Policies, Children, and Road Safety: contributions from the WPR approach to policy analysis

Abstract

We consider public attention to child safety in traffic from the Foucault-inspired approach What’s The Problem Represented to Be? (WPR) by Carol Bacchi, whose premise lies in using policy texts and policy proposals to access problematizations through which we are governed. It highlights a potential to rethink conventional emphases in agenda setting and in policy-making processes. The WPR approach suggests that in the internalization of children’s safety discourse, the ‘problem’ of traffic is not given a priori, but is also produced discursively in the context of policies and policy proposals with practical effects on the daily lives of children in urban areas.

Keywords:
policy analysis; WPR; children; road safety