New Perspectives in Policy and Politics
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The aim of this collection was to be provocative and open up debate, and the book appears to have succeeded. In doing so, it seems to have achieved the not insubstantial feat of provoking Colin Hay, who makes several abject criticisms of the collection. He is uninspired by Bob Jessop’s ‘neologistic’ approach to the topic, exhausted by the myriad attempts at conceptual re-formulation, and somewhat aghast at the potential implications of our own discussion of Carl Schmitt’s work. This very short concluding chapter responds to Hay’s critique of Flinders and Wood’s chapters, and of the broader purpose of this collection, in three senses. It argues that Carl Schmitt’s work is used to contextualise the collection, rather than set a theoretical agenda. Secondly, it argues that conceptual reflection and problem-based research need not be antagonistic, but can in fact be complimentary. Lastly, taking the lead from C Wright Mills’ work on ‘the sociological imagination’, it argues for a little more ‘big thinking’ in the social sciences, and the development of a ‘political imagination’.
Over the past two decades politicians have delegated many political decisions to expert agencies or ‘quangos’, and portrayed the associated issues, like monetary or drug policy, as technocratic or managerial. At the same time an increasing number of important political decisions are being removed from democratic public debate altogether, leading many commentators to argue that they are part of a ‘crisis of democracy’, marking the ‘end of politics’.
Tracing the political uses a broad range of international case studies to chart the politicising and depoliticising dynamics that shape debates about the future of governance and the liberal democratic state. The book is part of the New perspectives in policy and politics series, and will be an important text for students of politics and policy, as well as researchers and policy makers.
The toolbox of governments increasingly resembles a set of informational cues and prompts. Governments and other public sector organisations realise that the traditional tools of government, such as law and finance, need a supportive informational context to be effective. Recent developments in British government show that the distinction between nudge-like interventions and the traditional policy instruments cannot be sustained. These informational resources have increased the capacity of government and they can help alleviate the problems of top-down forms of intervention. In short, an informational focus to the tools of government can enhance more traditional forms of intervention.
When designing and implementing policies, policy makers usually assume linear, proportionate causation between interventions and consequences. Yet frequently unexpected consequences occur that seem unintended and disproportionate. This chapter argues that interventions are more appropriately understood as loops, not lines. System dynamics shows that causes and consequences interact in circular patterns, creating unexpected outcomes and self-reinforcing mechanisms. Some loops are vicious, causing deterioration of the situation, others are virtuous, propelling self-sustaining improvements that exceed original intentions. The chapter illustrates the circular approach to causality by applying it to interventions aimed at the improvement of the performance of primary schools in the Netherlands.
Despite the UK’s leading role in public management reform, and decades of continuous change, little has been learned of the final outcomes. Our understandings of the impacts are fragmentary. A theoretical explanation has three elements. The first comprises the inherent technical and methodological difficulties of evaluating complex major organisational change over time. The second identifies reasons why it is unlikely that most executive politicians will invest energy in systematic evaluation. The third emphases specific institutional features of organisational reform in UK central government. Changes can be made and remade with (comparative) ease - tempting elites constantly to reinvent.
Partnerships have played an increasingly prominent role in local governance and there has been considerable debate about the impact which self-organising capacity and government intervention have on their effectiveness. This paper examines what kinds of self-steering local public service partnerships require in order to address intractable public policy problems, and whether external steering by government helps or hinders them. It concludes that ‘soft steering’ by government can be instrumental in establishing and mobilising partnerships. The type of self-steering they deploy depends on the context in which they operate and the kinds of collaborative activities they attempt.
In recent years the nature of policy and politics has witnessed significant transformations. These have challenged perceptions about the ways in which policy is studied, designed, delivered and appraised. This book -the first in the New Perspectives in Policy and Politics series – brings together world-leading scholars to reflect on the implications of some of these developments for the field of policy studies and the world of practice. First published as a special issue of Policy & Politics, the book offers critical reflections on the recent history and future direction of policy studies. It advances the debate by rethinking the ways in which scholars and students of policy studies can (re)engage with pertinent issues in pursuit of both scholarly excellence and practical solutions to global policy problems.
The concept of everyday making has become a powerful influence on activists and academics looking for ways to transcend neoliberalism. For everyday makers, democratic and egalitarian spaces are created in the cracks and fissures of power by deciding, in the first place, to act differently. Drawing on Marx’s theory of capital and crisis, this paper rejects the choice between everyday and systemic perspectives. The challenges today are threefold: how to rollback the market, understanding how community and workplace struggles reinforce one another, and grasping the dynamics of scale: the systemic implications of everyday struggles and vice-versa.
This paper addresses the problem of how to engage with the politics of public policy in the current period of cuts, austerity and retrenchment. It explores current strategies of divestment, design and decentralisation, assessing the scope within each for creative enactments and alternative pathways. It then explores ‘public-making’ as a means of countering the affective consequences of austerity, and shows how practitioners mediate and manage the tensions that result through multiple forms of ‘border work’. Finally the paper explores the troubled relationship between progressive policy enactments and neoliberal appropriations.
What lessons about public sector reform can be learnt from using political anthropology to study governance reform? What are the strengths and weaknesses of such an approach? I contrast the everyday working experience reported in Rhodes (2011) with the core themes of civil service reform; namely evidencebased policy making, managerialism, and choice. I use five axioms for clarity of exposition: coping and the appearance of rule, not strategic planning; institutional memory, not internal structures; storytelling, not evidencebased policy; contending traditions and stories, not just managerialism; the politics of implementation, not top-down innovation and control.
