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74 pages

English

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Ten 'heretics', all leading thinkers and practitioners in their professional fields, explain the disastrous effects of New Public Management across a range of public services

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Public administration

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Publié par	Triarchy Press
Date de parution	20 juin 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781911193784
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0600€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Published in this first edition in 2020 by:
Triarchy Press
Axminster, England
+44 (0)1297 561335
info@triarchypress.net
www.triarchypress.net
Copyright © Triarchy Press, 2020
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including photocopying, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBNs:
Print: 978-1-911193-77-7
ePub: 978-1-911193-78-4
pdf: 978-1-911193-79-1
Contents
Foreword
Editorial
Bespoke by Default: The Future for Public Services
Death of the Professional: The Future is Generic
The Age of Impact: Why Charitable Giving Is Broken
The Organisation is Dead – Long Live the Network
Evidence isn’t Enough
Governments Should Create Our Money, Not Banks
Driven to Distraction? A slow stroll to help local government re-connect with what matters
Managers Nearly Always Measure the Wrong Things
About the Editors
Foreword
by Anton Hemerijck
Professor of Political Science: European University Institute, Florence Centennial Professor of Social Policy: London School of Economics and Political Science
John Maynard Keynes is purported to have said “when the facts change, I change my mind!” Surely, if ever there was a lucid, independent, 20 th -century mind, it was Keynes’s. Most of us harbour a more defensive posture, prone to relegate ‘facts change’ to exceptions from standard operating procedures in need of governance re-affirmation. As a collective endeavour, policy adaptation to changing realities is even more difficult for two reasons. Public policy is fundamentally geared towards (conflicting) objectives, such as full employment, economic growth, low inflation, more nurses and nurseries, less poverty, subdued inequality, and greenhouse gas reduction – commendable targets that are inherently uncertain. As such, there is an established tendency, however foolish, to re-commit to underlying rules and governance structures in times of need, when policy outputs deviate from aspired targets.
The second conundrum lies in the reality that public policy results from interactions among a multitude of policy actors, each with their own understanding of problems and solutions, and each with their own political preferences and interests. For day-to-day policy makers, unsurprisingly, it’s the rule-structure that provides governance leverage and professional security, not political objectives per se . On a positive note, this gives policy a requisite element of stability and predictability. On the other hand, we are far removed from the appealing dictum ‘when facts change, reform follows suit’.
Change is difficult, but it happens! The example of the experience of the Great Recession in Europe is instructive. Immediately after the 2007-8 crash, many OECD governments showed little inhibition in pursuing bold strategies of crisis management, on a scale unthinkable a decade earlier when market-liberal ideas were cemented into the policy-making machinery of advanced capitalist democracies. At first, crisis management focused on financial sector bailouts. Next, central banks took on new functions, including liquidity and credit enhancing interventions. With some delay, the European Central Bank (ECB), with Mario Draghi at the helm, stepped out of the void to save the euro, doing ‘whatever it takes’ through bond buying and quantitative easing, far beyond the narrow remit of inflation targeting in the Maastricht Treaty. But here is where the good news ends.
All the heresies in this volume are characterised by an astute readiness to give up on received wisdom, but no less hidden is the ambition, which I share, to one day be accepted as mainstream. Second, all the essays point to problematic mismatches between the substantive design of policy programmes and their institutional governance structures, which continue to rely on by-now outdated policy theories. Third, in recognition of institutional shortcomings, as a way forward, most proposals suggest improving the relational makeup of the policy environment.
Mark Smith laments the pervasive logic of standardisation, introduced for reasons of management control in public services, because it is incapable of absorbing variety, while prohibiting service work to walk the ‘extra mile’, which he maintains has become the new norm. By the end of his essay there is some recognition that ‘some’ services benefit from ‘some’ standardisation, but the danger of standardisation is its associated focus on method and procedures, rather than substantive problem-solving as a relational exercise, not a hierarchical one. Similarly, Catherine Needham challenges the orthodoxy of professionalisation into siloed care services, helping professionals to stay out of court, in an era where citizenship diversity requires integrated solutions of work, care, health and housing support, again in a relational fashion. As Smith does in the previous chapter, in her conclusion Needham warns us not to junk professional expertise altogether, in an advocacy for self-managed care teams of about 10 professionals supporting 50 neighbourhood patients to address wicked care problems in an integrated fashion.
Jake Hayman abhors the universal disconnect in the world of philanthropy, where ‘city’ involvement, based on a trickle-down paradigm of spreadsheet monitoring, is driving out joined-up activities designed to bolster communities, whilst ignoring deep problems of inequality. Stephen Lock’s heresy also points in the direction of the failure of ‘organisation’ in solving community problems, because organisations create hierarchical control by managers, directors and policy makers. What the world needs now, he argues, is less control and more genuine networking for better results. He also admits that effective networks often comprise many organisations, as in the NHS, but what matters is how interconnected organisations coalesce around a shared purpose on the basis of reciprocity and trust, which is the lifeblood that makes effective networks adaptive and resilient.
Most heretical perhaps is the proposal, based on the finance lessons of the Great Recession, by Vincent Richardson and Alan Peyton, to give government the monopoly on money creation. Lax financial regulation created a global money bubble that was destined to burst. When it did, the state had to rescue the ‘too big to fail’ banks but, once salvaged, banks were reluctant to increase lending because of the lack of economic demand. Once more, the doom-loop had to be resolved through state intervention in the form of quantitative easing or simply money creation. Subsequent trials and tribulations surely beg the question: “why we do not make money creation the unique competence of the state, in order to ease recessions and forestall bank runs?”
In their respective heresies, both Peter Wright and Richard Davis take on the issue of the evidential bases for policy. Richard Davis reiterates some of the insights from Smith, Needham and Lock – that managers always measure the wrong things, mainly those relating to control, budgets and accountability rather than those relating to the more fundamental questions of problem-solving in helping people to lead flourishing lives. Peter Wright boldly states that evidence is never good enough in the sense that for evidence to capture the hearts and minds of citizens and policy makers, it has to be anchored in a persuasive political narrative with a strong sense of purpose. Only then will the evidence become actionable in terms of reform, given the limited attention span of policy makers and the ever-present danger of regulatory capture.
Striking in all the heresies in this volume is how the relevant institutional status quo is unequivocally described as perverted. This immediately raises the question of whether – if we are able to persuade policy makers to change their plans as we wish – this will actually bring about massive improvements as things inescapably continue to change. How can we be sure that a state monopoly of money creation will lead to optimal investments in the real economy? Do open networks work better than rigidified organisation on all counts? Can we really do away with state capacity beyond money creation? This brings me back to the rise and fall of Keynesian economics in the 20 th century. In the 1920s, John Maynard Keynes fought Marshallian mainstream classical economics as a true heretic. He received widespread recognition after the Great Depression for having vindicated macroeconomics: the study of the behaviour of the economy as a whole (rather than the sum of the microeconomic behaviour of individuals, households and firms) as a branch of economics in its own right. As a heretic, Keynes portrayed counter-cyclical management as a ‘general’ theory to replace existing policy beliefs. However, with the benefit of hindsight, I would say that Keynesian macroeconomics added up to no more than a very important ‘sometimes true’ theory, relevant to the historical exigencies of the Great Depression and, more recently, the Great Recession. Keynesianism was discarded in the 1980s against the background of runaway inflation and rising unemployment, which monetarism and rational-expectation macroeconomics proved better able to explain. Equally revealing is that the fallout from the financial crisis also relegated monetarism to ‘sometimes true’ status. My take is that we live in a world of only ‘sometimes true’ theories, but in order to receive policy-making attention, we have sell our ideas as ‘general’ ones.
If we do live in world of merely ‘sometimes-true’ theories, this should have practical relevance. There is no denying the importance to actors of the structural incentives and constraints presented by the institutional environment in which they live. And wh