Paper short abstract:

Taking a Danish university policy as its focus this paper explores the benefits and pitfalls of conceptualising policy in terms of ‘ownership’. A heuristic division between policy-as-text and policy-as-context is introduced in order to explore the anthropological criticism of ‘implementation’ studies and current move towards notions of ‘appropriation’.

Paper long abstract:

In spring 2005, an amendment was passed by the Danish Parliament. With the amendment Danish universities for the first time were required to charge tuition fees from certain non-European students. However, a particular university had charged fees from a group of mainly Chinese students since 2004 and a legal investigation of the fees was put into place. Some of the Chinese students heard about the investigation and wrote directly to the Minister of Science to provide him with 'related information'. They publicly complained about the 'low quality' of their programme and claimed that the university had accepted unqualified students in order to make more money.

The stories of illegal fees and students' complaints were the first public testing or negotiation of the amendment. The incidents make evident different ways of relating to, negotiating and exploring policy. On the one hand the anthropologist can explore policy as a text: as a reified substance that different actors consciously attempt to define in different ways. In this perspective, the notions of policy 'implementation' and 'appropriation' place the 'ownership' in different ends of the process. On the other hand, policy can be seen as much more diffuse constellations of governmental logics or technologies that are evoked as a context for explanation by different actors (the anthropologist incl.). This notion of policy as context brackets the quest for ownership and includes as part of the policy process actors and situations that are silenced when policy is conceived of as a reified entity or text to be owned, implemented or appropriated.