Part IV Synthesis and Summary: Current Trends and the Way Forward
B. Guy Peters
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
INTRODUCTION
The past several decades have been characterized by sharp movements away from what had been conventional models of governing in most industrialized democracies. In particular, these governments have been implementing a shift away from hierarchical, Weberian styles of governing in favor of several alternate conceptions of what constitutes more appropriate styles of governing for the
‘‘modern’’ era. These changes represent both the ‘‘pull’’ of several new ideolo- gies about governing and the ‘‘push’’ factor resulting from skepticism about the effectiveness of the top-down styles of governing characteristic of the previous decades. The emerging conception is that government can perform better with more open and entrepreneurial organizations than it will with the familiar bureau- cratic style. (See Peters, 2001.)
The change in thinking about governance also involves change in the rela- tionship between the public sector and organizations in the private sector. In the emerging conception of the role of the public sector, governments remain a cen- tral, if not the central, actor in providing governance. Governments are, however, no longer committed to being both the maker and implementer of all polices, but 85
rather are likely to utilize a variety of different instruments and institutions in order to achieve their policy goals. This change in thinking produces more possi- ble routes for governments to achieve their goals, as well as the opportunity to build closer connections with the private sector and to enhance the role of civil society. This involvement of society not only reduces costs but also can make policy more democratic.
Expressed in other terms, both scholars and practical public managers have been shifting their attention from government per se in favor of a greater concern withgovernanceas a more inclusive process of steering society and economy (Pierre and Peters, 2000a; 2000b). In this emerging conception of the role of the public sector those public institutions continue to bear the primary responsibility for steering the economy and society. Government may, however, be able to discharge that fundamental responsibility through means other than the direct imposition of authority, or use other instruments requiring direct government involvement in the social processes being influenced. In the governance concep- tion steering is assumed to be achieved through involving networks of social and economic actors rather than depending entirely upon government organizations themselves. Governance is, in the words of prominent Dutch scholars (see Kick- ert, 1997), ‘‘steering at a distance.’’ This style of steering is more palatable politi- cally in an era in which there is significant public resistance to the state and its more intrusive forms in intervention.
Alternatively, governments have been perceived to have lost control of policies because of the influence of international actors, including both market and nongovernmental organizations. Some scholars (Strange, 1996) have argued that governments have lost the capacity to control their central economic policies because of the pervasive influence of the international marketplace and the pro- cesses associated with globalization (but see Hirst and Thompson, 1999; Peters and Pierre, 2000). Other scholars (Rhodes, 1997; but see Dowding, 1995) have argued that governments have lost their governance capacity to those very net- works that we are now arguing constitute a crucial element in the governance conception of the process of governing. The assumption behind this argument is that networks are in fact sufficiently well-organized to become capable of captur- ing the authority of the state and of using it for their own purposes.1 In such a view the participants in the networks seek their own goals and are sufficiently capable of evading the regulatory capacity of government to reach those goals.
Another desirable element of this emerging style of providing direction to the society, at least in the eyes of its advocates, is that it involves autonomous social actors and facilitates the adaptation of the governing system to changes in the environment. The argument is that the conventional public sector is so dominated by formal rules and internal regulations that it is incapable of re- sponding to the socioeconomic and even political environment, and hence incapa- ble of responding to the legitimate demands of the public. In addition, many
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formal styles of governing are relatively disconnected from their environment, making decisions on political or ideological grounds rather than because of close connections with social forces. The more socially driven governance model would, it is assumed, be more responsive to those external forces and hence perhaps also in principle more democratic.
Still other scholars (Marks, 1996) have argued that governance is now being produced through complex intergovernmental arrangements and is now a ‘‘multi- level’’ process rather than being centered on the nation–state level as in the past.
The argument here, not dissimilar to that offered by the advocates of the network conceptualization, is that the state has been losing power upward to regional structures such as the European Union and NAFTA, as well as downward to local and regional governments. The emerging style of governing, it is argued, makes the state just one of a number of actors involved in the governing process with no privileged position relative to the other participants. Further, governing in this conception is much less determinate than in the past, so that not only do governments have difficulty in managing their policies, but individual citizens and firms may find it difficult to predict their own position relative to regulation or other public-sector controls over them.
Finally, the governance conception emphasizes the role that private and third sector actors play in providing policy, implementing public programs, and serving as mechanisms for accountability. While most traditional conceptions of governing emphasize government as both formulator and implementor of policy, a governance emphasis is more agnostic about the implementation aspect of pol- icy (Walsh and Stewart, 1992). Again, the steering capacity of the public sector depends in this conception more upon the capacity of government to establish clear, operational goals and to monitor the implementation of those goals than it does on the actual delivery of public services themselves. Indeed, steering may be reduced by a direct government role, given that there may be greater public resistance to direct imposition by government than there is to the same rules being implemented either through self-implementing provisions such as tax ex- penditures or through third sector providers.
We reject the extreme conceptions of the loss of authority of the nation–
state, although certainly there have been important transformations of the manner in which governments deliver their services to the public. The governance con- ception can still locate the public sector at the center of the process, and indeed government is crucial for maintaining democratic legitimacy for the activities being undertaken in the name of the public (Peters, 2001; Hirst, 2000). In addi- tion, governments tend to be superior institutions for establishing collective goals for society than other possible competitors; that is, network theory appears to assume that there will be agreement among the members of a network, and hence that they will to some extent be capable of achieving agreement on policies and how to govern. (See Marsh and Rhodes, 1992.) In reality, however, any network
that is truly representative of the interests involved in the policy domain will involve competitive interests as much as collaboration, and hence must have mechanisms for resolving those conflicts. In the best of worlds that can be achieved through negotiation, but in reality that level of cooperation and collabo- ration may be difficult to achieve.
The process of moving away from the traditional conception of governing and toward alternative modes of governance has been far from complete. What has been occurring is a process of reform of the public sector that introduces some features of the governance model while at the same time retaining many aspects of traditional governing.2In particular, much of the traditional responsi- bility of government for establishing goals is retained, along with the capacity of state actors to monitor goal achievement and perhaps retake control of imple- mentation if the private sector or quasi-public organizations fail to attain appro- priate standards. Implementation through the nongovernmental actors may en- hance the economy and efficiency of government while losing little or nothing of the overall steering capacity, given that there are effective means of assessing and correcting errors in that implementation.
THE MARKET MODEL
The market has become the principal alternative to traditional styles of governing.
The assumption has been that if governments could function more like market organizations then the public sector would perform better. In particular, it has been argued that government organizations are often inefficient and ineffective because they are monopolies and are not forced to confront alternative providers of the same services. In this emerging conception of governing, the obvious rem- edy to the problems of governing is therefore to create competition, whether that competition is within the public sector itself or between the public- and private- sector organizations. This competition is assumed to reduce the costs of deliv- ering services, and therefore to provide collective benefits to society.
Likewise, citizens are assumed to be better off because of the opportunity to exercise more options when receiving public services. The conventional mech- anisms for service delivery in the public sector have emphasized coordination and an absence of redundancy in programs, but the market conception of good governance assumes that some redundancy—and with it some competition—is a virtue. Further, when possible, some of the alternatives to conventional forms of creating services can be located in the private sector (e.g., through creating vouchers for education or housing). Indeed, in the most extreme conceptions the entire operation of the public sector can be conceptualized as a series of contracts or principal–agent relationships that depend upon exchange to control behavior.
(For a critique, see Krause, 1999.)
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The market model provides some important benefits in the provision of public services, but also may have some serious disadvantages. In particular, the conception of the public interest being manifested through the market model assumes that economy and efficiency is at least as important as the quality of the services being provided. As we will point out below, quality and performance are being reasserted in some of the more contemporary reactions to initial rounds of administrative reform, so that the simple logic of saving money is being supple- mented with attempts at measuring the quality of services provided. In addition, the market model stresses opportunities for choosing policies for themselves, but the choices exercised are largely economic; that is, by providing vouchers and other means of subsidizing individual consumers of public services members of the public are able to have more control over what they do consume, but still have relatively little opportunity to shape the options being offered.
DEMOCRATIZATION AND PARTICIPATION
In addition to the market ideal, there are also other more politicized conceptions of governance emerging that reject the extremes of both the traditional hierarchy and the favored market alternative. Lying between the hierarchy and markets are several more directly political means of governing. Associated with those governance models are various concepts of networks of public and private organi- zations that cut across conventional vertical and horizontal lines of governing and attempts to provide adequate governance without as direct and authoritative a government role as in the past. These alternative views of governing represent a second wave of reform of the public sector, as the rather simplistic reforms in the first round increasingly are supplemented and replaced by substantially more sophisticated approaches to governing. Politically, the increasing advocacy of more direct means of public involvement in decision making reflects a perceived failure of government to legitimate many of its activities, including many of the recent reforms. The need for more public involvement is seen to be essential for both the formulation stage of the policy process and the implementation of pro- grams to give the public the sense that governance is occurring on their behalf.
In many ways participation in contemporary democracies is becoming di- rected more toward bureaucracies and other output institutions rather than through the usual input mechanisms such as parties or even interest groups (Kliks- berg, 2000). Citizens are expressing increasing discontent with the conventional means of participation and appear to want to have the means of more directly affecting policy decisions and program delivery. At one end of the spectrum there is increased interest in both direct democracy and deliberative forms of democ- racy that do permit more direct influence for the public. In addition, the means by which clients can influence the administration of their programs or participate
directly in the management of the programs are also becoming of greater concern to the public. In some ways this emphasis on the output side of the public sector reinforces the ‘‘consumerization’’ of government (Hood et al., 1996) characteris- tic of some of the market reforms initiated during the 1980s, but it still does provide an alternative channel of influence.
While the democratization of policy making is a procedural remedy for problems of governing, the creation of networks and other mechanisms for link- age between public and private organizations is a more structural solution for the problems (Kliksberg, 2000). In some ways this solution is a very old one, with corporatist and corporate pluralist mechanisms for participation in govern- ment being familiar instruments for involving private-sector organizations in pol- icy making. What tends to differentiate the emerging patterns of involvement is that they are more inclusive of the range of interests surrounding the policy area.
Further, the emerging patterns of involvement of social groups tend to be directly related to performance of organizations within the public sector. Evaluation of performance is to some extent objective and professional, but it is also increas- ingly a political process in which members of the public and their assessments of the programs being delivered to them become a major consideration.
THE REFORMS CONTINUE
One of the most interesting aspects of the administrative reforms implemented during the past several decades is that rather than a series of changes followed by some years of consolidation and perhaps even some reversals, there has been a succession of reform efforts. One reform has followed another in rather rapid succession, seemingly regardless of the politician in office or of objective envi- ronmental conditions. These reforms have tended to build on one another and to make most earlier attempts at administrative reform appear quite crude, both politically and technically. In particular the simple economistic (to use Peter Self’s term) conceptions of good governance that have been adopted began a drive toward greater efficiency in government. More recently reformers have been focusing on performance within the public sector and on the outputs of the system, taken very broadly. (See below.) This conception of performance in the public sector requires in turn greater involvement by the general public in order to define the nature of the outputs desired, and perhaps it may also require en- hanced opportunities for public involvement in the actual production of those outputs.
The central issue of contemporary administrative reform therefore may be the need to find mechanisms for matching the emerging political goals with the important economic and managerialist programs more characteristic of the first stage of reform. The first round of reform broke the domination of traditional
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forms of administration over the delivery of public services. The need now is to think about means of blending a variety of important public values, including efficiency, democracy, and service quality. The important reform question at the outset of the new millennium is how to build on those relatively simple concep- tions of efficiency in order to build more complex conceptions about the best ways of delivering services to the public. The managerialist reforms were very good at saying how the public sector could save money and be more efficient, but they were much less concerned with what government was doing.
The emerging managerialist tradition in government also is much less con- cerned with the interface between political leadership and management than is the traditional pattern of governing, and that issue—usually phrased as account- ability—has now resurfaced in a very significant way. Accountability must now, however, be discussed in a very different way than in the past. This is true in particular because the structure of the public sector is substantially different from that within which traditional parliamentary accountability had been exercised. In particular, the decentralization and deconcentration of public administration and the increased use of nongovernmental actors in the delivery of public services means that there is a need to rethink how to link service delivery with political power. There is now a good deal more managerial freedom, but many fewer ways of controlling it.
We should remember, however, that this accountability question is as trou- blesome for politicians as it is for citizens and public managers. Politicians are now being held responsible politically for actions over which they have a decreas- ing degree of influence. For example, the spate of rail disasters in the United Kingdom is being placed at the doorstep of the government, but the actual deliv- ery of the service in question is through an executive agency that operates at arm’s length from the minister responsible. The public may consider that the minister is still responsible in a case such as this, although he or she may actually have minimal control in the day-to-day management of the agency. It may there- fore appear in a number of cases that no one is really responsible for government actions, even when there are serious errors made (Gregory, 1998).
The fundamental argument of this chapter, therefore, is that reform begets reform, and when political and administrative leaders decide to intervene in the public sector they may solve one set of problems but in the process may create another set. The new problems may be no more or less pressing than the initial problems, but they will be different. In some cases the second reforms being implemented to ‘‘solve’’ the problems created by the first round of changes may return government to something closer to the status quo than existed prior to the reforming activities. This pendulum of change (see below) is indicative of the weakness of the administrative theory that may guide the change processes in the public sector.