2025-06-11 –, BS 3.15 - 60 cap.
Background
Extensive critique of the evidence-based policy paradigm has led to new ways of considering the role of evidence, for example Katherine Smith suggests that “ideas” rather than evidence mediate “the relationship between research and policy”. In this paper, we apply Smith’s work on “ideas”, including differing levels and types of ideas, and their journeys through policy processes, to explore how this framework can be fruitfully applied to a case of Australian policy making: a police diversion scheme for simple possession of drugs.
Method
We trace the ‘idea’ of non-criminal responses as expressed through a policy solution idea (a police diversion scheme), within NSW, from 2019 to 2024, applying premises from Smith’s work. Data sources included documentary analysis (reports, media), interviews with stakeholders, and the authors’ own notes and reflections (autoethnography), as participants in both evidence-generation and evidence-critique around police diversion.
Results
Features of ‘institutionalised ideas’ suggest that police diversion is unlikely to become an institutionalised idea. It could be considered a ‘chameleonic idea’ inasmuch as its characteristics change and are malleably deployed by different stakeholders with different interests. In addition the ambiguity around the data available on the police diversion scheme provides further opportunity for police diversion to operate chameleonically. ‘Flexian policy actors’ (including police, government officials, advocates, and researchers) are able to interpret, transform, and shape the meaning of the data to suit their interests and commitments. The idea of police diversion as it relates to evidence, implementation, and expansion represents three of Smith’s journeys: recontextualised, partial and fractured.
Conclusions
Smith’s conceptual tools facilitated new insights into the instability of police diversion as an idea. This suggests optimism for those seeking to reform drug laws in more substantial ways than police diversion. Simultaneously, the power of it as a chameleonic idea suggests that it is less likely to be unseated by alternative ideas (such as decriminalisation).
Alison Ritter & Paul Kelaita
Drug Policy Modelling Program, SPRC, University of New South Wales
Professor Alison Ritter, AO is a drug policy scholar and Director of the Drug Policy Modelling Program at the Social Policy Research Centre, UNSW, Sydney. She conducts research on drug laws, drug treatment, models and methods of democratic participation in drug policy; and research focussed on policy process. Her work is supported by grants from competitive research funding bodies (NHMRC, ARC) as well as commissioned research from governments across Australia and internationally. She is past President of the International Society for the Study of Drug Policy, and Editor for the International Journal of Drug Policy. Professor Ritter has an extensive research grant track record and has published widely in the field.