Progress in Human Geography 25,2 (2001) pp.

189–210

Geography and public policy: the

case of the missing agenda
Ron Martin
Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 3EN, UK

Abstract: The past two decades have seen a wholesale rethinking and reworking of public
policy, and have provided geographers with a major opportunity to enter and help shape the
policy debate. Yet, disappointingly, the impact of geography on the policy realm has been
limited. Increasingly, it seems, other social, political and environmental scientists, and even
media pundits, shape public perception and government policy in areas where we as
geographers could – indeed should – be having much greater influence. In this article I examine
the reasons for this state of affairs. The fundamental problem, I argue, is that for a variety of
reasons much contemporary social and economic geography research renders it of little practical
relevance for policy, in some cases of little social relevance at all. The more significant reasons
for this lack of relevance to, and influence on, the policy realm include: the effects on the subject
of the postmodern and cultural ‘turns’; the consequential emphasis on ‘sexy’ philosophical,
linguistic and theoretical issues rather than on practical social research; the retreat from detailed,
rigorous empirical work; the intellectual bias against policy studies; and the lack of political
commitment. The article makes a plea for a new ‘policy turn’ in the discipline, and concludes
with some tentative suggestions for how we might move towards a ‘geography of public policy’.

Key words: commitment, geography, policy, relevance, rigour.

I Introduction: outlining the problem

Writing an article on the subject of ‘geography and policy’ may not at first appear to be
a particularly worthwhile enterprise. After all, a previous writer on this topic for
Progress in Human Geography admitted that he found himself in ‘the peculiar position of
being far from certain what this research field is about’ (Hoggart, 1996: 110). However,
he is not alone: I suspect many share his uncertainty. It is far from easy to differentiate
the subfield from other branches of human geography. Hoggart, for example, was
concerned to distinguish the geography of policy from political geography, arguing that
the former is considerably wider than the latter. Some might take this argument further
and claim that virtually every aspect of research in human geography is of potential
policy relevance in one way or another, thus making the review task both difficult and

© Arnold 2001 0309–1325(01)PH319RA

190 Geography and public policy: the case of the missing agenda

of doubtful value. Yet others, I suspect, fervently oppose the very idea of delimiting a
‘geography of policy’; either on the grounds that it simply revives, in a somewhat
different guise, all the problems and contentions of the old ‘relevance’ debate that
afflicted geography in the early-1970s; or because policy studies are seen as driven by
topic or, worse still, by the political dictates of governmental and other research funding
bodies, and as typically making little contribution to the underlying theoretical
development of human geography as a whole. There would seem to be good grounds,
therefore, for giving the issue a wide berth.
And yet, on further reflection, I think such a reaction would be inadequate and irre-
sponsible. As a social science and, moreover, as a supposedly critical social science, I
believe that human geography has a moral duty to engage with public policy issues and
debate.1 I say moral duty, because what is the point of continually seeking to expand
and deepen our knowledge and understanding of society, the economy and the
environment if this knowledge and understanding is not used to help improve social,
economic and environmental conditions? As social scientists, I believe human
geographers have an obligation to apply our ideas in the pursuit of the betterment of
society. This is obviously a value-laden and contentious claim. Some might question
whether human geographers, social scientists or other academics have any such
obligation, or why geographers should feel any more obliged to engage in policy
research than, say, historians, who generally have only limited scope for policy-related
work. My claim derives in part from a personal belief that a subject such as ours, which
studies contemporary societal, economic and environmental systems in which we are
ourselves active agents, has a commitment to generate and disseminate knowledge that
both informs others of how those systems operate and how they might be changed.
This is not to argue that geographers have any unique ‘expert’ status, nor to espouse a
technocratic view of policy. It is simply to argue that the nature of our discipline – like
other social sciences – affords the basis for such a role. Many members of the public, I
suspect, are interested precisely in the practical and applied usefulness of subjects like
our own.
I would insist, therefore, that the improvement of socioeconomic welfare has to be one
of the primary aims of the discipline: the essential motivation is to change the world not
just to analyse it (see Markusen, 2000). This means several things. It behoves us to
expose and explain the inequalities and injustices that contemporary economic-political
systems routinely produce. It also requires us to interrogate and evaluate existing
policies and policy-making practices to reveal their limitations, biases and effects. And
it means seeking to exert a direct influence on policy-making processes, at all scales,
with the aim of producing more appropriate and more effective forms of policy inter-
vention. No doubt some will consider all this to be rather idealistic. Certain pessimists
(such as die-hard Marxists) may even think it utterly futile: that, under capitalism,
public policies can never solve social, economic and environmental problems, but
merely shift them around, from one social group to another, from one place to another.
I consider the pursuit of a geography of policy neither idealistic nor futile. The reality
is that policy-making of one kind or another is a prominent and pervasive feature of
modern society, affecting the daily lives of us all. As geographers we should be striving
to inform and shape the process and improve the outcomes.
Indeed, this need is arguably greater than ever before. The past two decades have not
only seen profound – and in many respects, disturbing – economic, social and environ-
 Ron Martin 191

mental change, but also the wholesale rethinking and reworking of public policy.
Globalization, new technologies, intensifying international competition, the reassertion
of markets, increasing environmental degradation, these and other major forces have
generated new and growing problems of economic, social and political inequality and
injustice (see, for example, Room, 1990; Gaffikin and Morrisey, 1992; Rodgers et al.,
1995; Rodgers and van den Hoeven, 1995; Harvey, 1996). At the same time, and in many
cases compounding these problems, states have been busy dismantling or restructuring
established systems of social welfare, economic regulation and citizenship rights, and
replacing them with new systems which prioritize budgetary prudence, private profit
and individual responsibility over social justice and community cohesion (see Esping-
Andersen, 1995; Jordan, 1996; 1998; Pierson, 1998). Despite their claims to be greatly
concerned about growing problems of ‘social exclusion’, the over-riding imperative of
contemporary governments is nevertheless to secure national economic competitive-
ness and flexibility. Geographers, no less than economists, sociologists and other social
scientists, have a role to play in asking exactly how goals of social inclusion and social
justice are supposed to be achieved under, and reconciled with, a regime of globalized,
competitive economic flexibility.
Yet the fact is that the impact of geography on the public policy realm has in general
been disappointingly limited. Increasingly, it seems, other social, political and environ-
mental scientists, even journalists and media pundits, shape public perception and
government policy in areas where we as geographers could – indeed, should – be
having much greater influence. Of course, we could adopt what has become the
customary disciplinary attitude and ‘celebrate’ the ‘discovery’ of geography and place
by these policy-shapers and commentators as proof positive that ‘geography matters’.
But then, if geography does matter, why are we playing second fiddle to other
academics and even journalists in areas where we should be making the main impact?
My primary aim here is to suggest some reasons why this might be so.
What concerns me is that we exert so little policy influence. In part this may be
because we do not publicize or proselytize our work enough amongst policy-makers;
or because we lack the confidence and self-assurance that seem to be second nature to
our colleagues in other social sciences (most particularly, of course, economists). But, I
shall argue, it is in part because much of what is done under the banner of human
geography is unlikely to be seen by policy-makers as being remotely germane to policy
issues. The fundamental problem is that there is no readily discernible policy research
agenda in the discipline. Indeed, recent developments in human geography research
have, if anything, militated against the emergence of such an agenda. Much of what is
now regarded as front-line research in the subject has little practical relevance for
policy; in fact, in some cases, one might even say little social relevance at all.2 It is
perhaps not surprising, therefore, that – with some notable exceptions which serve to
prove the more general rule – geographers are infrequently consulted or used by
governments or other policy bodies to advise in the policy-making process. No doubt
this charge will provoke a chorus of complaint from certain quarters of the discipline.
However, if my comments do ignite such conflagrations, I hope that any smoke
generated thereby will not obscure my main purpose: which is not to set fire to straw
persons but to spark off a genuine and much-needed debate about the policy relevance
of contemporary human geography. And to this end, having identified what I believe
to be some of the reasons for the subject’s current lack of influence, in the final part of
192 Geography and public policy: the case of the missing agenda

the article I go on to make some very tentative suggestions as to how we might move
towards a possible manifesto for a geography of public policy.

II The ‘policy turn’ that never happened

It is now more than a quarter of a century since the publication of David Harvey’s path-
breaking book, Social justice and the city (1973). In that work, Harvey not only raised
geographers’ awareness of the inequalities and injustices generated under capitalism to
a new level, but by so doing also began to point to some of the fundamental policy
issues that capitalist society faces. A year later, at the annual conference of the Institute
of British Geographers, both the presidential address and a special session of articles
were focused on ‘Geography and public policy’ (see Transactions, British Geographers,
1974). Contributing to those articles, David Harvey (1974) urged that before
geographers commit themselves to public policy, they need to pose two questions: what
kind of geography? And what kind of public policy? For Harvey, to provide satisfacto-
ry answers to these questions, geographers would have to adopt a much more critical
stance on capitalism and the corporate state. During the 1970s, inspired on the one hand
by Harvey’s contributions, and on the other by the stagnation of world capitalism and
growing spatial, social, gender, racial and income inequalities, geographical writing
became distinctively more critical and politically orientated, even radically prescriptive.
Much of this work was Marxist in orientation and tended to be very theoretical,
although similar concerns (as to inequalities and social injustices) also figured in the
more empirically inclined interest in humanistic geography and welfare geography that
emerged later in that decade. At the time these streams of work seemed to hold out
some promise of awakening within the discipline a new-found sense of social critique,
political commitment and public policy engagement far more incisive than the rather
anodyne ‘planning’ studies that had appeared within geography during the 1960s.
And, from the late 1970s onwards, the breakdown of the postwar Keynesian-welfare
model of state intervention and its accompanying panoply of social, economic and
spatial policies offered a major opportunity for geographers to enter the growing
political debate about what the successor to the Keynesian model should be.
But, alas, by the early 1980s what had promised to be a new ‘policy turn’ within
geography had largely failed to materialize. By this time, even Harvey had all but
abandoned the fundamental issues of social justice his earlier book had raised in favour
of a yet deeper Marxist exegesis of capitalism in which state policy was seen to be
subject to the same internal limits as the capitalist system it seeks to moderate and
regulate (Harvey, 1982). Harvey’s orthodox Marxist conclusion was as impracticable as
it was inevitable: the only way to solve the sociogeographical problems thrown up by
capitalism is to transcend capitalism itself. And since then, as the discipline has
fragmented into a series of post-radical, post-Marxian movements – critical human
geography, feminist geography, postmodern geography and cultural geography – so
the focus has been much more on absorbing new philosophical approaches and debates
from social and cultural theory than on directing attention to practical social policy
questions.
Obviously, this is not to argue there has been no notable work by geographers on
public policy issues over the past 25 years. Any such suggestion would be untrue and
 Ron Martin 193

unfair. Important contributions to the public policy field have been made in a variety of
areas and by several individuals.3 The urban sphere has probably attracted the most
attention, reflecting the succession of social, economic and environmental problems
that have beset many capitalist cities over the past three decades. A number of eminent
urban geographers, especially in the USA and UK, have consistently laboured to bring
their work and expertise to bear on the discussion, design and evaluation of urban
social and economic development problems and policies. Some of this work has indeed
had a significant impact on shaping the evolution of urban policy programmes and
major urban regeneration initiatives.
Similarly, some social geographers have directed their research efforts to practical,
policy-relevant issues such as the spatialities of poverty, housing problems, racial
conflict, ill-health and crime. Much of this work has been concerned with social mar-
ginalization and discrimination, or what has recently been renamed by politicians as
‘social exclusion’ (Levitas, 1998). Geographers have shown how the processes that
produce and reproduce such social exclusion are in large part locally constituted and
embedded, with the implication that policy interventions need to respond to local
conditions if they are to be effective. Yet further, significant numbers of economic
geographers have been working on policy-relevant topics and problems, including
regional growth disparities, local industrial clusters, local high-technology milieux,
geographical inequalities in business formation and success, and spatial differences in
employment opportunities and unemployment. Many of these issues are germane to
the industrial, regional development and labour market policies pursued by western
countries and by international organizations such as the OECD and World Bank.
Still other geographers have contributed to the growing research on environmental
problems and their causes and politics – whether this be urban transport problems,
pollution, the health and environmental effects of nuclear power production and waste
disposal sites, the protection of key ecological sites, energy conservation, water quality
and supply, international pollution spillovers, local aspects of global warming, and so
on. In many cases, from the analysis of the geographies of crime to air pollution studies,
GIS and related techniques have proved useful where large data sets have been
involved. There is also no shortage of geographical journals that encourage policy-
related contributions, for example, Urban Geography, Regional Studies, Government and
Policy, Environment and Planning, Applied Geography. And geographers working on
applied and policy problems can and do publish in relevant journals in other
disciplines. In addition, there are doubtless several geographers who undertake policy
consultancy and evaluations for government departments and public and private
sector agencies, but whose reports and studies never emerge in academic publications
and therefore are largely unknown to the wider geographical community.
There is then a significant body of geographical writing that has, directly or
indirectly, had a policy dimension. Yet, these and other examples notwithstanding, the
fact remains that the scale of involvement of geographers in, and their influence on,
public policy remains comparatively limited. One problem is that policy-makers do not
seem to take the policy research undertaken by geographers as seriously as that by, for
example, economists, criminologists, environmental scientists, and the like. Indeed,
when geographers are involved in policy advice and consultancy, it is significant that
they often relabel themselves – or are relabelled by policy-makers – as ‘urban experts’,
‘environmental experts’, ‘local economic development experts’, and so on, as if the
194 Geography and public policy: the case of the missing agenda

terms urban geographer, environmental geographer and economic geographer lack

recognition or credibility. In one sense there is a curious lack of knowledge on the part
of many policy-makers as to what, exactly, geographers do.
But there is a second factor that has impeded the impact of geographers on the policy
realm, and this has to do with the direction in which geographical research has itself
moved in recent years. There have been various ‘turns’ in the subject over the past two
decades, but hardly what one could call a ‘policy turn’. The key point is that policy
research has lagged far behind the other, more fashionable, streams of theoretical and
empirical investigation that have formed the expanding frontier of the discipline.
Several key books on human geography have appeared in recent years, but few if any
devote any significant space to the explicit discussion of the geography of public policy
or the potential role human geographers might play in policy debates. Berry (1994: 317)
sums up this lack of engagement with policy analysis in the case of urban geography
by arguing that:
Policy analysis must . . . be substituted for the increasingly frequent tendency to accept the assertions of inves-
tigative journalists, that once stated become accepted as truth. I would like to see more urban geographers
become policy scientists . . . When they do . . . they not only help reshape the legal framework within which
urban change unfolds, they also enrich urban theory, and on occasion even inform the journalists . . . who, by
creating the news, shape public perceptions.

Berry’s plea could easily be extended to human geography as a whole. The problem, as
I now want to argue, is that much of the work currently considered to be at the ‘cutting
edge’ of the subject either carries little, if any, relevance for public policy, or even where
it does deal with important social and economic issues is often of a form that renders it
difficult to cast into policy-useful terms.
No doubt some will argue that our social and policy relevance and influence as
geographers are best and most fundamentally brought to bear through our own
political practice and daily academic lives – how we incorporate, represent and practise
our social and political values in what we do, write and say not just as professional
geographers but as members of society (see Massey, 2000). I acknowledge the vital
importance of linking one’s academic work, personal politics and everyday life in this
way. But as Doreen Massey, a leading example of this fusion herself admits, it is not
all that common. In fact, in general there is a surprising lack of political commitment in
the subject. But this is only one of a number of such shortcomings, as I now want to
argue.

III The public policy irrelevance of the postmodern and cultural turns in human
geography

One reason for the neglect of public policy research within human geography is the
postmodern/textualist/discursive and cultural ‘turns’ that have had such a pervasive
impact across the subject in the last few years. These approaches have undoubtedly
enriched human geography, by expanding the range of conceptual frameworks we
draw upon, by exposing the limits of rationalist methodology, by highlighting the
textual and discursive strategies that are used to construct and explicate the realities we
study, and by emphasizing the complexity and fragmentation of contemporary socioe-
conomic life. But, somewhat ironically, despite its increasing interest in the social and
 Ron Martin 195

the cultural, the discipline has if anything retreated yet further away from policy
research into fields and modes of inquiry which have surprisingly little contact with the
pressing social problems of the day. Instead, the liturgical recitation of ‘great thinkers’
in social and cultural philosophy and the ‘spatialization’ of their great thoughts have
taken precedence over practically orientated social investigation.
At the same time, the surge of interest in the cultural, symbolic and reflexive nature
of capitalist society, in ‘identity’, ‘embodiment’, ‘the self’ and the ‘other’, has had
the unfortunate effect of shifting attention firmly away from the uneven development
of the capitalist market and the social inequality and environmental problems
it produces. Concepts such as ‘class’, ‘inequality’ and ‘conflict’ have all but
disappeared from the human geographer’s lexicon (see Castree, 1999). Instead, the
emphasis is on the geographies of ‘culture’, ‘consumption’, ‘lifestyle’ and the ‘cultural
politics of identity’. To be sure, these were woefully neglected areas in human
geography, and deserved to be brought into the discipline’s mainstream. And of course,
some forms of social inequality and injustice – especially gender and racial inequalities
– have indeed received attention by postmodern and cultural geographers. But even
here the tendency has been to recast these in narrow (even essentialist) cultural terms,
as (ever-shifting) ‘identities’ produced by cultural and discursive practices, and to
relegate or even neglect the real material, political and historical circumstances in which
such identities and inequalities are forged.4 Other important social problems – for
example, poverty, unequal access to public and social services, housing problems,
unemployment, ill-health, unequal health care, and so on – have hardly been
considered, if at all, by postmodern human geography (see, for example, Leyshon,
1995).5
This neglect is by no means confined to social and cultural geography, however. It is
also a characteristic of much of the new ‘cultural’ economic geography, where post-
modernism and the cultural turn are having somewhat similar effects. While attempts
to push through a ‘cultural turn’ in economic geography have met with resistance, nev-
ertheless there has been a major call to ‘refigure the economic’ towards the ‘cultural’
and to downplay the significance of ‘economic theory’ for economic geography (see
Thrift and Olds, 1996; Crang, 1997; Amin and Thrift, 2000, amongst others). The case for
recognizing the importance of cultural, social and institutional processes in under-
standing the economic landscape and its evolution is not in question (see Peet, 1997;
Sayer, 1997; Amin, 1999; Martin, 2000). Without doubt, the cultural bases of economic
life are important, and economic geographers’ accounts are undoubtedly enriched by
giving greater attention to culture. But this is not to imply, as some appear to do, that
culture is the explanation, or that – as seems to be happening – political economy should
be squeezed out. For as political economy has been squeezed out, so concern with
policy has correspondingly withered. If economic geography needs to be ‘refigured’
around the cultural, it no less needs to be ‘refigured’ around public policy. My
complaint is not that issues of identity and culture are unimportant in economic
geography, far from it; rather, it is that they seem to have been assigned priority over
other, arguably more pressing, ‘big’ social problems and needs (Martin and Sunley,
2001).
Nor is it just that the postmodern and cultural orientation of much contemporary
human geography ignores the sort of social and economic issues that are of public
policy relevance. The problem is compounded by the theoretical and linguistic
196 Geography and public policy: the case of the missing agenda

obfuscation that now characterizes so much of the subject. As Hamnett (1997: 127) aptly
comments:
Under the banners of postmodernism, postimperialism, discourse, narrative, deconstruction, textuality and the
like, a language, a set of concepts and a mode of writing have permeated human geography which bear an
increasingly tenuous relationship to social relations and social practices as they are lived and experienced by
many people . . .6

Instead, the postmodern and cultural turns have led to forms of geographical enquiry
and writing which
simply treat theory and concepts as a sort of intellectual game which has become increasingly detached from
real world problems and concerns . . . Under the guise of liberation, empowerment and giving voice to those
hitherto excluded, [this trend] simply reinforces the privileges of the intellectual elite to play an elaborate
language game written by and for a tiny minority of participants (Hamnett, 2001: 160–61).

Furthermore, by denying an extra-discursive reality – ‘it is not simply our accounts of

the world that are intertextual; the world itself is intertextual’ (Barnes and Duncan,
1992: 7) – postmodern geography disengages itself with movements and practices
which might challenge material power and so change outcomes. This trend is not
unique to contemporary human geography, but reflects a malaise that typifies much of
cultural studies and social science more generally. As a result, as Philo and Miller (2001)
point out, much of social science has lost its critical edge and is no longer able to
comment on the central issues and problems of its own society. A significant part of
recent research in human geography is guilty of the same offence.
In his plea for more public policy research by geographers, Berry (1994) has argued
that clarity of concepts, terminology and methodology is of paramount importance.
Such clarity and relevance is much more likely to come from the theorization of the
‘real’ structures of socioeconomic power and interest which shape society, however
multidimensional and fluid these structures may now be, from empirically grounded
conceptualizations about how the real world works (or fails to work), than from the use
of abstract, linguistically impenetrable constructs borrowed, usually uncritically, from
the pantheon of postmodern French philosophy.7 As Hamnett complains, the danger is
that the real world becomes subordinated to language games in which the ‘real’ is just
another ‘discourse’, and our ability to say anything meaningful about contemporary
social, economic and environmental problems is lost in a thicket of linguistic
‘cleverness’ and epistemic relativism.8
Of course, this is not to deny that the contours and fault lines of social power, class
formation and political interest are much more complex, hybrid and kaleidoscopic
under postindustrial capitalism than they were under industrial society; nor that the
advent of ‘reflexive modernity’ (to use Beck et al.’s (1994) terminology) has opened up
new ways of monitoring, evaluating and contesting social and economic processes,
institutions and outcomes. In this sense, we most certainly need to redefine and reprob-
lematize such concepts as ‘class’ and ‘inequality’. One does not even have to suscribe in
full to the ‘reflexive modernization’ narrative to realize that we need new ways of
thinking about, and new public policy solutions for, present-day social, economic and
environmental problems. But it is difficult to evisage how the vague abstractions and
epistemic and ontological relativism of much of human geography research – what
Chomsky (2001) has criticized more generally as a retreat from rational inquiry – can
form the basis of critical public policy analysis.9
 Ron Martin 197

IV The lack of empirical and explanatory rigour

A closely related aspect of the public policy irrelevance of much human geography
concerns the retreat from empirical and explanatory rigour. Over the course of the past
three decades, human geography has swung from the undertheorized ‘data-mining’
exercises of its positivistic modelling days to its contemporary tendency for overtheo-
rized and superficial empirical inquiry. Again this is especially noticeable in social and
cultural geography. It is here that the greatest swing away from extensive modes of
empirical inquiry to intensive case study and ethnographic approaches has occurred. In
principle, intensive qualitative methods have just as important a role to play in the
analysis and evaluation of public policy as more conventional extensive and quantita-
tive methods: ideally, the two approaches work best in combination, each informing,
reflecting back on and complementing the other (the common tendency for the two to
be portrayed as incommensurate alternatives is highly misleading). Unfortunately,
however, in much of social and cultural geography the shift to intensive and ethno-
graphic modes of inquiry seems to be have been taken as a licence for abandoning any
pretence at empirical and explanatory standards.
Regrettably, it has become customary within human geography to equate ‘rigour’
with positivistic, quantitative methods and formal (statistical and mathematical)
analysis, and what is widely regarded as a misplaced search for general principles. But
this is to misrepresent the issue. It is not a matter of ‘quantitative’ versus ‘qualitative’
methods: indeed, the point is that even research questions which are best approached
with qualitative procedures such as interviewing require methodological rigour and
transparency. The need for rigour – in the sense of carefully and clearly articulated
argument, founded on detailed empirical inquiry and detailed explanation, and
involving the identification and causal role of underlying mechanisms and structures –
applies equally to all methods, qualitative and discursive as well as quantitative. Where
empirical material is used in human geography, all too often it consists of a few selected
interview quotations, frequently from just a handful of individuals in a very specific
setting, and usually without any sustained attempt to interrogate such evidence
critically, to contextualize it thoroughly, to test propositions or to assess its wider
relevance.
Again, it should be stressed that the flight to superficial empirics is by no means
confined to social and cultural geography. The same trend is visible in the ‘new’ cultural
economic geography (see Martin and Sunley, 2001). In her recent critique of geograph-
ical research on regional development, Markusen (1999) has argued that despite the
outpouring of work in this field over the past decade and a half, even here the empirical
evidence generated has been surprisingly thin and highly selective. In her view, the key
problem is the proliferation of what she labels ‘fuzzy concepts’, that is, concepts that
lack substantive clarity. Fuzzy conceptualization makes it difficult for analysts and
practitioners to operationalize and subject explanatory accounts to scrutiny with real-
world evidence:
In regional studies, fuzzy concepts may have proliferated because it is more difficult to see what a progressive
spatial strategy might be under capitalism . . . It may also have something to do with the rise of postmodern
thinking . . . Regional studies is in need of a soul-searching about the quality of its theorizing, the rigor of its
research methods and the policy and political implications of its work (Markusen, 1998: 33–35).
198 Geography and public policy: the case of the missing agenda

Much of the research in this field has revolved either round the use of highly
generalized ‘master notions’ (such as flexible specialization, post-Fordism, globaliza-
tion, and the like), or vague and impressionistic neologisms (such as ‘learning regions’,
‘institutional thickness’, ‘untraded interdependencies’, ‘embeddedness’, ‘local
regulation’, the ‘associational’ regional economy, and so on). At the same time,
empirical investigation has shifted away from extensive to intensive approaches, and
comprehensive empirical inquiry has given way to anecdote, single case studies and
partial ‘stories’. It is difficult to translate such work into a policy context, and this is
probably another reason why, in general, it has made little impact on policy debates.
A striking illustration of the failure of economic geographers to take a lead in such
debates is the current interest by policy-makers all over the globe, from the World Bank,
to national governments, to regional development agencies, to local and city
governments, in the promotion of localized industrial ‘clusters’. Economic geographers
have for some time been researching these ‘clusters’, although they have tended to use
different labels, such as industrial districts, new industrial spaces, regional complexes,
high-tech milieux, and so on. Along comes Michael Porter, the influential Harvard
business economist, who develops a theory of competitive advantage which highlights
the role that local clusters play in national and regional economic development (Porter,
1990; 1998). Within no time at all, Porter’s ‘cluster model’ is high on the policy agenda
of governments everywhere, and he is flown into country after country to advise
policy-makers on how they might promote their own set of local clusters of specialized,
internationally competitive industries. Why is it that an economist should have had
such an influential effect on policy-makers while economic geographers, effectively
working on the same issue, have not? Perhaps economic geographers are less self-
confident, less self-promotional. Perhaps as a leading writer on business strategy, Porter
is better known and has much greater ‘credibility’ with politicians and policy-makers.
Perhaps it is because he is willing to undertake substantial empirical investigations as
the basis for his policy-related research for governments and other organizations. Or
perhaps it is because he writes in a manner – in clear, direct prose, unburdened by
jargon – that is accessible to policy-makers. Whatever the reasons, the fact is that his
writings are proving to be far more influential with policy-makers than those of
geographers. Indeed, and rather worryingly, a whole new breed of ‘geographical
economist’ is rising rapidly to the fore, whose work on local and regional development,
though cast in the regional economic theories and models that economic geographers
have long since left behind, has begun to permeate policy-making circles.10 Not only do
we need to expose the limitations of this self-styled ‘new economic geography’ within
economics (see Martin, 1999a; 1999b), we need to seize the policy agenda which is
emerging in this area.

V The intellectual bias against policy studies

If these problems were not enough, there is still a widespread view within human
geography that policy study is somehow intellectually inferior to the ‘higher’ pursuit of
‘theorizing’. Doing policy-orientated research is hardly the way to make a geographic
career: certainly, most young, aspiring human geographers deliberately avoid policy
research. This is left mainly to the ‘senior sages’ of the discipline. It may be that research
 Ron Martin 199

funding councils (such the ESRC in the UK, or the NSF in the USA) do stress the
importance of policy-related or policy-relevant research. None the less, the whole
emphasis of academic peer review and research assessment (such as the periodic official
Research Assessment Exercise in the UK) is firmly on the publication of ‘pure’ and thus
supposedly more ‘prestigious’ research, rather than policy study.
This intellectual bias rests in part on the charge that policy analysis rarely contributes
to the theoretical advance of the subject. Policy study is seen as simply ‘applied’, often
atheoretical and merely empirical or descriptive. Sadly, examples of rather bland,
descriptive policy analysis can indeed be found in human geography, so that this
particular criticism is to some extent justified. But policy analysis need not be like this.
In fact, serious policy analysis is extremely demanding intellectually. It requires not
only a deep understanding (theoretical and empirical) of the social-economic problems
which are the focus of the policies being investigated, but also the development of
appropriate methods and procedures for assessing those policies. There are some
extremely complex issues here. How are the effects of policies best isolated? What is the
role of counterfactuals in policy evaluation, and how can meaningful counterfactuals be
derived? How do we deconstruct policy practice, to reveal its ideological, political and
instrumental as well as social purposes? What insight does a specifically geographical
perspective bring to the study of policy? How should explicitly spatial policies be
designed, implemented and assessed? How can policies be linked to basic notions of
local social justice? For these and other related reasons, policy analysis is very far from
straightforward.
Moreover, rather than being seen as ‘simply applied’, policy analysis can and should
feed back into theory. The relationship between theory and policy should be an
interactive and recursive one, with each informing the other. Theory that is isolated
from the practical needs and lessons of policy is itself very unlikely to provide a useful
basis for the design of policy interventions. Similarly, policies that are not underpinned
by empirically supported theoretical foundations are unlikely to prove especially
effective. Indeed, precisely because they involve the close interplay of theory, evidence,
interpretation and evaluation, policy studies succeed most where they are multidimen-
sional and multiperspectival.
A second source of the prejudice against policy study, however, is the charge that it
all too readily becomes hijacked or subverted by the organizations, research grant
bodies and government departments that commission and fund it. The complaint is
that through their funding, and their selection and assessment procedures, these insti-
tutions set the agenda, define the issues, control access to data and even influence the
nature of policy research. After all, critics argue, no government or other policy-making
body is likely to commission or welcome research which it believes could be strongly
critical of its policy programmes. In this sense, it is claimed, government-funded policy
research is likely to be compromised in its scope and orientation from the very start. At
the same time, attempts by government and research funding agencies to define what
are ‘socially relevant’ (or even worse, ‘socially useful’) fields of research are seen as
prone to bias or even blatant instrumentalism (see Johnston, 1997, on a related point).
To compound matters, the complaint goes, research that is critical of government policy
or runs counter to what the government wants to hear, is either ignored or may even be
used to attack the academics who produced it. For many, therefore, policy studies
threaten the very independence of interest, thought and method that is the hallmark of
200 Geography and public policy: the case of the missing agenda

academic research. As Harvey (1974) and Leach (1974) bemoaned, in the earlier debate
on geography and policy referred to above, the fear is that public policy and other
social-problem orientated research simply becomes subservient to the state, and
thereby serves to preserve and strengthen the status quo.
Few would deny the reality of these problems, but they can also be exaggerated and
too easily used as an excuse not to engage in policy research at all. Public policy
research does not mean the surrender of intellectual independence and integrity. It does
not mean that research becomes subservient to the particular political interests of the
state. What it does mean, however, is that to be persuasive, research has to be relevant
and practical and, above all, backed up by persuasive empirical investigation and clear
and logical argument. Policy-makers are less able to ignore or reject policy research –
even if it is highly critical of policies – if that research is well founded methodological-
ly and empirically. And it is also easier to shift policy-makers’ views if criticism is con-
structive, that is accompanied with positive suggestions for improving or changing
policy. Taking issue with, and winning over, policy-makers is not easy, but is precisely
part of the reason why this sort of academic activity needs to be undertaken. To engage
in this activity, however, geographers need to expunge the ‘purity’ versus ‘policy’
mentality that permeates the discipline. They need to elevate the academic quality, and
hence the status, of policy-relevant research. And they also need to identify where they
stand with respect to the key issues in terms of which public policies should be judged
(social equity and inclusion, social justice, citizenship, democracy, and so on), and how
‘geography’ and ‘place’ matter for the conduct and content of policy discourse.

VI The lack of a sense of political commitment

But this presupposes a sense of political commitment amongst geographers, something

that is largely lacking. Markusen (1999) calls this the absence of a ‘progressive spatial
strategy’. If such a commitment had begun to permeate geographical research and
writing in the 1970s, it all but evaporated in the 1980s. Direct engagements with the
dramatic policy upheavals of the past two decades have been curiously few and far
between. Looking back on the 1980s and early 1990s, human geographers made sur-
prisingly few concerted attempts to evaluate the prognoses and policies championed by
the rise of free market neoliberalism (especially Thatcherism in the UK and Reaganism
in the USA), despite the highly contentious nature of those policies and their socially
and spatially divisive effects. Those effects were not hard to see, for example on the
division of social wealth, on the health of citizens, in the damage to public services, the
rise of selfish individualism, and the culture of fame, fortune and glamour. To the extent
to which human geographers examined the New Right policy regimes of that period,
the tendency was to cast them in terms of broad theoretic discussions about the
‘transition to post-Fordism’, rather than subject their substantive spatial effects and
implications to careful empirical scrutiny and interrogation.11 Nor was there much
willingness to acknowledge that amidst the strident ideological credos of the New
Right were in fact some highly telling criticisms of the weaknesses and limitations of the
old Keynesian-welfare social democracy policy model.
Even if the excesses of 1980s right-wing politics have since subsided, their legacy has
lingered on. Neoliberalism fundamentally recast the terms of the policy debate,
 Ron Martin 201

undermining Old Left politics in its wake, and permanently reshaping the socioeco-
nomic terrain on which subsequent policy experiments and developments have taken
place. Above all, despite a surge of political rhetoric about tackling poverty, social
exclusion and similar problems, the free market, ‘flexibility’, ‘enterprise’ and ‘wealth
creation’ remain political priorities (not only in the USA and UK, but increasingly
throughout the EU and within international institutions such as the OECD and World
Bank). Attempts to formulate a new politics which reconciles the free market with social
democracy and social inclusion remain elusive, despite appeals to a new ‘Third Way’
(see, for example, Giddens, 1998), or a new ‘stakeholder society’ (Plender, 1997).12 Social
and economic inequalities remain substantial, and indeed appear to be widening still
further as we move increasingly towards the new information or knowledge economy.
In this respect, along with other social scientists, human geographers have a major
opportunity to contribute to the debates and discussions surrounding the search for a
new policy consensus. However, although some geographers have responded to the
challenge, for the most part, human geography remains curiously caught in a political
vacuum between the equally discredited New Right and Old Left.
No doubt some geographers would counter this view by arguing that a new sense of
political commitment is emerging within the discipline, namely, around a new
postmodern or cultural ‘politics of difference’, of identity (gender, class, race, sexuality,
age, disability), and positionality. What we are seeing, it is argued, is the emergence of
a politics of particularism, in which a universalist and totalizing notion of justice is
giving way to a multidimensional and locally varying concept. It is not clear, however,
just how this new politics is supposed to translate into practical policy, especially as far
as geographical research is concerned. One problem with this new agenda is that while
the recognition of identity and difference may be a necessary part of a new emancipa-
tory politics, it is by no means sufficient. The dangers of an ‘identity politics’ which
emphasizes only difference are that it fails to explore the grounds for, and limits the
scope of, collective social action and intervention: it proves the need for, but also
threatens the existence of, universal principles of justice (Fraser, 1996; Harvey, 1996;
Leonard, 1997). Focusing only on ‘difference’ is thus as problematic as a modernist
focus on ‘sameness’. While an emphasis on sameness excludes and submerges diversity
(and generates an indifference to it), a focus on difference tends to construct another
form of exclusion, into distinct groups of ‘others’ (Jacobs, 2000). Moreover, differences
between groups become essentialized, and differences within groups negated. If it is to
form the basis for a new ‘progressive spatial strategy’, therefore, a politics of identity
needs to be embedded within an analysis of the material and structural factors under-
pinning differences, and that in turn requires consideration of the similarity of different
forms of inequality, discrimination and exclusion, as well as their particularity.
Thus although the new cultural left has thrown much valuable critical theoretical
light on multiple identities, social marginalization and multiculturalism, the focus on
difference and identity leads away from a concern with the structural determinants of
sociospatial problems and inequalities. Social critique has become divorced from the
critique of these systemic determinants, and extended theorization has become
substituted for practical application. As Merrifield and Swyngedouw (1996: 11) argue,
‘intriguing though this stuff may be for critical scholars, it is also intrinsically
dangerous in its prospective definition of political action. De-coupling social critique
from its political-economic basis is not helpful for dealing with the shifting realities of
202 Geography and public policy: the case of the missing agenda

(urban) life at the threshold of the new millennium’. The problem is put more pointedly
by Rorty (1999) who attacks the cultural left for trying, unsuccessfully, to philosophize
its way to political relevance by producing an excess of abstract theory but a dearth of
concrete practical proposals for political, social and economic reform.

VII Moving towards a new geography of public policy

So where does all this leave us? Levelling criticism is always easy; the difficult part is
suggesting what needs to be done, how we should move forward. What should a
geography of public policy look like? Given the nature of the problems identified
above, my argument here is that human geographers need to regrind their theoretical,
empirical and political lenses on several fronts if they are to increase the social and
public policy relevance of their work. First, we need to temper our enthusiasm for
seeking out the latest philosophical, theoretical or methodological fad, and develop a
greater interest in practical social research, and, as part of this reorientation, accord
proper academic standing to policy studies. Secondly, we need to develop a sense of
intellectual cohesion around key social issues and problems, bringing the different
theoretical and methodological approaches that characterize contemporary human
geography together to bear on key social policy problems, rather than allowing (or even
exploiting) this diversity of approaches to form noncommunicating cliques and
specialisms within the discipline. Thirdly, we need to take detailed empirical work far
more seriously: the drift towards ‘thin empirics’ needs to be reversed, and much greater
attention directed to methodology and the quality of evidence. And, fourthly, as social
scientists, human geographers need to decide how they, and the studies they undertake,
are to be used: there is, of course, no such thing as ‘neutral’ research, and we need to be
more explicit about, and more committed to, the political positions that inform and
shape our work – whatever those particular positions are.
However, in responding to such reorientations and reprioritizations, in groping
towards a manifesto for a new ‘geography of public policy’, we are necessarily drawn
back to the basic question originally posed by Harvey: what kind of geography for what
kind of public policy? As he acknowledged, this is a profoundly difficult question to
answer, although in the very way he posed it there seemed to be an implicit
presumption that the problem was basically one of agreeing on a particular (and
superior) kind of geography (which for him, of course, was Marxist geography). But if
the postmodern turn in human geography has had one major message above others, it
is that the age of the hegemonic ‘metanarrative’ has passed. There is no single, all-
encompassing, universally superior or commonly agreed theoretical framework or
methodological approach on which to base our research. Thus, there can be no single
approach to policy analysis, no blueprint for how geographers should integrate public
policy into their research or how they should evaluate its sociospatial impacts.
There are different forms of, and approaches to, policy analysis ranging, for example,
from the critical analysis of policy discourses and practices to reveal their underlying
ideological, and instrumental content, to extensive empirical analyses of policies to
evaluate their intended impacts and unintended consequences, to intensive ethno-
graphic type investigations of precisely how particular policies effect specific
individuals, groups and localities. Each provides a different ‘cut’ on policy, and
 Ron Martin 203

different policy issues will require different methods or combinations of methods.

Public policy analysis has to be pluralistic, not monistic. We need more interesting and
imaginative ways of combining qualitative and quantitative analysis, and of integrating
intuition into our research methodologies and analyses. Above all, for a policy turn to
occur in the discipline, our research has to become much more ‘action based’. We need
to see research not simply as a mechanism for studying and explaining change, but – by
following our investigations through to their implications for possible policy interven-
tion and action – as an instigator of change, as an activist endeavour (see Markusen,
2000).
This leads to the second part of Harvey’s question: what sort of policy? The aim
should be to pursue policies that make a real and positive difference, and we should be
willing to criticize those policies that do not. Some will argue that policies only make a
real difference if they are truly radical and change the fundamental relationships and
values in society, that policies which seek to ‘reform’ existing socioeconomic structures
and processes merely adjust the status quo, or worse still end up reproducing it. I agree
that part of our endeavour should be to visualize alternative futures. The geography of
public policy is not just about evaluating policy impacts. Important though that role is,
geographers should also be engaged in fundamental debates over the direction of
society, economy and environment, and what policies would be required to achieve
different outcomes. But, equally, it is surely as important to research and campaign for
achievable reforms as it is to debate ideal transformations which have little prospect of
being implemented, at least in the short or medium term, if at all. This is not to submit
to a limp incrementalism. Neither, however, is it to accept the argument that ‘reformist’
policy research merely produces marginal palliative measures or serves the interests of
the political establishment. Rather, it is to argue that historic improvements to social,
economic and environmental conditions can be wrought by significant institutional and
political reforms without waiting for some hypothetical and unattainable Utopia
(Harvey, 2000). The emergence of the welfare state–mixed economy in between the
1930s and 1950s was one such historic change that was built upon major reforms of an
otherwise largely unaltered capitalist order.
Within this context, however, a primary objective must be to demonstrate the crucial
‘difference that place makes’ in the construction, implementation and impact of public
policy. It is not just a question of what sort of policy, but also how geography
contributes to the policy process. The importance of a geographical perspective on
policy arises in several ways. Almost every ostensible ‘nonspatial’ policy (whether
national, international or supranational) has spatially varying consequences and impli-
cations. Most policies of this kind, even those which involve spatially decentralized
systems of delivery, implementation, intervention or regulation, rarely take local
impacts into account, yet those impacts are frequently highly differentiated from place
to place.13 Moreover, national (and indeed international and supranational) policies
often reflect the economic and political power of specific socioeconomic groups and
areas, with the result that policy outcomes tend to favour those groups and areas.14 In
other cases, even where such hidden spatial biases are not present, by ignoring regional
and local differences in socioeconomic structures and conditions, national, internation-
al and supranational policies often work to intensify geographical inequalities in
economic development, social welfare and environmental quality. The critical interro-
gation of the localized effects of such ‘nonspatial’ policies is long overdue.
204 Geography and public policy: the case of the missing agenda

The importance of geographical difference, however, is not merely that it can reveal
the contradictory, ambiguous, unintended and unequal impacts of macro-level public
policy, but that it also offers scope and opportunity to devise policies and interventions
which explicitly respond to and incorporate such difference. Most states operate
explicitly spatial policies of one sort of another, for example targeted programmes of
urban regeneration, regional development and local environmental reclamation. Yet,
often, having recognized geographical difference at one level, in the sense of identifying
a group of specific areas in need of special support and assistance, these policies are
usually then applied blanket-fashion across the designated areas as if the same
problems, conditions and solutions pertain to each. It is not surprising, therefore, that
the success of such policies has been mixed and often disappointing. Policies that may
work in one area do not necessarily work in another. Local specificity needs to be built
into policies of this sort to reflect the particular conditions, constraints and possibilities
of individual areas and social groups within them. As Forester (1993: 125) emphasizes,
when discussing the application of critical social science to public policy:
Combined with the study of real cases, critical theory points us towards repertoires of political practices of
several kinds, but taken by itself that theory – or any theory – cannot generate specific strategies, tactics, skills
to be used independently of specific contexts (i.e. for all times and places).

In other words, local context matters in the formation and practice of policy. As Harvey
(1996) points out, because socioecological and political-economic processes are consti-
tutive of the very standards of social justice that may be used to evaluate and modify
their operation, notions of justice are themselves historically and geographically
constituted. This means we need critical ways of thinking about how different
ecological, economic, social, cultural and political conditions get produced, and ways of
evaluating the justice and injustice of those differences.
This task is particularly pertinent at the present time because of the rescaling of
regulation and policy intervention that appears to be underway throughout the
capitalist world, in which, as part of the so-called ‘hollowing out’ of national states,
spaces of political regulation, governance and intervention are becoming at once both
more global and more local (Pieterse, 2000). One of the ideals of the postwar policy
model in many of these countries was to establish a (modernist) totalizing, homogeniz-
ing and quintessentially ‘top-down’ programme of economic and social intervention
and regulation. The policy goal of integrating and stabilizing the spatial socioeconomy
was achieved, in part at least, by a corresponding spatial centralization of policy-
making and intervention (see Martin and Sunley, 1997). Postwar Keynesian-welfarism,
for example, subjugated regions and localities to the national ‘grand plan’. With the
demise of the Keynesian-welfarist model since the beginning of the 1980s, there have
been signs of a new ‘regionalism’ and ‘localism’. On the one hand, central state policy
measures, programmes and apparatus are being decentralized to increase the
‘flexibility’ of their delivery and response, although usually within national guidelines
(the workfare programmes of the USA and UK, and increasingly other countries,
exemplify this trend towards ‘policy decentralization’ – see also OECD, 1999a; 1999b).
On the other, there is a surge of local ‘bottom-up’ policy initiatives and institutions
(what Rogers Hollingsworth and Boyer, 1997, refer to as a shift from a national to a
complex spatially nested institutional arrangement, and what Regini, 1995, refers to as
a shift from macro-political to local micro-social regulation).
 Ron Martin 205

The dual processes of globalization and localization are key forces driving this shift
of policy responsibilities down from the central state to the local level (see World Bank,
1999). While the scale of these developments should not be exaggerated – the central
state obviously remains the key locus of policy formulation, and the top-down
approach of the postwar period is hardly about to be replaced by a new ‘bottom-up’
model – nevertheless, from labour market measures to welfare programmes, from
health-care provision to industrial promotion, from crime prevention to environmental
protection, increasingly there is a local dimension to policy debate and design. As part
of this shift there is stress on the importance of ‘local private–public partnerships’ as
vehicles for novel policy intervention, and even the theme of ‘community’ has
reentered politics, not in the sense of recapturing some lost form of local solidarity, but
as a means of promoting the material and social regeneration of urban neighbourhoods,
inner-city areas and old industrial areas through locally based and embedded policy
actions. This embryonic ‘new localism and regionalism’ is far from unproblematic of
course, not least because regional, local and community problems often originate
beyond local borders, and locally based policy efforts may not be strong enough to
challenge the enormous power of (global) corporate capital, or indeed national
government itself (see Harvey, 1996; Lovering, 1999). Nevertheless, it opens up what
are arguably unprecedented opportunities for geographers to contribute to public
policy discourse and deliberation.
In responding to these opportunities, however, geographers will need to adopt a
more positive and proactive attitude towards pluralistic and collaborative research.
Economic, social and environmental problems are typically the product of multiple
causes and conditions, and rarely fall within neat disciplinary or subdisciplinary
boundaries. Thus their explication and policy solution will often require the collabora-
tion of researchers from different disciplines, with different forms of expertise and
different perspectives. There are two aspects to such collaboration. At one level, there is
a need for far more integrated research within human geography itself. As Berry (1994:
317) argues, policy study both requires and encourages a more integrative approach:
‘Policy studies, by ‘integrating philosophy, history, science, prophecy and commitment’’ . . . help . . . span the
pluralism in modes of thought that today seem to narrow and fracture rather than broaden and unify geo-
graphical inquiry.’

Unfortunately, as specialisms have proliferated within human geography, and tensions

have arisen between different theoretical and philosophical positions within the geo-
graphical academy itself, so intergroup schism has tended to limit the scope for greater
collaboration. Overcoming these schisms is a prerequisite for more effective policy
research in the subject. But at another level, the need for collaboration extends beyond
geography. By its nature much policy research requires interdisciplinary collaboration.
Here too there are problems. While human geographers have increasingly looked to
other social sciences for theoretical, conceptual and methodological inspiration, in
general they have not been much given to practical research collaboration with experts
in other fields (economists, sociologists, planners, lawyers, and so on). At the same
time, those in other social and relevant sciences may well have to be persuaded that
geographers have something distinctive and significant to bring to interdisciplinary
policy study.
The above are only some of the skeletal elements of what is required for a ‘policy
206 Geography and public policy: the case of the missing agenda

turn’ in human geography to occur. Essentially, my call here has been for a greater link
between theory and practice, for a clear, empirically based and engaged human
geography which can address the key issues of its own society. A geography of public
policy should be capable of analysing the consequences of political policies, of
informing public debate on critical policy issues, and providing arguments for
alternative policy interventions. It must also be willing to debate and establish guiding
ethical and moral principles of social justice for evaluating geographical difference. As
I stressed earlier, there are numerous geographers out there who are already committed
to and engaged in such activity. But we need many more like them. My complaint is
that rather than encouraging more recruits, recent developments in the subject have in
fact lured researchers into modes of thought and fields of interest that seem to have
only tenuous connections with practical social, economic and environmental problems.
However, to end on an optimistic note, there are some welcome signs that we might
perhaps be on the verge of a renewed discussion of relevance and praxis in the
discipline: witness Harvey’s (1996; 2000) recent return to the issue of social justice; the
recent exchange on geography and policy in Transactions (Banks and MacKain, 2000;
Peck, 1999; 2000; Pollard et al., 2000; see also Massey, 2000); the symposium on relevance
in the Scottish Geographical Journal (1999); and the appearance of a number of contribu-
tions which, in one way or another, call for more politically committed applied work in
the subject (such as Pacione, 1999; Smith, 1998; 1999; Markusen, 1999; 2001; Storper,
2001). Hopefully, these various strands will evolve into a full-blown debate. Such a
debate is urgently needed in the subject, for policy is much too important to be left
solely to policy-makers.

Acknowledgements
I am grateful to several individuals for their valuable comments on an earlier version of
this article. In particular, Ron Johnston, Doreen Massey, Sue Owens, Jane Pollard, Peter
Sunley, Tim Unwin and Ann Markusen provided very useful insights and suggestions.
I am also indebted to three anonymous referees for helping me to sharpen the
argument. None of the above, of course, bears any responsibility for the eventual
outcome.

Notes

1. I use the term ‘public policy’ here in a wide sense to include any form of deliberate intervention,
regulation, governance, or prescriptive or alleviative action, by state or nonstate bodies, intended to
shape or reshape social, economic or environmental conditions.
2. I recognize that this is a highly provocative statement. I am certainly not arguing that all or most
human geography research is socially, economically or environmentally irrelevant, nor that all geo-
graphical research should have a policy dimension. But I do believe that far too little research in
human geography has any kind of public policy relevance.
3. In what follows I confine my comments to geographic research on the advanced capitalist
countries, and do not discuss the state of policy research in development geography. Nor do I intend
to list names and individuals here – that would be invidious, since many others would no doubt
complain they had been omitted. I list instead the sorts of work that have been directly or indirectly
policy relevant.
 Ron Martin 207

4. As a perusal of the contents of the books in the new Critical Geographies series (published by
Routledge) will confirm.
5. I am not suggesting that all postmodern social science is necessarily antithetical to public policy
concerns. For example, Leonard (1997) shows how postmodern theory could be used to raise some
crucial issues for the contemporary debate about the reconstitution of welfare programmes and the
political discourse of welfare. However, he goes on to admit that, as yet, there are few if any signs of
postmodern social science being applied in this way.
6. The problem is well described, for example, by Gitlin (1991: 329): ‘One thing that has rent theory
and criticism asunder is the self-insulation of professional social science. And no factor has
contributed to that self-insulation more than the quality, if that is the right word, of academic writing.
Which raises the question of why academics write routinely, hermetically, in clotted prose, ridden with
jargon and the passive voice, even enthusiastically crossing the line from complexity to obscurity.’
7. A sustained exposure of the questionable and superficial nature of much of the latter is given by
Sokal and Bricmont (1998). While these critics’ own philosophical position is arguably naive, many of
their criticisms of postmodern science and social science cannot be summarily rejected as irrelevant or
misguided, as some postmodern theorists and geographers claim. One of the unfortunate traits of
postmodern theorists, it seems to me, is their readiness to dismiss and criticize ‘modernist’
approaches, but their inability to accept criticism of their own position.
8. A telling critique of postmodern urban geography is contained in Sui (1999).
9. In my own discussions with government policy-makers, this issue of the jargon-ridden nature
and impenetrability of much social science writing – including that of geographers – has been a
recurring complaint.
10. For a recent statement of this ‘new economic geography’ within economics, see Fujita et al.
(1999) and Krugman (1998; 2000). For a critical assessment, see Martin (1999).
11. Linking the policy upheavals of the past two decades to regulationist interpretations of con-
temporary capitalism has proved less than successful. For example, some saw neoliberalism
(especially its Thatcherite incarnation) as a shift to a quintessentially ‘post-Fordist’ mode of social
regulation. But the failures of and subsequent political move away from the neoliberal model have
necessitated a reconsideration of what a supposedly post-Fordist mode of regulation will look like.
And in any case, as is increasingly being realized, the whole notion of ‘post-Fordism’ is problematic.
12. The so-called ‘Third Way’ policy model is largely vacuous. While Giddens’ formulation is
worthy in some respects, many of the strands he identifies – such as environmental reclamation and
protection, or crime prevention, or the fostering of an active civil society – could be claimed with equal
passion by those of the left and the right. Other strands identified by Giddens, such as the promotion
of the ‘democractic family’ and voluntary work, could be regarded as outside a political project, while
still others, such the policy responses to globalization, are not developed at all. At present, the Third
Way seems to consist more of policy and institutional innovations intended to avoid the excesses of
old social democracy and pro-market neoliberalism than a coherent programme of socioeconomic
regulation in an era of postindustrial, globalized capitalist development. If there is a ‘big idea’ under-
pinning the Third Way, it is that there is no ‘big idea’.
13. As an example, the bulk of the benefits of the substantial cuts in the top rate of taxation in the
UK in the late 1980s went to the high-income southeast region of the country. This helped to fuel the
inflationary boom in the region, which in its turn led the government to raise interest rates in an effort
to deflate the economy, which in its turn ushered in a national recession. This was a classic case where
regional imbalance undermined national economic policy.
14. To pursue the same example, it was the electorate of the southeast which had been the main
stronghold of political support for the neoliberal, free-enterprise Thatcher government that reduced
taxes in the late 1980s.

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