POWER, POLICY AND DEVELOPMENT
5.5 DECISION MAKING AS PART OF POLICY DEVELOPMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION
4. How are their interests served?
The importance of understanding power relations in policy formulation helps us to understand the dynamics involved in socio-economic and political issues.
Lukes' three-dimensional views of power offer a very useful analytical tool for policy makers and scholars. It helps us understand the power and power
relations in social institutions and structures. Using this tool we have learnt that it is not only the local players and the directly affected players that need to be taken into account when we develop policies or when we analyze power relations. National government, financial institutions and the public are also parties that are critical in the informal sector policy debate.
5.5 DECISION MAKING AS PART OF POLICY DEVELOPMENT
policy in its own right which changes as prevailing material, social and political conditions dictate otherwise, which call for yet another decision to be made.
The most important point to be taken into account is that the focus of decision making remains with the national state. Municipalities in drawing or formulating their policies must in the first instance consult with the policies of the national government. Policy makers allocate values to decisions. Decision-making takes place in different arenas and at different levels. At one level there is a decision by high policy actors, at another there are decision of the actors who are involved at ground level. Modern government is a complex multi-layered, or multi-sphere activity in which a policy entails numerous decision points.
According to Lasswell, decision analysis is concerned with "who gets what, when and how."(LassweIl1936) According to Parsons
Decision analysis encompasses a range of academic discipline and frameworks ... For something as complex as decision-making by
individuals and groups no one diSCipline or framework can possibly explain everything. In highlighting one aspect another is ignored or
underestimated. Strengths are also weaknesses. There can be no one explanation of decision-making, and consequently the aim of policy analysis is to contextualise approaches, and clarifies the values and beliefs which frame a given theory (Parsons, 1995)
Parsons examines models of decision -making, drawn from a number of social sciences. These include political science, sociology, organizational theory,
economic, psychology and management. These disciplines may be compressed into five major categories which are power, rationality, public choice and its
alternatives, institutional, informational and psychological. Ideas can not be pigeonholed, contributions to decision analysis often overlap. Models of power view decision-making in terms of power structures such as wealth, class,
bureaucratic and political arrangements, pressure groups and technical knowledge.
Models of power in turn can be viewed in different approaches, which clearly show power relations in decision making. Let us consider the following:
5.5.1 ELITIST MODEL
The elitist model holds that power is concentrated in the hands of a few groups and individual. According to this model a decision making process works to the advantage of the elite. Elitism purports to have been founded on how the real world works. It is argued that in the real world there are those at the top with power and the mass without power. The proponents of this model are Mosca and Pareto, both Italian theorists.
Mosca and Pareto argue that, contrary to Marx, history shows that elitism is inevitable. They argue further that democracy can be viewed as a form of politics where people compete for the people's vote in order to secure legitimacy for elite rule.
Commenting on power Lasswell (1936) takes the view that "the study of politics is the study of influence and influential." Lasswell agreed with Pareto that there was a circulation of the elite in democracy and that there was a shift from class struggle to a struggle between different skill groups such as those with business and commercial skills, technocrats who possess specialised knowledge and bureaucrats with administrative or organisational skills. When combined these elites pose a danger to democracy.
Implicit in this analysis is that elites are pervasive, and a gulf will always remain between 'them' and 'us'. In the result, participatory decision-making is limited for as long as there are elites.
The usefulness of the understanding of this model within the South African context enables us to understand why informal traders in particular at local government are ever suspicious about reforms or new policy initiatives or developments. Clearly, from this model we can now appreciate that informal traders may be cautious the authorities who are 'the elite' running the show in the name of democracy to further their elitist agenda.
5.5.2 CORPORATISM
This term gained currency in the middle ages and in the fascist movement of the post war period. The theory was that of a society based on the incorporation of groups in the policy making process. This, it was argued would overcome
conflicts between labour and capital. Schmitter (1974) defines corporatism "as a system of interest representation in which the constituent units are organised into a number of singular, compulsory, non-competetive, hierarchical ordered
categories, recognized or licensed by the state and granted a deliberate representational monopoly within their respective categories in exchange for observing certain controls in their selection of leaders and articulation of demands and supports."(934-936)
5.5.3 PROFESSIONALISM
This model seeks to analyse the extent to which professional elites have acquired power in decision-making and implementation of public policies. It is argued that professionals are more interested in their own gain than that of the public they are meant to serve.
5.5.4 RATIONALITY
"I think that there is plenty of evidence that people are generally rational ... they usually have reasons for what they do, even in madness there is almost always a method as Freud was at great pains to point out and, putting madness aside for a moment, almost all human behaviour consists of goal oriented action." (Simon, 1985:285,297)
Human rationality according Simon is limited in terms of:
• The incomplete and fragmented nature of knowledge
• Consequences that can not be known
• Limits of attention
• Human being learning through adjusting their behaviour in line with purposive goals
• Limits of storage capacity of the human mind
• Human beings as creatures of habit and routine
• Human beings with limited attention spans
• Decision-making as also bounded by an organisational environment, which frames the processes of choice.
The theory of rationality seems to have some relevance in understanding some of the challenges confronting municipalities in their attempt to deal with informal traders. The above limitations of human rationality tend to explain why the
process of appropriate or sound informal trading policies does not seem to address the problems of managing the informal sector in a way that enhances their status and at the same time contributing to the economic development of municipalities.