This colloquium aims to provide a dedicated intellectual home for critical and interpretive scholars in public administration, policy analysis, and political science. Although diverse in orientation, these approaches a common starting point: a fundamental problematization of claims to objective knowledge about the social world.

We argue that critical and interpretive approaches to public administration are especially relevant in current times. Memories of nationwide lockdowns are still fresh, while campaigns against the rights of racial and religious minorities dominate elections. Governments worldwide are divided on the ongoing Gaza genocide and pulled in different directions when it comes to their contribution to it. Climate change progresses unabated, while authoritarian regimes undermine the administrative state. This necessitates a critical assessment of how states and social groups exercise power and countervailing power within evolving and increasingly complex governance arrangements. In other words: the need to critically assess the contribution of public administration to common policy goals has rarely been so acute.

While critical and interpretive scholars can be found in most public administration and political science departments of NIG universities, their numbers are relatively small, and at conferences they are generally one of a kind in thematic panels. This colloquium will strengthen interpretive and critical approaches in terms of content, methods, teaching, outputs and network, within the landscape of public administration and political science research.

The bundle Futures of public administration (Toekomst van de bestuurskunde) (Karré, Schillemans, Van der Steen, & Van der Wal, 2017), argues that public administration is mainly developing itself as a science that focuses on what Burawoy (2005) calls ‘professional’ and ‘policy’ types of knowledge. The majority of public administration research, in other words, produces knowledge that is either aimed at refining existing bodies of knowledge, or deals with practical questions posed by policymakers. As an alternative to more instrumental approaches, critical and interpretive approaches in public administration research address issues of power and domination (critical) as well as sensemaking, values, meaning-making and improvisation (interpretive).

Critical, also known as reflective or normative, public administration research questions the often-implicit power dimensions of administrations (Ringeling, 2017) and aims to add critical reflection on power dynamics and their effects in the politics of policymaking and societal debates. Critical public administration or political science primarily seeks to make reflexive contributions. What differs is that it does so by explicitly questioning paradigms that inform both theory and practice of public administration (Bovens, 2016; Triantafillou, 2017).

Interpretive approaches to public administration focus on ‘the meanings of policies, on the values, feelings and/or beliefs which they express, and on the processes by which those meanings are communicated to and ‘read’ by various audiences’ (Yanow, 1996, pp. 8-9). Interpretive studies are often strongly grounded in fieldwork, with researchers examining different levels of administrative, political, and organizational life up close – ranging from representatives and public managers to policymakers, frontline workers, citizens on the receiving end, and the interactions between them (Rhodes et al. 2007; Yanow 1996; Yanow 2000; Van Hulst et al. 2016; Rhodes 2011). Research focuses on daily practices of actors in the field or on particular processes, typically zooming in on the sensemaking they engage in.

Critical and interpretive research in public administration form a broad family – to some, they go hand in hand, others portray themselves as engaging in one, but not necessarily the other. They find each other in problematizing the idea of the objectively knowable (Wagenaar, 2011) and in a shared ambition to explore, at a rather fundamental level, the way in which actors “construct the world through acting on beliefs they also construct” (Bevir & Rhodes, 2010, p. 73).

Our goals are to:

1. Form, nurture and expand a community of interpretive and critical scholars within the fields of public administration and political science.
2. Build a supportive environment in which junior and senior scholars can receive and give feedback on work in progress, such as papers, manuscripts with an R&R, book proposals, and applications for research grants.
3. Facilitate cooperation between scholars – both junior and senior – resulting in collaborative research projects, joint publications, and/or the organization of panels at national and international conferences.
4. Facilitate philosophical and theoretical exchange between scholars beyond concrete research output, with the aim of strengthening the field and our knowledge of critical and interpretive public administration and political science.
5. Further the development of research methods usually employed within these approaches, such as ethnography, framing analysis, discourse analysis, etc.
6. Improve participants’ teaching of critical and interpretive approaches.
7. In the long term, solidify critical and interpretive administrative and political research in the Netherlands and Flanders.

To achieve these goals, we engage in the following activities:

1. Organize a recurring panel at the NIG Annual Work Conference, and additional panel sessions at international conferences such as held by the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR), International Public Policy Conference (ICPP), the European Group for Public Administration (EGPA), and the European Network for Public Administration (ENPA).
2. Contribute to NIG education in the form of a course for the PhD training program.
3. Organize a CIPA session during the yearly NIG colloquia off-site day.
4. Organize ad hoc events and workshops, such as the 2021 working session ‘Ethnography in times of COVID-19’, the upcoming writing seminar with John Forester (May 2026), or the conference ‘The politics of ‘the region’ in policy transformations’ (June 2026).
5. Publish proceedings of the research colloquium in a special issue (to be published towards the end of the colloquium duration). Next to this publication we also strive for journal publications in international peer-reviewed academic journals.

For some of these events, we invite a prominent scholar in the field to inspire with teachings on new developments in theory or methods, to contribute to our discussions from a broader or different perspective, and to comment and critically reflect on our work and progress. Other events focus on bringing both senior and junior members together to exchange shared topics, struggles, emerging themes and work-in-progress.

With the colloquium, we expect to generate the following output:  

1. Improved professionalization of public administration scholars using a critical or interpretive approach.
2. A recurring panel at the NIG annual work conference.
3. Attract at least 25 participants for ad hoc events.
4. An elective course for PhDs at the NIG training program.
5. Publication of a special issue and journal publications in international peer-reviewed academic journals.
6. Conference panel sessions co-authored by two or more members of the colloquium at international conferences such as held by the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR), International Public Policy Conference (ICPP), the European Group for Public Administration (EGPA), and the European Network for Public Administration (ENPA).

The colloquium explicitly contributes to the NIG’s overarching aim of ‘stimulat[ing], facilitate[ing], and assist[ing] the further scientific development of administrative and political science in the Netherlands’. By bringing junior and senior scholars together, we facilitate exchange and support network amongst researchers working with similar approaches across various NIG universities. Additionally, with the CIPA course we contribute to developing critical and interpretive approaches as a fundamental element of PA training for PhDs. Finally, by annually organizing a panel at the NIG conference, complemented by ad hoc events, we continue to contribute building community as a part of the larger NIG research network.

Sam Muller, Utrecht University – s.h.a.muller@uu.nl

Wouter van Rijk, Utrecht University – w.k.j.derijk@uu.nl

Simone van de Wetering, Tilburg University – s.a.l.vdwetering@tilburguniversity.edu