EP | Literature summary
1DI_Introduction
• A policy is a statement made by a government, company or other organizations about what it
intends to do
• Institutions are the humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic and social
interaction. They consist of both informal constraints (sanctions, taboos, customs, traditions, and
codes of conduct), and formal rules (constitutions, laws, property rights)
• Governance is all processes of governing, whether over a family, tribe, formal or informal
organization, or territory, and whether through laws, norms, power, or language
Three important scientific pieces which influenced the debate:
1. Rachel Carson (1962) on environmental effects of overuse of pesticides and DDT;
2. Garret Hardin (1968) on the Tragedy of the Commons;
3. Meadows et al. (1972) as the Club of Rome: Limits of Growth on linking human and natural
systems in computer models.
Latest addition to the environmental policy and governance debate is private and hybrid governance.
Johan Rockström aims at a shift from ‘limits to growth’ to ‘limits within growth’.
█ Kjær (2004)
Weber’s bureaucratic state: “public moneys and equipment are divorced from the private property of
the official”.
Traditional model of the public sector: circle of sovereign people → legislative assembly → executive
power → administrative apparatus → …
The organizing principle between the administrative apparatus and the sovereign people are:
• acceptance of undeniable human rights;
• principle of the rule of law;
• state’s monopoly on the means of coercion.
Challenges to the traditional model:
1. Public employees are only held accountable to their superior. However, they should also be
to the client. Emphasis on social and environmental wishes of clients;
2. Interest aggregation resulted in powerful organizations rather than a plurality of individuals;
a. Corporatism = “a system of interest representation in which constituent units are
organized into a limited number of […] categories […]” (p. 23)
3. Internationalization of the economy created supranational organizations which bypass
national governments;
4. Bureaucracy will increase its own inefficiency and increase its own construction, resulting in
reforms in the 1980s and 1990s.
Common elements in definitions of public sector reform are:
1. Deliberate planned change to public bureaucracies;
2. Synonymous with innovation;
3. Improvements in public service efficiency and effectiveness are the intended outcomes of the
reform process;
4. The urgency of reform is justified by the need to cope with the uncertainties and rapid
changes taking place in the organizational environment.
New public management (NPM), formed in 80s and 90s and introduced by Thatcher, consists of:
1. managerialism = the introduction of private sector management into the public sector, e.g.
(i) hands-on professional management, (ii) explicit standards and measures on performance,
, (iii) managing by results and (iv) value for money. The three Es: (i) economy, (ii) efficiency
and (iii) effectiveness;
2. privatization = selling public sector enterprises to private ownership, which aims at
increasing efficiency. A milder version is contracting out = gov remains buyer of the service,
but it is undertaken by a private agency;
3. agencification = establishment of semi-autonomous agencies responsible for operational
management. Isolation the agency of political pressures makes it run more efficiently,
removing the service from policymaking, as the government already decided upon the policy;
4. competition. Enforced by dismantling states monopoly or introduction of quasi-markets;
5. decentralization = moving decision making from central government to lower levels of
government. There are two types, namely
a. deconcentration: decision making at central level but decentralization of
implementation;
b. devolution: all authority is decentralized and local government is no longer
accountable to central government;
6. citizens’ empowerment: accountability of decentralized tasks of public officials is held by
clients and users, which might increase the quality of the service.
The centre of government hollows out because the core executive is losing or conceding capacities:
1. to societal actors (internal);
2. to other state actors (internal);
3. supra-state entities (external, because of globalization).
On the one hand, one could say that loss of capacities leaves the executive power steer less, on the
other hand one could argue that the executive becomes more diverse strengthening the state. This
lead to voices for both centralization and fragmentation.
Policy networks = the inter-organizational linkages in implementation, based on negotiation.
At local level market reforms resulted in new networks:
+ flexible, new products, services and solutions, short time-span;
- difficult to control, not durable, impede overall coordination.
Governing presupposes a subject while governance is the result of the actions taken, a mode of social
coordination. A key challenge for government is to enable these networks and to seek out new forms
of co-operation. It has to accept its loss of steering capacity and learn how to manage networks in an
indirect way to enable service delivery to become efficient.
Network management can be divided into:
• Game management: influencing the interaction processes between actors within the network,
facilitating agreement;
• Network structuring: characteristics of the network are seen as an obstacle to joint decision-
making.
Four types of political environments surrounding government agencies:
1. Dominant interest group that favours the agency’s goals, e.g. support for agricultural prices
and export subsidies;
2. Dominant interest group hostile to its goals;
3. Two or more rival interest groups in conflict over the agency’s goals;
4. No important interest group.
Four types of politics:
1. Client politics;
2. Entrepreneurial politics: hierarchical structure is necessary;
3. Interest groups politics: networks as there are opposite interests;
4. Majoritarian as there are no important interest groups.
Governance is used in twofold:
, 1. Narrow sense: managing self-organizing networks (game management);
2. Broader sense: managing rules and patterns of coordination, organizing the complex
strictures of hierarchies, networks and markets (network structuring).
█ Birkland (2016)
Policy processes is a relatively new scientific field, originating from the 1950s. However, it is
rooted in the longer tradition of political sciences.
Politics = the process by which the society determines who gets what, when they get it, and how they
get it.
Key attributes of public policy:
• Policy is made in response to some sort of problem that requires attention;
• Policy is made on the ‘public’s’ behalf;
• Policy is oriented toward a goal or desired state, such as the solution of a problem;
• Policy is ultimately made by governments, even if the ideas come from outside government or
through the interaction of government and non-governmental actors;
• Policy is interpreted and implemented by public and private actors who have different
interpretations of problems, solutions and their motivations;
• Policy is what the government chooses to do or not to do.
Policy = a statement by government—at what level—of what it intends to do about a public problem.
Such statements can be found in the Constitution, statues, regulation, case law, agency or leadership
decisions, or even in changes in the behaviour of government officials at all levels.
Problem = a usually undesirable situation that, according to people or interest groups, can be
alleviated by government action.
Classical liberalism = the ideological system that emphasizes individual liberty and the ownership
and acquisition of private property as a means to improve overall wealth and happiness and
discourage social strife.
Public interest = the assumed broader desires and needs of the public, in whose name policy is made.
The public interest is hard to define, but is something to which all policy advocates appeal.
█ Stoker (1998)
1WO_Hyrarchies
Command and control rules impose detailed, legally enforceable limits, conditions, and affirmative
requirements […], generally controlling sources that generate pollution on an individual basis.”.
