Telling about policy: Writing for reflexivity

Abstract

How might we engage global or transnational practitioners in talking and thinking about policy? This article offers a particular kind of practitioner, already concerned with advocacy, engagement and organizational development, a way of thinking about what they do and, in turn, what policy is and does and how it is made. It presents a research-based, narrative account of a policy officer visiting a country for the first time, as the trip – and the policy work on which the officer has embarked – is reconstructed in conversation with a professional mentor. This dialogue generates a reflexive self-awareness in the protagonist-practitioner, and the reporting of it prompts a similar reflexivity in the reader: The reader-practitioner learns vicariously, by watching a counterpart learn. A supplementary discussion engages with the very different presumed academic readership of this journal, reflecting on the credibility and validity of the story as a mode of academic writing and on its design and form as pedagogy.