Chapter 5: Catching Up with Catching Up: Collaborative Policy Work, In|formality and Connective Talk

In this chapter, I ask what catching up means in the practice of collaborative policymaking. During ethnographic fieldwork among municipal policymakers and semi-public managers in child and family services in the Netherlands, I found the central actors constantly catching up. These are not interactions that we generally see in accounts of public policymaking, nor has this ‘mundane’ activity been systematically analysed. Based on many hours of participant observation, and illustrated through a composite narrative, I demonstrate how catching serves to construct the participants’ identity (who am I in this meeting), and relationship (what is our relation in this meeting), and to make sense of the specific situation of the meeting (what is it we are doing here) and of the larger ‘world’ beyond (what has happened and might structure what we will be doing here). I argue that catching up is a connective practice, connecting temporalities, spaces, knowledge and people. Within its actions, the informal and the formal are entangled.