Why have we allowed academics to blind-side us all?? The state of the State - part 6

This is the last part of my tabular presentation of what the commentariat have been saying in the past 50 years about the management and delivery of public services – although it’s certainly not my last word on the subject!

This is a subject to which I’ve devoted most of my life but I have to say that the result of this particular exercise leaves me with the powerful feeling that tens of thousands of academics have been wasting their lives - and the time of their students and of others hoping to get some enlightenment from the writing on the subject

“New public management”, “governance”, “public value”, “new public governance”, "public sector" or "governance" "innovation"..... the terms, strategies and debates are endless – and little wonder since the discussion is rarely about a concrete organization but, rather, about the system (of thousands of organisations) which makes up the entire public sector.

In the 1990s “the management of change” became a huge new subject in management literature – chapter 6 of my book In Transit – notes on good governance (1999) discussed the literature on management in both sectors - and the earliest book quoted is from 1987.

In the private sector, change was handled according to the perceptions of each Chief Executive and his team. But not so in the public sector – where reform was determined at the highest political level and its future (uniform) shape the subject of central edicts.

Academics dominate the writing but only as historians and classifiers…..at a very high level of abstraction….as will be seen from my summary of chapter 4 of In Transit – notes on good governance     

Question	How it’s dealt with by the commentariat	Typical Products
11. How do states compare in quality of public services?	“Benchmarking” national policy systems has become an important activity of bodies such as the World Health Organisation (WHO) - until 2000 The Commonwealth Fund is now the main source for a global assessment of Health systems. The OECD does a global education survey. Occasionally efforts are made to benchmark entire systems of public admin “Peer Review” is also a widespread activity within the EC eg this recent one on the Polish educational system	Health systems overview article An International Comparison of UK Public Administration (National Audit Office 2008)
12. Why do governments still continue to pay consultants vast sums of money?	Private consultants now run a global industry dispensing advice to governments which is worth at least 50 billion euros a year. Statistics are not easy to find – but the UK alone spends 1.3 billion pounds a year - see Use of consultants and temporary staff (NAO 2016) – which is actually about half of the figure ten years ago! Some will argue that this is a small sum to pay for good, independent advice to help ensure that public services are kept up to date. The trouble is that no one really knows whether it is good advice. It is a highly secretive industry – with reports seen only by senior civil servants and the odd Minister. Management consultancy in the private sector has been the subject of at least two highly critical studies  (Hucynszki; Micklewait and Woolridge) – which suggest a world of senior executives subject to fads and fashions and given to imposing their will on the work force in an autocratic way. This is even more likely to happen in public bureaucracies which have the additional problem of a political layer on top.	Michael Barber How to Run a Government so that Citizens Benefit and Taxpayers don’t go Crazy (2015) Ed Straw’s Stand and Deliver – a design for successful government (2014) John Seddon’s Systems Thinking in the Public Sector – the failure of the Reform regime and a manifesto for a better way (2008)
13. Role of Think-Tanks?	A few Think Tanks have a reasonable track record in this field – generally those who draw on retired civil servants for their insights… eg The Institute of Government The Demos Think Tank was a favourite with New Labour in its early years of the ambitious Modernising Government programme. The Centre for Public Impact is a new body which promises great things from its use of Big Data –We will see…..	Policy-making in the Real World (Institute of Government 2011) Professionalising the Civil Service (Demos 2017) eg The Public Impact Gap (2017)
14. What challenges and choices does the state face in the future?	The focus of these questions has been organisational – there are a couple of important elephants in the room namely finance and technology which are dealt with in other bodies of literature	Governance in the Twenty First Century (OECD 2001) is one of the rare books which tries to deal with future challenges
15. What are the best Toolkits, manuals, roadmaps etc for people to use who want to engage in reform efforts?	Change Here! Managing change to improve local services (Audit Commission 2001) Supporting small steps – a rough guide for developmental professionals (Manning; OECD 2015) A Governance Practitioner’s Notebook – alternative ideas and approaches (Whaites et al OECD 2015) OECD Public Governance Reports – Slovakia (2015) I am not a fan of deliverology but…..Michael Barber’s How to Run a Government so that Citizens Benefit and Taxpayers don’t go Crazy (2015) does repay study...... To Serve and to Preserve; improving public administration in a competitive world (Asian Development Bank 2000) still offers wise words	The Essential Public Manager; by Chris Pollitt (2003) is, by far and away, the best book to help the intelligent citizen make sense of this field Although I’m no fan of the World Bank, 2 titles (from the Development field!) offer the  best insights - People, Politics and Change - building communications strategy for governance reform (World Bank 2011) Governance Reform under Real-World Conditions – citizens, stakeholders and Voice (World Bank 2008)

State of the State – part 5

It’s odd that “Public Bureaucracy” seems to be of so little interest to the public - since one state alone (eg the UK) can spend no less than 800 billion pounds a year to give its citizens services….

A month ago in one of this series of posts, I actually identified 8 very distinct groups of people (academics, consultants, think tankers, journalists etc) who write about public services – from a variety of standpoints - using a variety of styles (or tones) and formats of writing. We could call them “the commentariat”.

It has to be said that little of their material is easy to read – it has too much jargon; it takes 10 pages to say what could be said in 1. Those who write the material do not write for the general public – they write for one another in academia and global institutions. On the few occasions they write snappily, they are generally selling stuff (as consultants) to governments.

The media do give a lot of coverage to various scandals in particularly the welfare and health services - but rarely give us an article which sheds any real light on what is being done with these hundreds of billions of euros….We are treated, instead, as morons who respond, in Pavlovian style, to slogans.

I am, of course, being unfair to journalists. They write what they are allowed to by newspaper and journal editors and owners – who generally have their own agenda. And who wants to read about the dilemmas of running public services or arguing about their “functions” being “transferred”? Just looking at these words makes one’s eyes glaze over!!

It seems that only journals like “The New Yorker” who can get away with articles such as The Lie Factory – about the origins, for example, of the consultancy industry.

And yet there is clearly a public thirst for well-written material about serious and difficult topics.

Take a book I am just finishing - journalist Owen Jones’ The Establishment – and how they get away with it (Penguin 2014) can boast sales approaching 250,000. For only 9 euros I got one of the best critiques of British society of the past decade……

I remember being in New York in 1992 and finding a copy of Reinventing Government (by Osborne and Ted Graeber) in one of its famous bookstores - which went on to become the world’s bestseller on government (with the exception perhaps of Machiavelli’s The Prince?). I simply don’t understand why someone can’t do that again with all that’s happened in the past 25 years….

In 2015 Penguin Books made an effort in this direction with a couple of titles …..Michael Barber’s How to Run a Government so that Citizens Benefit and Taxpayers don’t go Crazy (2015) and The Fourth Revolution – the global race to reinvent the state; by John Micklethwait and Adrian Woolridge (2015). The first suffers for me in too obviously being the special pleading of someone who was Tony Bliar’s Head of Delivery in the British Cabinet and has now reinvented himself as a "Deliverology" Guru. 

And I have avoided the second book for the past 4 years because it was written by managing editors of "The Economist"; spends the first 100 pages looking at how Hobbes, Locke and the Webbs gave us the first three revolutions in thinking about the state; the next 100 at the lessons we should take from California, Singapore and China - with not a single reference in the notes to any of the literature on public administration reform.....But, on the basis that it's better to know your enemy, I succumbed and have now started to read it.......

Over my lifetime, I’ve read/dipped into thousands of books about managing public services and organisations generally. About a dozen have made a lasting impression on me – I’ll reveal them in a future post…Let me, for the moment, continue some of the questions I think we should be asking about the state – and our public services -

Question	How has “the commentariat” dealt with the question?	Recommended Reading
6. Has privatisation lived up to its hype?	There is now quite a strong backlash against the performance of privatised facilities – particularly in the field of water and communal services – with the Germans in particular mounting strong campaigns to return them to public ownership…. A lot of such services remain monopolies – occupying the worst of all worlds since privatisation creates “transaction costs” (both in the initial sale process and subsequent regulatory bodies) and boosts executive salaries and shareholders’ profits – thereby adding significant additional costs. The only advantage is an artificial one – in the removal of the investment cap.	Reclaiming Public Services; TNI (2017) Our Public Water Future (2015 Public services international research unit) Private Island – why Britain now belongs to someone else; James Meek (2014)
7. What are the realistic alternatives to state and private provision of Public Services?	A hundred years ago, a lot of public services (even in the education and health field) were charitable. That changed in the 40s – but the 80s saw the welfare state being challenged throughout Europe. In the UK, government started to fund social enterprises working with disadvantaged groups – new Labour strengthened that work. The 2010 Coalition government started to encourage mutual structures for public services	Social Enterprise – a new phenomenon? (2014) The Three Sector Solution; (2016) Becoming a Public Service Mutual (Oxford 2013)
8. Where can we find rigorous assessments of how well the “machinery of the state” works?	The process of changing the way the British “machinery of government” started in the 1970s and has been never-ending. Although the emphasis during the Conservative period from 1979-97 was transfer of functions to the private sector, a lot of regulatory bodies were set up to control what became private monopolies – in fields such as rail and, in England, water. And, in an effort to mimic real markets, the health service was also the subject of a major division between purchasers and suppliers. Such innovations were eagerly marketed by international consultants – and copied globally New Labour was in power between 1997 and 2010. Its Modernising Government programme was developed with a strong emphasis on sticks and carrots – eg naming and shaming.                                                       Curiously, there are far more books describing the intentions and activities of specific programmes of change than assessments of the actual impact on organisations. A Government that worked better and cost Less?; Hood and Dixon (2015) is one of the few attempts to assess the effects of the British changes of the past 40 years. This OECD paper looks at the earlier period	The two clearest and most exhaustive UK books analysing in detail the reasons for and the shape and consequences of the large number of change programmes between 1970 and 2005 were written by someone who was both an academic and practitioner - Chris Foster author (with F Plowden) of “The State Under Stress – can the hollow state be good?” (1996); and British Government in Crisis (2005) Transforming British Government – roles and relationships ed R Rhodes (2000) is a good if outdated collection An International Comparison of UK Public Administration (National Audit Office 2008)
9. What Lessons have people drawn from all this experience of changing the way public services are structured and delivered?	We have now almost 50 years of efforts to reform systems of delivering public services - and the last 20 years has seen a huge and global literature on the lessons…… Academics contribute the bulk of the publicly available material on the subject – with Think Tankers and staff of global institutions (World Bank; OECD; EC) the rest. Consultants’ material is private and rarely surfaces – apart from their marketing stuff.  Michael Barber was Head of New Labour’s Delivery Unit in the early 2000s and has now become a “deliverology” consultant to governments around the world. He shares his advice here -  How to Run a Government so that Citizens Benefit and Taxpayers don’t go Crazy (2015) Chris Pollitt and Rod Rhodes are 2 of the top political scientists studying the changes in the structure of the state - see Rethinking policy and politics – reflections on contemporary debates in policy studies). Their basic message seems to be that a lot of civil servant positions were disposed of; new jargon was learned; management positions strengthened – but “stuff” (ie crises) continued to happen! The Fourth Revolution – the global race to reinvent the state; John Micklewaithe and Adrian Woolridge (Penguin 2015) is a rare journalistic entry into the field (to compare with Toynbee and Walker; and Barber).	The best short article on the experience must be  What do we know about PM reform? Chris Pollitt (2013) International Public Administration Reform  by Nick Manning and Neil Parison (World Bank 2004) had some good case studies of the early wave of efforts. Two of the best collections of overviews are - Public and Social Services in Europe ed Wollman, Kopric and Marcou (2016) AND The New Public Governance – emerging perspectives on the theory and practice of public governance; ed Stephen Osborne (2010)
10. Is anyone defending the state these days?	We have become very sceptical these days of writing which strikes too positive a tone. “Where’s the beef?” our inner voice is always asking – ie what interests is this writer pushing? Paul du Gay is a rare academic who has been prepared over the years to speak up for the much-maligned “bureaucrat” and his is the opening chapter of a 2003 collection of very useful articles The Toynbee and Walker book is another rare defence….this time from journalists	Dismembered – the ideological attack on the state; by Polly Toynbee and D Walker (Guardian Books 2017) “The Values of Bureaucracy”; ed P du Gay (2003) - googling the title should give you a complete download)

Miniatures and Matrices

I’ve been reflecting a lot this year on my working experience of organizational change (both managing and advising state bodies) - now equally divided between the UK (the first 25 years) and central Europe and central Asia (the last 25 years).  I do so in a coat of many colours – scholar, community activist, politician, consultant, straddler of various worlds (not least academic disciplines), writer and….blogger.
Conscious that there are very few who have this experience of straddling so many worlds, I thought it would be useful to try to produce some pointers for the general public, using a series of questions which occur to interested citizens about public services 

I have always been a fan of tables, axes and matrices – by which I mean the reduction of ideas and text to the simple format of a 2x2 or 6x3 (or whatever) table. It forces you to whittle text down to the bare essentials. Perhaps that’s why I love these Central Asian and Russian miniatures so much

So I have developed 16 questions and have compressed my answers into such a table with just 2 columns for responses – “how each question has been dealt with in the literature” and “where the clearest answers can be found”. Of course, the literature is predominantly anglo-saxon – although the experience covered is global.

This proved to be an extraordinarily useful discipline – leading to quite a bit of adjustment to the original questions. It’s a long table – so I’ll make a start with the first five questions 

- How does each particular public service (eg health, education) work?

- What can realistically be said about the interests which find expression in “the state”?

- How satisfied are citizens with the outcomes of state activities?

- Why is the state such a contested idea?

- Where can we find out about the efficiency and effectiveness of public services?

Basic Question	How extensively has it been explored	Some Good answers
1. How does each particular public service (eg health, education) work? How does it define and deal with challenges?	Each country has its own legal and cultural history which affects the shape and funding of services. Globalisation and Europeanisation have posed state bodies with profound challenges since the 1980s – with functions transferring from state to private and third sector sectors (and, in some cases, back again) and an increasing emphasis on mixed provision and “partnerships” Thousands of books give analytical treatment of each of our public services – some with a focus on policy, some on management. Measurement and comparison of performance – at both national and international level - have become dominant themes Less emphasis since 2010 on Capacity building and strategic thinking – seen as luxuries for services under severe pressure because of cuts and austerity…	Public and Social Services in Europe ed Wollman, Kopric and Marcou (2016) The New Public Governance – emerging perspectives on the theory and practice of public governance; ed Stephen Osborne (2010) What are Public Services Good At?; Demmke (2008) Parliaments and Think Tanks occasionally report on strategic work
2. What can realistically be said about the interests which find expression in “the state”?	The 1970s and 80s saw an active debate in political science and sociology about the nature of The State (national and local) – and the public, professional, political, commercial and other interests one could find represented there. As the state has “hollowed out” in the past 30 years – with privatisation and “contracting out” - political scientists became more interested in identifying the narratives which justified the remaining structures (see 8 and 9 below). It has been left to journalists such as Jones and Monbiot to look at the issue of interests – particularly commercial and ideational – of the new constellation of the state.	The State of Power 2016 (TNI) The Establishment – and how they get away with it; Owen Jones (2014) Democracy Incorporated – managed democracy and the spectre of inverted totalitarianism; Sheldon Wolin (2008) The Captive State; George Monbiot (2000)
3. How satisfied are citizens with the outcomes of state activities?	Despite the constant political and media attacks on public services, the general level of satisfaction of the British public remains high – particularly for local institutions	Opinion polls – Gallup, European Union Parliamentary Select Committee on PA eg this 2008 report on citizen entitlements
4. Why is the state such a contested idea?	In the 1970s a new school of thinking called “public choice theory” developed a very strong critique not so much of the public sector but of the motives of those who managed it. The argument was not a pragmatic one about performance – but rather that politicians and bureaucrats had  private interests which they always put ahead of any notion of public interest; and that private sector provision (through competition) would therefore always be superior to that of public provision. Although it was initially treated with derision, it was the basic logic behind Margaret Thatcher’s push for privatisation which became global after the fall of the Berlin Wall	Reinventing Government (by Osborne and Ted Graeber) popularised the new approach in 1992 Public Choice Primer (IEA 2012) is the clearest justification of this powerful school of thinking
5. Where can we find reliable analyses of the efficiency and effectiveness of public services?	In the UK a powerful National Audit Office (with more than 600 staff) investigate Departments of State (inc Hospitals). It is overseen by Parliament’s most powerful Select Committee - the Public Accounts Select Committee. For 25 years local authority budgets in England and Wales were overseen by an Audit Commission which was, very curiously, abolished Attack on public spending “waste” has long been a favourite subject for the media – with quite a few books devoted to the subject.	National Audit Office Public Accounts Select Committee Global league tables for health and education sectors The Blunders of our Governments (2013) The most accessible and comprehensive treatment

We need to talk about…… “The State”

We need to talk about….the State. Or at least about the “machinery of government” about whose operations I am most familiar – in local and regional government in Scotland from 1968-90 and then in local and national systems of government in some 10 countries of central Europe and central Asia from 1991-2012.

Terminology is admittedly confusing….my first love, for example, was “public administration” since, at one fell swoop in 1968 I became both a Lecturer (officially in Economics) and a locally-elected reformist politician. From the start, I saw a lot wrong with how “public services” impacted on people in the West of Scotland – and I strongly associated with the national reform efforts which got underway from 1966, targeting both local and national systems of government and administration.

Major reforms of the “Civil Service” and of English and Scottish systems of local government were duly enacted – and I duly found myself in a powerful position from the mid 1970s to 1990 to influence strategic change in Europe’s largest Regional authority  

But, by the late 70s, national debate focused on “state overload” and on “ungovernability” and the discourse of private sector management was beginning to take over government.

The 80s may have seen a debate in UK left-wing circles about both the nature of “the local state” and the nature and power of “The State” generally but it was privatization which was driving the agenda by then.  “Public Administration” quickly became “public management” and then “New Public Management”….

Indeed by the 90s the debate was about the respective roles of state, market and society. Come 1997 and even the World Bank recognized that the undermining of the role of the State had gone too far.

But it has taken a long time for voices such as Ha-Joon Chang and Marianna Mazzucato to get leverage……and the space to be given for talk about a positive role for the “public sector”.

In the meantime talk of “platform capitalism”, the P2P “commons” and automation confuses most of us… and the last remnants of European social democratic parties have, with a couple of exceptions, totally collapsed. So do we simply give up on the idea of constructing a State which has some chance of working for the average Joe and Jill?

Because I’m a bit of a geek, I’ve long followed the discussion about Public Admin Reform and PMR…..trying to make sense of it all – initially for myself….but also for those I was working with….For the past 40 years I have been driven to draft and publish – after every “project” or intervention - a reflective piece…..

It’s only now that I feel I am beginning to understand some of them…..particularly those I wrote  a decade or so ago about the possibilities of reform systems of power and government in central Asia…

And then a British book about “the attack on the state” provoked me into identifying some questions about this huge literature which academics hog to themselves - but which need to be put out in the public domain. I found myself putting the questions in a table and drafting answers in the style required by the fascinating series such as “A Very Short Introduction” or “A very short, fairly interesting and reasonably priced book about….”, 

The State (at both local and national levels) is a constellation of diverse interests and power – to which we can give (rather arbitrarily) such terms as  “public”, “professional”, “party”, “commercial” or “security”. But, the questions begin…..

- In what sense can we say that something called the state exists?

- What can realistically be said about the interests which find expression in “the state”?

- How does each particular public service (eg health, education) work?

- How satisfied are citizens with the outcomes of state activities?

- Why is the state such a contested idea?

- Where can we find out about the efficiency and effectiveness of public services?

- Where can we find rigorous assessments of how well the “machinery of government” works?

- What Lessons have people drawn from all the “reform” experience?

- How do countries compare internationally in the performance of their public services ?

- Has privatisation lived up to its hype?

- what alternatives are there to state and private provision?

- why do governments still spend mega bucks on consultants?

- do Think Tanks have anything useful to contribute to the debate?

- whose voices are worth listening to?

- What challenges does the State face?                            

- If we want to improve the way a public service operates, are there any “golden rules”?

The next post will try to present a table which addresses these questions – with all the hyperlinks which my readers now expect……

How the attack on the state harms us all

We’re all ambivalent about “the State”….We slag it off with pejorative terms…and often profess to anarchistic and libertarian tendencies….In my formative period in the early 70s I was very taken with the concept of The Local State whose corporatist tentacles we saw strangling everything in Scotland. Cynthia Cockburn’s 1977 book on the subject and the products of the national CDP Project were the most powerful expression of this critique – although Newcastle sociologists such as Jon Davies and Norman Dennis had led the way with their books of 1972.

And yet I was an active social democrat, consciously using the levers of (local) state power open to me to push the boundaries of opportunity for people I saw as marginalized and disenfranchised

That period of my life lasted from 1974-90 and is captured in From Multiple Deprivation to Social Exclusion

Since then, my focus has been more single-mindedly on the development of institutional capacity in the state bodies of ex-communist countries. The World Bank reflected the prevailing opinion of the early 90s in asserting that the state should simply be allowed to crumble….. and only came to is senses (partly due to Japanese pressure) with its 1997 Report – the State in a Changing World

  

By the time of my exodus from Britain, the country had already had a full decade of Thatcher – and of privatisation. I confess that part of me felt that a bit of a shake-up had been necessary…..but it was George Monbiot’s The Captive State (2000) – 3 years after New Labour’s stunning victory - which alerted me to the full scale of the corporate capture of our institutions and elites regardless of political affiliation …

And why did this capture take place? Simply because of a set of insidious ideas about freedom which I felt as I grew up and have seen weld itself into the almost irresistible force we now call “neoliberalism”……..But it is a word we should be very careful of using….partly because it is not easy to explain but mainly because it carries that implication of being beyond human resistance….

The sociologists talk of “reification” when our use of abstract nouns gives away such power – abstracting us as human agents out of the picture. 
Don’t Think of an Elephant – know your values and frame the debate is apparently quite a famous book published in 2004 by American psychologist George Lakoff - which gives a wonderful insight into how words and phrases can gain this sort of power – and can be used deliberately in the sorts of campaigns which are now being waged all around us…    

Amidst all the causes which vie for our attention, it has become clear to me that the central one must be for the integrity of the State – whether local or national….I know all the counter-arguments – I am still a huge fan of community power and social enterprise. And the state’s increasingly militaristic profile threatens to undermine what’s left of our trust. But those profiled in “Dismembered – how the attack on the State harms us all” are the millions who work in public services which are our lifeblood – not just the teachers and health workers but all the others on whom we depend, even the much maligned inspectorates - all suffering from cutbacks, monstrous organizational upheavals and structures….

I am amazed that more books like this one have not been forthcoming…

Coincidentally, I have also been reading the confessions of a few political scientists who argue that it lost its way in the 70s and, for decades, has not been dealing with real issues. I do remember Gerry Stoker saying this to the American professional body in 2010 and am delighted that more have now joined him in a quest for relevance 

And I’m looking forward to the publication in a few weeks of The Next Public Administration – debates and dilemmas; by Guy Peters (and Jon Pierre) who is one of the best political scientists of his generation.

For too long, “the State” has been the focus of irrelevant academic scribbling….at last there are some stirrings of change!