Dealing With Conflicting Values in Policy Experiments: A New Pragmatist Approach

• Author: Lieke Oldenhof,Rik Wehrens,Roland Bal
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00953997211069326
• Published date: 01 October 2022
• Date: 01 October 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00953997211069326

Administration & Society

2022, Vol. 54(9) 1736 –1766

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00953997211069326

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Article

Dealing With Conflicting

Values in Policy

Experiments: A New

Pragmatist Approach

Lieke Oldenhof1, Rik Wehrens1,

and Roland Bal1

Abstract

Despite the “turn to values” in Public Administration, there is still a lack

of empirical research in situ that investigates how various stakeholders

in interaction develop strategies to deal with conflicting values over

time. By using a new pragmatist approach, this article fills in this gap by

investigating policy experiments in Dutch healthcare. The results show

how professionals, citizens, and policymakers differently valued the worth

of policy experiments, which manifested itself in multiple value conflicts.

To deal with these conflicts, stakeholders adopted different strategies:

colonization, compromising, prioritization, short-cutting, organizational

enmeshing, and pilotification. The results show a shift from exclusive top-

down strategies to inclusive multi-value strategies over time.

Keywords

conflicting values, strategies, healthcare, policy experiment, pragmatism

1Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Corresponding Author:

Lieke Oldenhof, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Burgemeester Oudlaan 50, Rotterdam 3000

DR, The Netherlands.

Email: oldenhof@eshpm.eur.nl

1069326AAS0010.1177/00953997211069326Administration & SocietyOldenhof et al.

research-article2021

Oldenhof et al. 1737

Introduction

Despite the “turn to values” in the field of Public Administration (West &

Davis, 2011, p. 226), the majority of studies still focuses on philosophical and

theoretical discussions of values (see for a critique; de Graaf, 2015; de Graaf

et al., 2016; Paanakker, 2019, 2020; Wagenaar, 2014; West & Davis, 2011).

This conceptual interest in values has not been equally matched by empirical

research. As a consequence, we do not exactly know “how values shape prac-

tical action in situations” (West & Davis, 2011, p. 230) and how actors “grap-

ple with and make judgements about value conflicts when making policy

decisions” (Spicer, 2009, p. 539; see also de Graaf et al., 2016). Given this

gap in Public Values research, there is a need for empirical research that

investigates how multiple stakeholders—for example, public professionals,

policymakers, and citizens—in interaction deal with contested value ques-

tions on the ground. A key question on this agenda is how different stakehold-

ers frame, change, and transform values over time when dealing with difficult

and controversial social issues (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006; Kornberger,

2017; Oldenhof et al., 2014; Van der Wal, 2016). This question can also pro-

vide new insights into the various strategies that multiple stakeholders prag-

matically develop to deal with conflicting values in practices.

This paper aims to contribute to the empirical research agenda on values

by particularly focusing on conflicting values in policy experiments that join

multiple stakeholders in the co-design, experimentation, implementation, and

evaluation of innovative policy ideas in local settings. We argue that a focus

on policy experiments is productive for gaining new insights into how value

conflicts are constituted and experienced by multiple stakeholders for various

reasons. First, an important goal of policy experiments is to move beyond the

status quo of existing routines, thereby potentially disrupting institutional-

ized values and renegotiating new value settlements. This makes policy

experiments an ideal case to investigate how stakeholders critique, reshuffle,

renegotiate, and reinvent values. Second, as a consequence of this disruptive

focus, policy experiments are known to be characterized by a high degree of

ambiguity and conflict (Nair & Howlett, 2016). Because there is no blueprint

for action, multiple stakeholders need to negotiate the meaning, purpose,

direction, and operationalization of experiments under conditions of uncer-

tainty and power inequality in networks (Ettelt et al., 2015; Felder et al.,

2018; Nair & Howlett, 2016). It is therefore likely that value conflicts will be

part and parcel of policy experiments, thereby providing ample empirical

opportunities for investigating how stakeholders differently perceive which

values (no longer) count. Third, in policy experiments stakeholders are

encouraged to develop joint ways of problem-solving that partially transcend