ABSTRACT
Processes of negotiation and mutual adjustment are the focus of much scholarship that adopts a ‘policy perspective’. This perspective questions the ability of actors to achieve a synoptic overview of a policy problem on both organisational and cognitive grounds. As a consequence the scope for rational policymaking is strictly limited. Instead, the contingencies of the construction of policy ‘problems’ and ‘solutions’ (and how they are brought together) are emphasised. Even once a policy has been ‘made’, actors face further radical difficulties in attempting to implement it. A focus on the independent and/or constitutive influence of ideas and knowledge has provided a fruitful prospectus for much recent policy analytic research. In the first edition of this book I applied a policy perspective to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and Community law. I continue to believe that this perspective is particularly appropriate for analysing European integration, the development of European Community law and the Court of Justice (as an actor).
