats' 2024 Failures

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

Dynamic Analysis

Gender Dynamics Across Cultures

What Is Stakeholder Mapping?

Hidden Stakeholders

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Conflict Resolution

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

The states in play, with the data that shapes their stance

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

By committee

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

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Frequently asked questions

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

Related conferences

A Pivotal Year: Israel, the Middle East, the US, and Europe Come 2026

Mutual Understanding: Bilateral Projects between MCC and Asian Students

V4 Summit 2026

International Conference on Internationalism and Globalization (ICIG) 2026

6th Visegrad Conference: New multipolar order or global disorder?

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Frequently asked questions