In his introduction to this roundtable, Hubertus Buchstein raised some interesting questions for the assessment of Habermas’ role for critical policy studies, starting from the abstract level of philosophy of science (positivism and its critique) and going down to the level of a specific field of policy problems (ecology). From the perspective of political theory, which is his special field of interest, such an approach certainly makes sense. As my role in this roundtable is more to represent the perspective of policy studies, I am going to reverse this sequence from the abstract to the concrete. I shall start, like policy sciences are expected to do, with the level of practical problems that Buchstein formulated
as the ‘question of ecology’. As space is limited on this roundtable, I shall comment only on three of Buchstein’s questions, leaving the issue of positivism and its critique for future comments.