Arise old blog, arise !

Over the course of the last couple of years I have stepped back from this blog, largely because I have been back in learning mode, ploughing through coursework, comps, papers and proposals as part of ongoing work toward a PhD in Public Policy. What started out as a simple plan – get into some dedicated research space to work toward preconceived and specific goals, by way of carving out a professional niche – has turned into a great intellectual adventure. The original idea was to bring theory to years of practical experience in science-based water policy (which in turn was based on a technical foundation in water resources engineering). However the theory has opened up on all sides giving occasional glimpses of a sort of “superview”, as one colleague put it, of the public policy landscape; history, methods, disciplinary perspectives, processes, concepts and vocabularies, ideologies, institutions, actors, etc.

Now as the ideas pile up and connections continue to take shape it is time to write again. Indeed there has been a lot of writing along the way but now it’s time to pull out shorter pieces and take on documenting various aspects of the larger whole. At this point the objective will be to keep things relatively tight, and limited to key references, but that may change. I hope to provide a sense of how one piece fits within the larger picture, but the topic areas will be diverse, spanning from water and watershed governance to political philosophy to economic theory, through crosscutting institutional dimensions, and back again (and more), so tracing linkages between the many different dimensions will be neither easy nor complete, but hopefully it will be interesting.