What future for the policy sciences?

The term “policy sciences” refers both to a distinctive tradition within the policy movement and to the broader policy movement itself. While the generic use of this term is sure to persist, the community of policy scientists trained in the tradition founded by Harold Lasswell and Myres S. McDougal faces challenges to its sustainability as a distinctive tradition of the policy movement. To motivate open discussion and debate, this essay follows the logic of a problem-oriented analysis, and also includes personal reflections and anecdote, with the following objectives: It suggests that the policy sciences tradition faces challenges to its sustainability because of the simple arithmetic of generational turnover in university faculty. It explores six factors internal and external to the policy sciences community militating against sustainability. The essay then critiques three different roles the policy scientist might play in contemporary academia, and concludes with a discussion of alternatives that might enhance the sustainability of the policy sciences tradition, should sustainability indeed be a desired outcome.     

Agency, Structure, and Social Chance as Cross-Disciplinary Concepts

It is appropriate that social scientists should develop explicit conceptualisations of agency, structure and social chance, these being three major dimensions of social and political life. The agency–structure debate, which refers to theoretical and ontological issues that tend not to be explicitly discussed by political scientists, is an important interdisciplinary starting point for conceptual and empirical work involving collaboration between political scientists and sociologists. Following a theoretical review of agency, structure and chance, it is argued that empirical research concerned with the study of politics and policy – indeed, social scientific research on any topic – should employ an ontology and methodology that focuses on the dynamics of interaction between agency, structure and social chance.     

After Columbia: The Space Shuttle Program and the Crisis in Space Access

The loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia on 1 February 2003 brought to the fore the sad history of the Space Shuttle's origins, evolution, operation, and the continuing challenge of space access. The crisis that emerged in human access to space because of the accident was greater than any experienced since the end of the Apollo program more than thirty years earlier. This essay explores the origins and operations of the Space Shuttle, the varied efforts to build a successor vehicle versus upgrading the shuttle fleet, and suggests that the first decade of the twenty-first century promises to offer both serious challenges and enormous potential for the development of new launch vehicles that may finally achieve the long-held dream of reliable, affordable access to space. The essay ends by asking whether or not the half-hearted quest for a shuttle replacement might not portend the demise human spaceflight for the United States.