Public policy generally consists of the set of actions—plans, laws, and behaviours—adopted by a government. Concern with the new governance draws attention to the extent to which these actions are often performed now by agents of the state rather than directly by the state. A vast number of studies offer detailed accounts of the impact of the new public management and the rise of the new governance within particular policy sectors, such as health care, social welfare, policing, and public security. However, policy analysis often includes a prescriptive dimension as well as a descriptive one. Students of public policy attempt to devise solutions to policy problems as well as to study governmental responses to them. Of course, their solutions are sometimes specific proposals aimed at a particular policy problem. At other times, however, they concern themselves with the general question of how the state should seek to implement its policies.
The rise of the new governance raises a question: How should the state try to implement its policies, given the proliferation of markets and networks within the public sector? Answers to this question typically seek to balance concerns over efficiency with ones over ethics. To some extent, the leading types of answers reflect the leading theories of governance. Rational choice theory tends to promote market solutions; its exponents typically want to reduce the role of the state in implementing policies. Institutionalism tends to concentrate on strategies by which the state can manage and promote particular types of organizations; its exponents typically offer advice about how the state can realize its policy agenda within a largely given institutional setting. Interpretive theory tends to promote dialogic and deliberative approaches to public policy; its exponents typically want to facilitate the flow of meanings and perhaps thereby the emergence of a consensus.
Planning and regulating
The stereotype of “old governance” is of a bureaucratic state trying to impose its plan on society. Formal strategic planning did indeed play a prominent role in much state activity in the latter 20th century. However, there remains widespread recognition that strategic planning is an integral feature of government. Plans help to establish the goals and visions of the state and its agencies, and they facilitate the concentration of resources in areas where they are thought to be most likely to improve an organization’s efficiency in relation to its dominant goals. Of course, plans are not set in stone. Rather, they are made on the basis of assumptions that might prove inaccurate, and of visions that might change, in ways that require the plan to be modified.
Although planning remains an integral feature of government, there has been much debate over how the state should implement its plans and policies. Neoliberals want the state to concentrate on steering, not rowing, and they have sometimes argued that a focus on steering would enable the state to plan more effectively: when state actors step back from the delivery of policies, they have more time to consider the big picture. Neoliberalism represents less a repudiation of planning than an attempt to contract out or otherwise devolve the delivery of policies to non-state actors. Typically, its advocates suggested that devolving service delivery would do much to foster a more entrepreneurial ethos within public services; it was said that the new public management would free managers to manage. Nonetheless, if some neoliberals appear to think that market mechanisms can ensure that non-state actors will do as the state or citizens wish (or should wish), others recognize that the state still has to structure and oversee the policy process. The state still has to set the goals for other actors, and it has to audit and regulate these actors in relation to these goals. Even as the state forsook direct intervention, so it expanded arms-length attempts to control, coordinate, and regulate other organizations. The new governance included expanded regimes of regulation, with a growing number of agencies, commissions, and special courts enforcing rules to protect competition and social protection.
Managing networks
Social scientists often conclude that the withdrawal of the state from service delivery led to a proliferation of networks and regulatory institutions. The spread of networks appears to have further undermined the ability of the state to control and coordinate the implementation of its policies. Social scientists, notably institutionalists, thus argue that effective public policy now depends on mechanisms for controlling and coordinating networks. There are several different approaches to the management of policy networks. Some approaches attempt to improve the ability of the state to direct the actions of networks by means of law, administrative rules, or regulation. Others focus on the ability of the state to improve the cooperative interactions between the organizations within networks; typically, they suggest that the state can promote cooperation by altering the relevant incentive structures. Yet other approaches concentrate on negotiating techniques by which the state might promote incremental shifts in the dominant norms and cultures within networks.
The different strategies of network management can be seen as complementing one another. In this view, the state should deploy different policy styles as appropriate in different settings. Public-sector managers respond to citizen references and specific problems in concrete settings. Generally, they have to bear in mind multiple objectives, including meeting quality standards, promoting efficiency, remaining democratically accountable, and maintaining public trust and legitimacy. Their responses to problems are typically pragmatic ones that aim to satisfy all of these objectives rather than to maximize performance in relation to any one of them.
Many approaches to network management reject the command-and-control strategies associated with hierarchic bureaucracies. In this view, because the state now depends on other organizations, it has to rely on negotiation and trust. Some social scientists thus suggest that the new governance requires a new ethic of public service. The state should neither row nor merely steer. It should act as a facilitator or an enabler. It should help foster partnerships with and between public, voluntary, and private-sector groups. It should encounter citizens not merely as voters or as consumers of public services but as active participants within such groups and so policy networks. Instead of defining the goals of public policy in advance, it might even allow the public interest to emerge from dialogues within networks.
Dialogue and deliberation
Sociological institutionalism and interpretive theory highlight the ways in which meanings, beliefs, cognitive symbols, and conceptual schemes have an impact upon the policy process. Some of their advocates suggest that the state might try to manage public policy by means of negotiation and other techniques designed to produce incremental shifts in the culture of networks. Others are less focused on the state; they advocate dialogue and deliberation as means to give greater control of the policy process to citizens. These latter advocate giving greater control to citizens partly for democratic reasons and partly because doing so can improve policy making and policy implementation. Some of them argue that the direct involvement of citizens became both more important and more plausible as a result of the rise of the new governance and the emergence of new information technologies.
Advocates of dialogue and deliberation argue that they facilitate social learning. In this view, public problems are not technical issues to be resolved by experts. Rather, they are questions about how a community wants to act or govern itself. Dialogue and deliberation better enable citizens and administrators to resolve these questions as they appear in concrete issues of policy. They enable a community to name and frame an issue and so to set an agenda. They inform those involved about their respective concerns, preferences, and ideas for solutions. They help to establish trust and, so, cooperative norms within a community. And perhaps most important, they are said to help reveal common ground, even to generate a consensus about the public good. Hence, they appear to pave the way for common action.
Critics point to various problems with dialogic and deliberative policy making. They argue that it is unrealistic given the size of modern states, it ignores the role of expertise in making policy decisions, it inevitably excludes groups or viewpoints, it is slow, and it cannot respond to crises. Critics also suggest that some policy areas—such as national security—are particularly inappropriate for direct citizen involvement. Despite such criticisms, citizen involvement, even if only as voters, is surely a necessary requisite of good, democratic governance.
Democratic governance
Questions about public policy are partly normative. Policy processes should ideally reflect the values of the citizenry. Today these values are generally democratic ones. However, the new governance raises specific problems for our democratic practices. Democracy is usually associated with elected officials making policies, which public servants then implement. The public servants are answerable to the elected politicians who, in turn, are accountable to the voting public. However, the rise of markets and networks has disrupted these lines of accountability. In the new governance, policies are being implemented and even made by private-sector and voluntary-sector actors. There are often few lines of accountability tying these actors back to elected officials, and those few are too long to be effective. Besides, the complex webs of actors involved can make it almost impossible for the principal to hold any one agent responsible for a particular policy. Similar problems arise for democracy at the international level. States have created regulatory institutions to oversee areas of domestic policy, and the officials from these institutions increasingly meet to set up international norms, agreements, and policies governing domains such as the economy and the environment.
There is no agreement about how to promote democracy in the new governance. To some extent, the different proposals again reflect different theories of governance in general. Rational choice theorists sometimes suggest markets are at least as effective as democratic institutions at ensuring popular control over outcomes. Institutionalists are more likely to concern themselves with formal and informal lines of the accountability needed to sustain representative and responsible government. These institutional issues merge gradually into a concern to promote diverse forums for dialogue—a concern that is common among interpretive theorists.
“Good” governance
Concerns about democratic governance first arose in discussions of economic development. Economists came to believe that the effectiveness of market reforms was dependent upon the existence of appropriate political institutions. In some ways, then, the quality of governance initially became a hot topic not because of normative democratic concerns but because it impinged on economic efficiency, notably the effectiveness of aid to developing countries. International agencies such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank increasingly made good governance one of the criteria on which they based aid and loans. Other donors followed suit.
The concept of good governance was thus defined by institutional barriers to corruption and by the requirements of a functioning market economy. It was defined as a legitimate state with a democratic mandate, an efficient and open administration, and the use of competition and markets in the public and private sectors. Various international agencies sought to specify the characteristics of good governance so conceived. They wanted checks on executive power, such as an effective legislature with territorial (and perhaps ethno-cultural) representation. Likewise, they stressed the rule of law, with an independent judiciary, laws based on impartiality and equity, and honest police. They included a competent public service characterized by clear lines of accountability and by transparent and responsive decision making. They wanted political systems to effectively promote a consensus, mediating the various interests in societies. And they emphasized the importance of a strong civil society characterized by freedom of association, freedom of speech, and the respect of civil and political rights. Some international agencies, such as the World Bank, also associated good governance with the new public management; they encouraged developing states to reform their public sectors by privatizing public enterprises, promoting competitive markets, reducing staffing, strengthening budgetary discipline, and making use of nongovernmental organizations. Other organizations, such as the UN, place greater emphasis on social goals, including inclusiveness, justice, and environmental protection.
Non-majoritarian institutions
It was perhaps ironic that international agencies and Western donors began to emphasize good governance just as the proliferation of markets and networks posed questions about their own democratic credentials. The new governance sits oddly beside the ideal of representative and responsible government in accord with the will of the majority. It involves private- and voluntary-sector actors in policy processes even though these actors are rarely democratically accountable in as straightforward a way as are public-sector actors.
There are many responses to the tension between governance and democracy. These responses vary from the suggestion that society might benefit from less democracy to proposals to make networks and markets more accountable to elected officials and on to calls for a radical transformation of democratic practices. The suggestion that less democracy might prove beneficial generally comes from people indebted to rational choice theory. Their argument contrasts democracy, which allows citizens to express their preference by voting only once every few years and only by a simple “yes” or “no” for a whole slate of policies, with the market, which allows consumers to express their preferences continuously, across a range of intensities, and for individual items. In addition, they worry that democracy entails certain political transaction costs that make it prone to incessant increases in public expenditure. One problem is that the costs of any item of expenditure are thinly distributed across a large population, which thus has little reason to oppose them, whereas the benefits are often concentrated in a small population, which thus clamours for them. Hence, they advocate non-majoritarian institutions as ways of protecting crucial policy areas, such as banking and budgeting, from democracy.
