Meeting in Brackets – How Mental Health Policy Travels through Meetings
(2023) Evidence and Policy : a journal of research, debate and practice — Vol. 19, n° 2, p. 196-216 (2023)
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- Background: Meetings are essential events for the production of a policy. Yet they are largely taken for granted in policy studies: they are perceived as tools for achieving predefined tasks and used as a means of studying other topics, such as public participation. Aims and objectives: In this article, I aim to study meetings themselves and to develop the concept of meeting in brackets, which helps us understand how meetings might produce the policy to which they relate. Methods: Qualitative methods, including direct observation of 77 meetings, interviews and document analysis, were combined over an eight year period in order to fully understand the relationship between the observed meetings and the policy being studied. Findings: The Belgian mental health policy gradually emerged from meetings that took place in the policy and professional arenas, at international, national and local levels. As a result of references made by the participants to previous meetings or to the resulting documents, these meetings gradually formed a web, outside of which the Belgian mental health policy cannot be understood. Discussion and conclusions: The concept of meeting in brackets allows us to define a meeting as an event framed by decisions regarding the structure of meetings, which I describe as bracketing decisions. These decisions facilitate a form of communication described as reflexive. Reflexive communication in turn leads to a collective creation: a unique vision of the policy under discussion. Such unique visions are gradually assembled as meetings succeed each other, thus forming a web of meetings which is inherent to policy production.
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Thunus, S. (2023). Meeting in Brackets – How Mental Health Policy Travels through Meetings. Evidence and Policy : a journal of research, debate and practice, 19(2), 196-216. https://doi.org/10.1332/174426421X16595409252858 (Original work published 2023)