ABSTRACT
In mainstream development circles, one seldom hears ‘culture’ and ‘policy’ uttered in the same breath: the domain of culture is often seen as marginal to development policy, and any suggestion — evident for instance in the expression ‘the culture of development policy’ — that the policy formulation process might itself have cultural dimensions, is likely to be met with incredulity. Policy-making is typically viewed as a technical and institution-laden process, and while culture may become an object of policy, it is thought to have little to do with the process of policy-making. Yet, the construction and institutionalization of policy involve noteworthy representational practices: to make policy is necessarily to imagine it, to speak and write about it, to discuss and debate it, and to see it implemented (or be seen to be implementing it) in this or that way. Development policy is thus semiotically mediated, that is, it is culturally embedded and transacted, involving the production and systematization of particular languages, images, rhetorics.
