Doing Interpretive Analysis through Policy Ethnography: Spatial Memory of Flooding and Reflexivity in Secondary River Cities, Philippines and Thailand

Studying public policy in Southeast Asia, particularly in the Philippines and Thailand, has long treated empiricism as the default rule for assessing policy issues and thinking through potential solutions. Yet we cannot simply reduce policy analysis to technical assessment, or to the objective insight that numbers alone bring to bear, especially on policy issues that touch on the direct experience and suffering of individuals. This is more evident when we consider the deeper layers through which a crisis like flooding is experienced, not only on a personal note, but as a spatial memory, a shared experience held in common by a community. At times, however, we are constrained from surfacing and unpacking these layers, because dominant structures and normative framings admit only one legitimate view of a policy issue. Policy ethnography is currently getting considerable attention, particularly for its critical potential to transcend empiricist normativities, and its interpretive potential to unpack deeper reasons and worldviews over an issue. In a field immersion I conducted across informal settlement communities in secondary river cities of the Philippines (Iloilo City) and Thailand (Chiang Mai), I contemplated how reflexivity matters as we work through the spatial memory of flooding via policy ethnography toward a more interpretive policy analysis. I argue that a more conscious practice of policy ethnography is inseparable from a more critically discerned interpretive analysis: critically reading the spatial memory of flooding is not incidental to reflexive practice but demands it, and reflexivity is the crucial link that allows policy ethnography to engage spatial memory as more than description. Reflexivity here works in three registers. First, immersion: the researcher's own embeddedness in a space is itself a form of knowledge claim, and to read a space discerningly requires being immersed in it well, not observed from a remove. Second, relationality: reflexivity is bound to one's connection to community life, since understanding how ordinary lives continue is itself a way of reading a space's memory, memory that becomes territorialized in the material and social frameworks a community inhabits. Third, emplaced sensing: spatial memory unfolds not only through what is visually apparent but through embodied, sensory co-presence, knowing that is situated in the relationship between body, mind, and environment, revealing what reflection alone cannot access. In topics such as flooding, reflexivity matters to policy ethnography, and this approach needs underscoring in the interpretive discussion, because there are instances when a crisis is kept from public reach: covered over by concrete or state-sponsored spatial elements or veiled under an aesthetic that gentrifies and further displaces the memory of the space, the memory of the crisis. We need, then, not only to reflect individually but to be linked with spatial memory through opening our eyes not only for ourselves but for the community as well. This paper offers room for further discussion, room to start talking more on approaches that matter most in our context, in the Asian context, and to go beyond the established norms that often make us overlook our own vantage points.