Policy coordination and coherence have been a challenge to government since the inception of government. The development of the public sector has been primarily through continuing specialization and the creation of organizations that perform a limited number of functions. Hierarchical control from central agencies and political leaders has been the conventional response to the coordination problem, but other methods such as networking and collaboration are also available to coordinators.
This paper discusses coordination from two seemingly contradictory analytic perspectives. The major part of the analysis will be attempting to understand coordination as a collective action problem. Coordination involves multiple actors whose self-interest, or ignorance of the possibilities for improving public services, may prevent them from cooperating in ways that would improve overall performance. Thus, coordinating public policy involves many of the same issues as forming governing coalitions, and I will develop an argument about how to address the issue analytically, if not necessarily practically,
The other, and to some extent competing, perspective about policy coordination is identifying some means for promoting cooperation and collaboration among the actors. This approach to coordination is not based so much upon rational calculation and bargaining but more on perceived needs to work together, and also on ideational approaches. That is, the assumption of these collaborative approaches is that most people working within the public sector tend to want to produce better outcomes for their clients. Therefore, when those opportunities can be identified the actors involved will indeed cooperate. Even then, however, good ideas may not be enough and cooperation may not emerge autonomously and some agency will be required. Thus, effective coordination may require the utilization of a variety of instruments.
There seems to be quite a bit of reflection on the current state of play in the study of public policy at the moment. I have recently offered something on the topic myself.
A couple of months ago Peter John posted a draft paper online entitled New directions in public policy: Theories of policy change and variation reconsidered. The paper offers a perspective on the state of the debate and identifies what may constitute a novel way forward. As always with Peter, the paper is thought-provoking and well worth reading.
The thought it provoked in me was that he is both absolutely right and very possibly not quite so right at one of the same time.
Peter’s paper divides the history of the study of public policy into three. The focus is on policy continuity and episodes of policy change, so the paper leaves out quite a bit that is interesting about public policy – for example, implementation theory or processes of adaptation.
But, accepting the focus upon policy change, Peter maps out the three phases as the early classic studies – encompassing rational decision making, but also incrementalism and Simon’s bounded rationality – a second phase focused on the synthetic approaches of the 1990s – multiple streams, punctuated equilibrium, advocacy coaltion framework – and the current phase. John’s argument is that the current phase has been characterised by a relative lack of theoretical innovation. With the exception of a rise in interpretative policy analysis and behavioural public policy – which are, one has to concede, rather large exceptions – nothing has emerged that has had an impact similar to that of the three big beasts of 1990s US policy studies.
Peter then proceeds to argue that if you look over the fence at other subfields within political science and at the intersection of political science and economics then you will find there is interesting and innovative work going on. It is seeking to shed light upon the determinants of public policy. Hence, public policy scholars have much to gain from expanding their horizons.
At one level I agree with Peter’s analysis of the state of play. But at another level I would say that it implicitly relies on some rather heavy-duty boundary work. You could argue, for example, that some of the most interesting work relevant to policy that has been done since the 1990s draws on historical instutitionalism. I’m thinking of the 2005 collection edited by Streeck and Thelen or, in particular, the 2010 collection edited by Mahoney and Thelen which develops the case for taking endogenous incremental change seriously. But this work does not tend to make any reference to the big three, or much else from the canon of the ‘public policy’ literature. While the application of these ideas to policy is relevantly straightforward plenty more needs to be done to work them through in a policy context.
We can conclude that research in public policy has been a little moribund only if we are prepared to draw the boundaries of what constitutes ‘public policy research’ quite tightly.
The other interesting aspect of Peter’s argument is that he works towards the conclusion that a potentially fruitful way forward for public policy research is political economy, and comparative political economy is particular.
Now I am absolutely in agreement that expanding the compass of explanation to locate policy processes more explicitly in their socio-political context would be a valuable theoretical sophistication. But “political economy” is a treacherous concept. Or rather it can mean very different things to different people.
Peter favours the version of political economy that flows from the encroachment of mainstream economics into political science. This is the sort of field where political economy is as likely to carry the prefix “positive” or “constitutional” as it is “comparative”.
It is undoubtedly true that this flavour of policy economy has thrown up some interesting findings. These findings can be used to critique some of the myths and taken-for-granted assumptions that underpin contemporary political discourse. Peter briefly reviews some of them.
But I would argue that if we are to expand the analysis of public policy into the realm of political economy then there is an urgent need to embrace the sort of political economy preferred by social scientists who are not mainstream economists – human geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, institutional economists.
Here the focus is much more clearly upon the impact of values and ideologies, structures of power, agnotology, the ways in which local decision making is framed and stabilised by global discourses, or where – drawing inspiration from Polanyi – the idea that there is a meaningful binary divide between “the state” and “the market” and that policy processes are constrained by “the market(s)” is challenged as a fundamental misunderstanding of structure of society.
That is a route that would, it strikes me, be just as likely to prove illuminating. But would it be “public policy”? I’ll leave it to others to adjudicate on that point. Personally, I’m happy to look wherever the mood takes me and wherever it looks like there are theoretical resources that offer the potential to advance our understanding.
I promise that I never planned to use the word ‘masturbation’ (offered in the context of methodological debates) three times in my April 2012 opening address to the Political Studies Association annual conference in Belfast. There was no carefully made plan to achieve a record-breaking ‘twitter-spike’ or to create a wide-ranging stir. It just sort of happened. The results of this rhetorical flourish have, however, been largely positive in the sense that it initiated a professional debate about the role of political studies in the twenty-first century. More specifically it initiated both research and discussion into the available evidence that the discipline had become either ‘more’ or ‘less’ visible or influential vis-à-vis the public, social groups, politicians or policy-makers, while at the same time unleashing a more fundamental debate about the meaning and political implications of terms such as ‘impact’, ‘relevance’ or ‘engagement’ when applied to political science.
My simple argument throughout this debate is that political science is kidding itself if it really believes it is visible, engaged or relevant beyond the academy. There are clearly exceptions to this argument. Some sub-disciplines and specialist fields have cultivated and maintained a social relationship that delivers a visibility and level of influence far beyond the lecture theatre and seminar room. There are also a small number of what I might term ‘hyper-engaged’ scholars but these are very much the exception rather than the rule. Several scholars have criticised me for making such arguments and have argued that the discipline has never been so relevant. My response is that if this is the case – and it’s a very big ‘if’ – then a serious perception gap exists (i.e. if high-quality theoretically informed but policy-relevant research is being undertaken by political scientists then it is simply not percolating down into Whitehall and Westminster). Debates about the existence or explanations for this ‘gap’ could form the focus of a hundred books or journal special editions and yet to engage in such an intellectual exercise risks simply reinforcing the view of many social commentators that political science has become ‘self-referential as well as self-reverential, and often unreadable to anyone but a specialist… a narcissistic world of academics writing for each other’.
It is exactly this context that my focus falls not on the ‘tragedy of political science’ (to adopt the title of David Ricci’s wonderful 1984 book) but on the ‘potential of political science’ or what C Wright Mills termed ‘the promise’ of the social sciences. This potential and promise will, I suggest, only be realised once political scientists accept that they possess a professional responsibility to the public in terms of engaging with society in the broadest sense about why their research and writing matters. This argument has absolutely nothing to do with the corporatisation of the universities, with the dumbing-down of scholarship or with ‘clipping-the-wings’ of academic autonomy or independence. I am not interested in producing purely instrumental knowledge or in narrow definitions of ‘impact’ or ‘relevance’ but I do believe that a new model of ‘engaged scholarship’ provides ways of increasing the visibility of the discipline as well as increasing its leverage with potential funding bodies. (Moreover, I’ve said many times before that it is political theorists and political philosophers and not the governance and public policy specialists who have most to gain from the ‘tyranny of relevance’). ‘The promise’ of the social sciences relates to being able to promote an understanding of the world that allows individuals to locate themselves within the bigger picture. There are no simple solutions to complex problems and academics must push back against unrealistic expectations but there is a great public appetite for new ways of understanding the world. Frameworks of understanding, a new marketplace of ideas, novel opportunities to embed ‘impact’ within both teaching and research, clear and direct ways of dealing with the ‘so what?’ question that scholars of all disciplines are increasingly asked …the notion of engaged scholarship provides a way of turning what is frequently interpreted as a threat into an opportunity.
The specific characteristics of this argument and its surrounding debate – as well as an important and novel attempt to tease-apart and tie-down the concepts of ‘impact’, ‘engagement’ and ‘relevance’ – can be found in this article and it is sufficient here for me to sign-off by recalling a famous passage in C Wright Mills The Sociological Imagination (1959) [I make no apologies for its length]
“Just now, amongst social scientists, there is widespread uneasiness, both intellectual and moral, about the direction their chosen studies seem to be taking. This uneasiness, as well as the unfortunate tendencies that contribute to it, is, I suppose, part of a general malaise of contemporary intellectual life. Yet perhaps the malaise is more acute among social scientists, if only because of the larger promise that has guided much earlier work in their fields, the nature of the subjects with which they deal, and the urgent need for significant work today… Not everyone shares this uneasiness, but the fact that many do not is itself a cause for further uneasiness among those who are alert to the promise and honest enough to admit the pretentious mediocrity of much current effort. It is quite frankly my hope to increase this uneasiness, to define some of its sources, to help transform it into a specific urge to realize the promise of social science, to clear the ground for new beginnings… my conception stands opposed to social science as a set of bureaucratic techniques which inhibit social inquiry by ‘methodological’ pretensions, which congest such work by obscurantist conceptions, or which trivialize it by concern with minor problems unconnected with publicly relevant issues. These inhibitions, obscurities and trivialities have created a crisis in the social studies today without suggesting, in the least, a way out of that crisis.”
Over half a century later it is possible to detect a new or continuing ‘widespread uneasiness’ about the direction of the social sciences, in general, and political science in particular. This is also forms part of a wider set of concerns about the state of contemporary intellectual life (the role and future of universities, the impact of the internet and social media, the decline of public intellectuals, etc.) while the Perestroika movement in the United States and the ‘Perestroika-lite’ agenda across much of Western Europe raises both methodological and normative questions that resonate with Mills’ position. The aim, however, of my focus on engaged scholarship is to suggest ‘a way out of that crisis’.
Policy makers’ intentions and attempts to shape the state of the world in accordance with their beliefs and expectations through policy interventions is based on their perceptions of cause and effect in the policy domain, which they then try to influence through policy: through compliance with new regulation, they presume situational changes for the better. Practitioners, as well as scientists, have a hard time coming to grips with this linear understanding of policy intervention. How is it that intervention works in one case and not in another, even when cases share similarities? Is it the manner of policy intervention design that is misinformed? For ages, scientists have racked their brains for answers to problems of unintended and unanticipated consequences: what are they, how do they evolve and can we do anything to stop them? As the world around us, including the world of policy intervention, grows increasingly more complex, we find ourselves understanding the effects of policy intervention better in some ways, but also worse in others, and struggle to determine whether interventions under such circumstances can be at all effective. Different questions are raised about what is going on. Yet the age-old question for policy makers remains the same: what works?
In an attempt to help scientists and practitioners understand the intricate relationship between the effects of a policy with its produced results and interactions it causes in a complex world, we combine different theories. Theories about complexity (system dynamics, complex adaptive systems, causal loops), combined with those of unintended effects and unanticipated consequences, together shed new light on the workings of policy interventions. In the article we question the notion of the concept of causality, on which most policy interventions and the theories explaining them are based. We introduce the notion of mutual causality in policy interventions, based on a study of underperforming schools in the Netherlands. We show that some schools end up in vicious cycles where situations deteriorate as a result of intervention, whereas other schools are propelled into a virtuous cycle that markedly changes for the better. The cases show the dynamics of intervention processes and the ways in which interactions of circumstances, contexts and factors emerges. Understanding these processes and the loops of causation that are involved depends to a great deal on local knowledge and the ability of local actors to signal the relevant changes. Therefore we claim that a change in perspective and language about causality and consequences in designing policy interventions is needed in science and in practice. Rather than linear conceptions of causality and one-size-fits-all policies, designing effective policy interventions is about positive and negative feedback loops, observation, monitoring and tailor-made interventions. That implies that the broader regimes and systems in which policy-interventions are designed become better equipped to deal with local complexity and the local judgement of professionals or policy-makers that intervene in those local systems.
Martijn van Der Steen, Mark van Twist, Menno Fenger and Sara Le Cointre
Decades of political domination by free marketeers have been very damaging for the left. With partial exceptions in some Latin American and northern European countries, varieties of ‘free market’ fundamentalism are now so ingrained as to be unquestioned, even unquestionable, by political elites. Mainstream social democratic parties have largely accepted the terms of this neoliberal hegemony: all prosperity depends on a healthy market economy, argued Tony Blair. With mass strikes being defeated and membership falling for decades, the trade unions too seem impotent in the face of this market hegemony. Worse still, far from provoking a successful challenge to neoliberal domination, the economic crisis of 2008 and after seems only to have entrenched it. At the sharpest end of the crisis in Greece, heroic struggles on the streets and in the workplaces, have failed to halt the relentless austerity drive. On the contrary, the Greek Labour Party (PASOK) chose to sacrifice its own political base and electoral credibility to drive through an unprecedentedly brutal cuts agenda, in order to save Greece’s membership of the Euro and make the country ‘competitive’.
With the organised left on the sidelines, many thinkers and activists have started looking for other ways of challenging the dominance of markets, corporations and authoritarian ‘austerian’ states. The basic idea of ‘everyday making’ is that despite everything, we have the capacity to do things differently if we choose. If only we stop devoting all our attention on criticising ‘the system’ and focus on our immediate experiences and capabilities, then another world is possible in the here and now. Everyday makers typically focus on practical action at the small-scale: from those in the craft movement trying to recover creative skills lost in mass production, to those wanting to build new economic practices through cooperatives and other forms of mutual endeavour. Everyday making is to build painstakingly in small spaces ignored or vacated by the profit economy.
My article explores the rich variety of approaches to everyday making, arguing that it is a mistake to give-up on challenging capitalism. I draw on the ideas of Karl Marx to argue that capitalism is no illusion, but very real and by its nature profoundly unstable and aggressively expansionary. This is not because capitalists necessarily want to behave like that, but they have to do so to continue making profits in ageing market economies. The governance of European austerity illustrates all too well how, driven by authoritarian states, the market encroaches further and further into public welfare and public space. Nothing is sacrosanct, including the economic alternatives celebrated by everyday makers. Since the crisis, for example, cooperatives have been firing employees and cutting wages just like ordinary businesses. They cannot do otherwise if they want to continue trading in the market economy. This is not to deny the importance of grassroots community campaigning – London Citizens has made a real difference through its fight for a living wage. It is rather to say that sustaining and building on success requires a challenge to market domination. In other words, everyday making itself poses questions about how economy and society as a whole are organised.
At the same time, it is clear that there is a strong, constructive relationship between everyday making and large-scale protest. In Turkey recently, we saw how a small-scale ‘everyday’ protest against the development of Taksim Gezi Park could quickly mushroom and generalise to encompass far more radical political demands. I argue that despite many defeats over the past 30 years, it is these mass demonstrations and strikes that have come closest to defeating austerity – and still have the greatest potential to do so. If so, the question is not whether to give up on system change in favour of everyday making, but rather how to further radicalise the explosive struggles that emerge from everyday life; how, that is, to take that final step from heroic resistance to victory. There are no easy answers to that question and the ideas of everyday makers have much to contribute to our visions of how another world may be possible. But they are not enough on their own.
We think we know how to reform the public sector yet our aims are rarely realised. Undeterred, we return to the same kind of solutions. We want more rational decision making. We strive for better management that, as in the private sector, delivers economic and effective performance. Latterly, we have added the call for service delivery based on the choices of citizens acting as if consumers. This repetitive compulsive behaviour has been labelled the ‘civil service reform syndrome’ in which ‘initiatives come and go, overlap and ignore each other, leaving behind residues of varying size and style (Hood and Lodge 2007: 59). We do not need more of the same.
Ethnography offers a different approach. Life at the top is characterised by coping with rude surprises. Willed ordinariness is the goal, and being here tomorrow a marker of success. There is no one agreed view of the world. The older generalist tradition coexists with the newer managerial tradition. Top civil servants are not managers but political administrators. They must have political antennae. They need to warn the minister that there is hole ahead. After the minister has fallen in, they help him or her out of the hole. Then, they pretend the minister never fell in. They protect the minister against the goldfish bowl existence that is the present-day media (Rhodes 2011). Whether they know it or not, ministers need the civil service to provide a protective cocoon. This world is ill suited to such innovations as strategic planning and evidence based policy making. Instead, we need to preserve the best features of the historic civil service.
A key reform is to find ways of preserving institutional memory – the inherited beliefs and practices of departments – often called the ‘departmental philosophy’. Top public servants and ministers learn through the stories they hear and tell one another and such stories are a key source of institutional memory, the repositories of the traditions through which practitioners filter current events. The departmental tradition is a form of folk psychology. It provides the everyday theory and shared languages for storytelling. It is the collective memory of the department; a retelling of yesterday to make sense of today. For many observers institutional memory is under threat. The recipe for departmental Alzheimer’s is: rotate staff rapidly, change the information technology frequently, restructure every two years, reward management over other skills, and adopt each new management fad (Pollitt 2009). Record keeping, the craft of writing, the ability to spot snags, and an awareness of a department’s history are not exciting history-making activities but they are the bedrock of a permanent career civil service. It would be wise for the would-be reformers to preserve the world they are eroding before it is lost.
References
Hood, Christopher and Lodge, Martin 2007. ‘Endpiece: Civil Service Reform Syndrome – Are We Heading for a Cure?’ Transformation, Spring, 58-59.
Pollitt, C. (2009), ‘Bureaucracies Remember, Post-Bureaucratic Organizations Forget?’ Public Administration 87 (2), 198-218.
Rhodes, R. A. W. 2011. Everyday Life in British government. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
40 years after the launch of Policy & Politics it is fitting to ask some troubling questions about the relationship between these terms. Has the politics of policymaking been fundamentally changed as think tanks and media savvy advisers have become more prominent? As the boundaries of the state are being redrawn, with policy functions distributed to contractors on the one hand and to the amorphous civil society of ‘local communities’ on the other, how can we understand where – and how – policy actually happens? And what’s the relationship between new political forces and movements and the mundane, everyday work of shaping policy on the ground?
In Performing new worlds? Policy, politics and creative labour in hard times I examine some current trends in the policy process (strategies of divestment, the turn to design and the ongoing project of decentralisation), all of which shift where and how policy is performed. I ask how far those shifts enable new forms of creative solutions to emerge – or whether the stripping away of resources, people and capacities closes down opportunities for renewal and change.
Such questions are particularly significant in this period of austerity in which many of those who had been involved in delivering or shaping policy have lost their jobs, at the same time that there is an urgent need to address the severe problems resulting from cuts to welfare benefits and services. That is, they raise difficult questions about how the politics of austerity is being lived and experienced by those working the borders between politics, policy and institutional change.
Janet Newman Faculty of Social Science, The Open University j.e.newman@open.ac.uk
Members of the board and speakers at the conference: (left to right) Julia Mortimer, Alex Marsh, David Sweeting, John Keane, Sarah Ayres, Matthew Flinders and Eva Sorensen
Policy & Politics held its 2013 Conference in Bristol on the 17-18 September at the Marriott Hotel, Bristol. The theme of this year’s conference was ‘Transforming Policy and Politics: the Future of the State in the 21st Century’. Details can be found on the conference webpage.
160 scholars from eighteen countries discussed different aspects of public and social policy in relation to recent and future changes to the state, politics and public services. Discussions were focussed at a global and local level in a range of sectors, including health, housing, welfare and economic development.
The conference hosted four fantastic plenary speakers: Professors Liesbet Hooghe (University of North Carolina), Bob Jessop (Lancaster University), John Keane (University of Sydney) and Eva Sorensen (Roskilde University). The plenary speakers drew on examples from around the globe to illustrate recent transformations to the state and their implications for policy and politics. Panel sessions included world leading scholars in their fields with many discussions leading to plans for future work, including joint or group publications.
The conference was also well attended by postgraduate students who made valuable contributions to the plenary discussions and panel sessions. Indeed, one of the highlights of the conference was a paper presented by an early career academic, Zachary Morris (University of California-Berkeley, USA) who presented work from his Master’s thesis titled ‘Disability policy reform in the United States and Great Britain’. Conference delegates described Zach as a ‘rising star’.
The theme of next year’s conference is ‘The challenges of leadership and collaboration in the 21st Century’. It will be held on the 16-17th September at the Marriott Hotel, Bristol. Our plenary speakers are: Professors Chris Ansell (University of California, Berkeley), Erik-hans Klijn (Erasmus University), Helen Sullivan (University of Melbourne) and Jacob Torfing (Roskilde University). We will also be announcing the winners of two new Policy & Politics prizes for ‘Best Paper’ and ‘Best Paper from an Early Career Academic’ published in the Journal. We hope that colleagues will once again join us for a superb academic event.
Sarah Ayres and Matthew Flinders
Co-Editors Policy & Politics
Editorial by Sarah Ayres, co-editor Policy & Politics, as published in Policy & Politics volume 41, number 4, available free until the end of November 2013
Sarah Ayres at the Policy & Politics conference 2013
This special issue is based on a selection of papers presented at the 40th anniversary Policy & Politics conference, held in Bristol in 2012. Policy & Politics published its first issue in 1972 and since then has been one of the leading international journals in the field of public and social policy. In that time the nature of policy and politics has undoubtedly witnessed significant transformations. Recent changes have included the increasing importance of global governance, a reframing of the state in delivering public services, the global economic downturn and associated austerity measures.This has been combined with rising public expectations about choice and quality of public services and the transition from government to governance, epitomised by the inclusion of non-state actors in the policy process. The 40th anniversary year provided an opportunity to reflect on these developments and the impact they have had on the field of policy studies and the world of practice. It has also been an opportunity for the journal to consider its position within and contribution to the field.
A host of leading international scholars were invited to present papers on the conference theme: 40 Years of Policy & Politics: Critical Reflections and Strategies for the Future. Delegates examined contemporary policy issues while looking back at the experiences of the last 40 years and reflected on how much is enduring, what has changed and how we might use past lessons to inform future policy? The conference included themes where Policy & Politics has enjoyed a strong track record in publishing world class scholarship, including democracy and social justice, partnership working and governance, politics and discourse, theories of policy making and reflections on health, housing, welfare and education policy. This special issue presents a selection of articles drawn from the conference. It brings together work by world leading scholars to address theoretical and practical developments pertinent to Policy & Politics over its 40-year history.
It begins with an article by Christopher Pollitt, who argues that ‘despite the UK’s leading role in public management reform, and decades of continuous change, little has been learned of the final outcomes’ (p 465). Pollitt ascribes this to the methodological limitations in evaluating major management reforms – that is, the difficulty in using orthodox, ex ante performance indicators in complex and constantly changing policy environments – and an apparent disinterest within government for finding out the results. Pollitt also notes the apparent ease with which large-scale reform takes place in the UK. This is the consequence, he argues, of a ‘light touch’ legal system and a style of politics which enable leaders to instigate public reform unchallenged. While the UK may have a leading role as a major exporter of public management ideas, Pollitt asserts that ‘its prominence has been built upon shaky foundations’ (p 466).
Rod Rhodes joins Pollitt in raising questions about the production and quality of social science evidence to inform policy and practice. He considers the limitations of the dominant tradition of modernist empiricism in political science with its roots in the natural science model, and asks what lessons about public sector reform can be learnt from using political anthropology: more specifically, whether the various reform proposals introduced in the UK blend with the everyday beliefs and practices of Whitehall civil servants and their ministers. Rhodes uses the concept of ‘storytelling’ to examine the structures and procedures that guide working practices in Whitehall. He argues that would-be reformers would benefit from drawing on observational evidence so that they know ‘what they are seeking to reform’ (page 492). These insights, he argues, would be more effective than the rational, managerial approaches to reform that have predominated since the 1970s and produced modest success.
Jonathan Davies also refers to the importance of everyday behaviours and working practices in his critique of the continued dominance of the neoliberal narrative and quest for possible alternatives. He refers to the concept of ‘everyday making’ to explore the possibilities for resistance and change within the capitalist system. Everyday makers reject system-orientated theories and campaigns and instead look to invoke opposition by deciding ‘in the first place, to act differently’ (page 497). However, Davies rejects the idea that we need to choose between everyday and systemic approaches, and instead argues that they are complementary. He argues that a future challenge will be to grasp the ‘dynamics of scale: the systemic implications of everyday struggles and vice versa’ (page 497).
Janet Newman echoes Davies’ call for the exploration of creative and progressive responses to the politics of austerity. She considers ‘how actors with “progressive” social or political commitments are able to enact new worlds within the confines of the [neoliberal] present’ (page 515). Newman argues that critical reflections alone are insufficient, and goes on to explore the potential for new methods, actors and framing of the policy process to generate innovatory solutions in a period of cuts and austerity. Both Newman and Davies recognise the importance of the individual (or agency) in exploring new pathways to post-austerity politics, as do Vivien Lowndes and Kerry McCaughie (533-49) in their analysis of local government in the UK. They identify the emergence of creative responses to service redesign, based upon pragmatic politics and ‘institutional bricolage’ – the recombination and reshuffling of preexisting components to serve new purposes. Lowndes and McCaughie agree with Davies and Newman in their observation of an apparent absence of radical new ideas in austerity politics. Instead, they observe new solutions emanating ‘bottom-up’ as practitioners take the role of innovators and entrepreneurs in their daily practices.
Martijn van der Steen, Mark van Twist, Menno Fenger and Sara Le Cointre (551-67) also examine the role of contextual factors, local circumstances and practitioners in shaping policy outcomes. More specifically, they examine the unintended effects of policy interventions in ‘weak schools’ in the Netherlands. Their article poses two central questions: What causes the differences in outcomes of similar policies in similar contexts? Can patterns of causation be found in what seem to be unpredictable, unstable and chaotic systems? They look at the role of causality, feedback mechanisms and cyclical loops in the production of policy outcomes. They view cumulative effects as inevitable and hence predictable. Like other articles in this issue, they recognise the central role of local practitioners in predicting and identifying the local circumstances and causations that might impact on policy outcomes in unique ways.
Other articles have explored the complex relationship between different modes of governance – markets, hierarchies, networks – in the policy process. Guy Peters examines the challenges of policy coordination in different contexts. Peters claims that hierarchical coordination is the ‘default option for coordination’ (page 580), but that it can be analysed in different ways. One is to understand coordination as a collective action problem based on an analysis of self-interest and resource dependency. Another is to view coordination as a form of cooperation and collaboration, whereby coordination is not based so much on rational calculation but on perceived needs to work together and shared beliefs. He goes on to explore the conditions and factors where these alternatives are most likely to be successful. Likewise, Steve Martin and Valeria Guarneros-Meza consider the dynamics of hierarchy and coordination in their study of local partnership working. They explore the kinds of ‘self-steering’ required in order to address complex public policy problems and whether external (hierarchical) steering by government can help or hinder the process. They conclude that ‘soft steering’ – defined as the provision of government funding, information and expertise’ – can have ‘an important role in helping to establish and mobilise the local partnerships’ (page 586) but that self-steering capacity is also vital. These examples illustrate the continued presence of hierarchy within the so-called transition to networked governance and, interestingly, the potential complementarity of governance modes in the right context.
Peter John’s work on the ‘tools of government’ looks at the scientific developments that have taken place in the field over the past 40 years. John argues that the traditional tools of government, such as legislation, finance and regulation, are being redesigned or supplemented by low cost behavioural interventions, such as ‘nudge’. Nudge involves using information in a particular way that encourages citizens to behave in their own or society’s interest. John notes that the tools of government have always had an informational component, but that they ‘are more informational now because of a growing awareness among policy makers about the power of signals and norms’ (page 606). John’s work provides a powerful demonstration of the impact of new methodological and scientific techniques on the policy process.
A number of articles in this issue have raised questions about the type of knowledge and evidence produced by social scientists, and its variable impact on policy (Flinders, 2013; Pollitt, 2013; Rhodes, 2013). In particular, Matthew Flinders reflects on how the academy should engage with policy and practice. He calls for ‘engaged scholarship’, and for academics to realise their ‘political imagination’ to ensure that academic knowledge has a clear role in ‘promoting public debate, cultivating engaged citizenship and having some form of impact beyond academe’ (page 626). He challenges the academy to reconnect with policy and politics and to embark on a different type of scholarship that is more accessible. Aside from meeting a public duty, he argues that this will be essential to the reputation and survival of political studies as a discipline.
There are obvious connections in the themes covered in this collection of articles. The content represents key contours of the terrain covered by Policy & Politics over the last 40 years. In the final article, Sarah Ayres and Alex Marsh reflect on the theoretical and practical developments pertinent to Policy & Politics during this period, and suggest some steps to advance the debate. We draw out key themes from the papers comprising this 40th anniversary special issue and discuss them under four headings: (1) theorising policy, (2) evidence and the policy process, (3) transforming structures and processes, and (4) implementation and practice. We argue for ‘greater tolerance of diversity in theoretical and empirical enquiry and for continued reflection on the foundational assumptions of the field of policy studies’ (page 643).
Finally, I would like to offer some reflections on the future of Policy & Politics as it embarks on the next 40 years. Matthew Flinders and I took over as co-editors of Policy & Politics in its 40th anniversary year. It has been, for us, a period of critical reflection and thinking about strategies for the future. We have revised our editorial strategy to reflect the unique intellectual landscape of the journal. The vision and strategy of Policy & Politics is to publish articles that demonstrate rigour, originality and significance, and that have relevance both within and beyond academe. This focus has forged its position as a truly interdisciplinary and international journal over the past 40 years. However, like all journals, Policy & Politics must evolve to retain its capacity for examining new trends, debates and challenges. The current journal strategy embraces two dimensions of scholarship – continuity and change, on the one hand, and breadth and depth, on the other.
In terms of continuity, Policy & Politics continues to foster its intellectual reputation as an outlet for world-class scholarship in relation to public administration, public and social policy, partnership and community governance, and public sector reform. In terms of change, the journal is increasingly publishing influential articles in relation to citizenship and the state, public participation and the relationships between evolving structures of multi-level governance, and mechanisms of democratic accountability. We welcome the submission of manuscripts that build upon the journal’s traditional strengths, as well as those that push the journal into new intellectual debates and terrains. Within a broad disciplinary landscape, the underlying factors that will determine publication are whether the manuscript meets the journal’s standards in terms of rigour, originality and significance.
In terms of breadth and depth – the journal welcomes manuscripts that are empirical, conceptual or theoretical, as long as the broader international and comparative relevance of the argument is explicit. One of the hallmarks of the journal is the manner in which its articles generally shift from the micro to the macro (or vice versa), by addressing the link between ‘policy’ and ‘politics’. For example, while singlecase studies might form the basis of an article, the broader significance and relevance of that study will be made explicit. Where articles deal with broad macro-political or economic issues they may also drill down to some discussion of the micro-level implications of that analysis. Successful articles will therefore demonstrate both analytical breadth and depth in the coverage of their subject matter. Articles also need to be written in a manner accessible to academic scholars, policy makers and practitioners across different academic disciplines around the world. This focus will shape the direction of the journal at least for our term of editorship.
As my colleague, Matthew Flinders notes:
The next 40 years will reward those journals who lead from the front and are willing to take risks; those journals that bridge boundaries, challenge common assumptions, and think anew; those journals that are willing to cultivate curiosity and shape debates. (page 639)
Policy & Politics welcomes this challenge and has a commitment to remaining reflexive, open minded and responsive to trends while being proactive in setting research agendas.
In a lucid and compelling contribution to Policy & Politics, Mark Purcell confronts the progressive liberal line of those who warn of the dangers of austerity and urge the (re)instatement of a welfare state. He argues that while a conventional liberal-democratic state may be more desirable than a neo-liberal state, they both fall far short of what we can and ought to imagine democratic society to be. Drawing on the work of French intellectual Lefebvre, Purcell outlines for citizens a state of ‘autogestion’ – a process and struggle where citizens both individually and collectively take control. They take control not to cede power to oligarchical state institutions or powerful state actors, but instead to co-ordinate in leaderless, non-hierarchical groups analogous to rhizomes – ‘centreless assemblages in which any point or individual can connect to any other’.
As Purcell points out, this idea is not some abstract utopian notion of human organisation, but instead a recurrent feature of co-ordinated and democratic behaviour occurring spontaneously around the world in 2011, in sites such as Tahir Square in Cairo, Puerta del Sol in Madrid, Syntagma Square in Athens, and Zuccotti Park in New York. Rather than ‘lamenting these revelations as a failure’, we should, according to Purcell, ‘narrate the exhilaration that participant after participant reported having felt as they refused to be ruled and took on the challenge of ruling themselves… it is that joy and delight in discovering democracy and urban society that we must help to grow and spread’.
Purcell focuses on the urban public realm to develop his analysis, and his article is available free of charge in September. His is one of five contributions to the current themed issue of Policy & Politics (Volume 41, number 3, July 2013,) on ‘reconfiguring the local public realm’. This collection of papers aims to advance our understanding of local and urban governance and democracy through theoretical and empirical exploration of matters such as social movements, political participation, and institutional formation. Contributions are international, taking in global North and South, and are located both in theoretical literature and empirical analysis. Alongside Purcell’s contribution is a detailed empirical analysis of urban activism in Madrid by Andres Walliser; an examination of the potential of participatory forms of governance such as those found in Brazil to proliferate in the global south by Jeremy Seekings; a consideration of the relationships between state and civil society in Norway by Jacob Aars and Dag Arne Christensen; and, in a contribution that very much contrasts with Purcell’s, a consideration of the need on democratic grounds for powerful local government by Colin Copus, Melvin Wingfield, and David Sweeting.
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