ABSTRACT
This section will suggest that responding to the ‘whys and wherefores’ of voluntary sector policy demands attending to a range of factors at play in the worlds of politics and policy which, while evolving to a certain extent independently from one another and over very different timescales, came together at the end of the 1990s to generate change. The issue can be explored using the analytic framework developed by the US political scientist John W. Kingdon. Kingdon’s influential 1984 book, Agendas, Alternatives and Public Policies, revised and reissued in 1995, seeks to offer a systematic account of the concepts we need to answer the questions ‘How do subjects come to officials’ attention? How are the alternatives from which they choose generated? How is the governmental agenda set? Why does an idea’s time come when it comes?’ (Kingdon, 1995: xi). The fields examined in considerable detail over a number of years by Kingdon were transport and health policy in the US, but the generic approach does seem to provide at least a starting vocabulary for examining the emergence of UK voluntary sector policy, as long as some important limitations and caveats, to be discussed below, are recognized. This approach is appropriate because it is one of the few frameworks for analysing policy which gives particular attention to the agenda-setting phase of the policy process, treats rather than takes for granted the question of issue awareness or salience, while also allowing for a low level of institutionalization – the aspect which, necessarily, we are dealing with in this case.6
