ABSTRACT
Healthy People: A Participatory Public Health Policy Process In her book, Policy Paradox, Deborah Stone (1997) argues that policy making is not always a rational process of cool-headed decision making among people seeking to maximize their individual self-interests and well-being in an orderly sequence of stages. Rather, she off ers a model of policy making that invokes metaphor and category making to persuade other people to adopt a particular policy. The essence of policy making, in her view, is the struggle over ideas to create shared meaning about the public interest and the nature of the community. Rather than being a marketplace of individuals maximizing self-interest, she considers it to be communities trying to achieve something as communities-motivating people to collective action (Stone, 1997).
