what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Friday, August 30, 2024

A CONFESSION

I was slightly distracted when I wrote the last post - by the English poet Philip Larkin whose book The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin (ed Archie Burnett 2012) I had pulled down from the shelves and started to read – leading me in turn to download both it and two others about the poet  

of his poems and more a commentary on his work.
hardly the most fascinating of reads being letters to his mum and sister but does contain some of his wonderful cartoon sketches
Larkin was the poet who wrote Annus Mirabilis which begins

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

The last post may have created some confusion in readers between the State 
(as an inanimate object - which continues to fascinate me) and the government 
of the day – about which I am much less interested. It’s passing strange that 
the State arouses so little interest amongst citizens. You would have thought 
that an organisation which controls such a large part of our lives and manages 
such a huge budget would have been of interest. But it’s the Government of the 
day that attracts the attention and ire rather than the functions of the state
and the recent debate about the DEEP STATE (in right-wing circles)  is little 
more than a gross oversimplification. To help readers, I’ve extracted this list of
books about the state from one of the Annexes to the current draft of my The
Search for Democracy – a long journey 
review article (Comparative Politics vol 16 no 2 Stephen Krasner 1984) From the late 1950s until the mid-1970s the term state virtually disappeared from the professional academic lexicon. Political scientists wrote about government, political development, interest groups, voting, legislative behavior, leadership and bureaucratic politics, almost everything but "the state." However, in the last decade "the state" has reappeared in the literature. If you are feeling very adventurous, I would try two short articles - Stuart Hall’The State in Question” (1984) or David Held’s “Central Perspectives on the Modern State (1984)

Thursday, August 29, 2024

RUMINATIONS ON WHAT THE STATE CAN AND CAN’T DO

Twitter was alive yesterday with the aftermath of Monday’s big speech from the UK PM about the grim actions needed to repair the 22 billion deficit left from the Conservatives (whoever said they managed the economy well?? The Labour party generally is left inheriting their mess)

This has brought into focus the question of whether states actually need to 
balance their budgets. Economists such as David Blanchflower and Richard Murphy 
are amongst those who take a different view, supporting the work of Stephanie 
Kelton in her The Deficit Myth – Modern Monetary Theory and the birth of 
the people’s economy (2020) which she presented (with useful slides) in a 
discussion a few years ago with the OECD. It’s not an easy topic to get your 
head around and I found this a good objective presentation 

But it takes me back to a more fundamental question which has been exercising 
me for the past couple of decades – namely the limits on state capacity. 
Recent posts from Aurelien and crazed Dominic Cummings on this coincided 
with this more positive post from Paul Cairney about a new vision for UK government.
Cairney’s post references a 2021 article of his which has, at the end, a link to 
a contemporary story of policy” which links in turn to a fantastic article on  
Ostrom and the bright side of public service” which superbly summarises the 
entire literature on government failures and suggests a way forward.
It’s hardly surprising that some 50 years of neoliberalism have seriously dented 
the capacity of the State. But it’s taken some time for us to notice the combined 
effects of privatisation and Austerity on the British State.  
I’m loathe to credit Cummings with anything since he was the brains behind 
Brexit and also the key political adviser not only to Michael Grove (when he was 
Education Minister) but also to Boris Johnson (before becoming one of his bitterest
 critics). But the man blogs interestingly eg
almost all large organisations incentivise (largely implicitly/unconsciously) preserving 
existing power structures and budgets, preventing system adaptation, fighting against 
the eternal lessons of high performance excluding most talent, and maintaining 
exactly the thing that in retrospect will be seen as the cause of the disaster. 
Large organisations naturally train everyone who gets promoted to align themselves 
with this dynamic: dissent is weeded out. Anybody pointing out ‘we’re heading for an 
iceberg’ is ‘mad’, ‘psychopath’, ‘weirdo’ — and is quickly removed. And even the very 
occasional odd characters who a) see, b) are able to act and c) have the moral courage 
to act are highly constrained in what they can do given the nature of large institutions 
and the power of the forces they confront. (Even Bismarck in 1871-5 or Stalin in the 
1930s, more powerful than anybody else in their country, were highly constrained in 
their ability to shape forces like automation, though they could help or hinder their 
particular country’s adaptation


Even Boris Johnson was forced to put his pen to an admission of failure when 
he allowed this Declaration on Government Reform published in 2021, before 
his ignominious resignation. In 2024 this note on a New Vision for the UK government
 was published by the Academy of Social Sciences 
Positive Public Policy embraces a range of approaches aiming to facilitate effective 
government and policymaking. Some are relatively new while others have been discussed 
and studied for decades without realising their full potential. These include the 
concept of the strategic state, systems-thinking, place-based approaches, evidence
-informed government, public participation, and behavioural public policy. 
What connects these approaches is (i) an appreciation of the complexity and 
inter-connected nature of policy contexts, (ii) a belief in the capacity of collective 
action to address shared challenges, and (iii) a commitment to the collection, synthesis 
and application of different forms of knowledge. Each has been tested and is 
underpinned by an accumulation of evidence – including, good practice, frameworks, 
case studies, and policy learning – and together they provide a coherent reform 
agenda and a fresh portfolio of ways of designing and delivering high-performing 
public policy.
Years of instability in UK government have eroded underlying capacity for reform. 
The General Election will be conducted against the backdrop of financial stress 
across government, and no reform is cost-free. Will an incoming government give 
priority to getting its own house in order? And taking the leap of faith reform 
requires? Positive Public Policy embodies the vision of real change to drive change 
to address the significant social, economic and environmental challenges we face. 
It provides a range of approaches, tools and methods for designing and delivering 
effective public policy, and the clear, coherent and sustainable story of reform 
required to lower barriers to change and to leveraging resources.
What we need is the political will and sustained capacity to trial and test the insights 
of Positive Public Policy in a UK context, and this in turn calls for investment in 
connective and catalysing engagement opportunities between researchers and 
policymakers. There’s an urgent need to connect the positive public policy academic 
community with practitioners at scale in order to help constitute the policymaking 
tools that governments can use as they grapple with the ‘art of the possible’ to 
translate lofty ideals into practices that might work in their own context. 
Now is the time to attract and devote resources towards trialling, tracking and 
evaluating experimentation in more future-oriented, holistic, and more participatory 
approaches to government.
Quite a few mouthfuls there!!

See also “Pathways to Positive Public Administration”  a book scheduled to 
come out in October 2024. The opening chapter is here; and the second here