Understanding Policy Fiascoes

Paul 't Hart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351293228
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

A crisis of governance is widespread in western societies. Public administration is caught in a web of personal and organizational inter-dependencies that require continuous awareness and readjustment on the part of its practitioners. Understanding Policy Fiascoes applies policy analysis to come to terms with policy fiascoes, with a full appreciation of its limits. Despite the fact that policy failures may seem universal, they are in fact better understood as social, political and academic constructions. Bovens and 'tHart trace how and why certain episodes of public policymaking become labeled as "fiascoes." They highlight the analytical and political biases that shape our judgments of policy outcomes and the performance of policymakers and institutions.

When put in their proper historical, institutional, and policymaking perspective, many policy fiascoes could easily have turned out quite differently. The authors show that the fact that these policy episodes unfolded as they did does not mean that they were inevitable. Careful analysis indicates that a whole series of variables, if not always manageable, can, through careful configurations of decisions, alter the course and outcomes of policies and programs, as well as the post-hoc judgments made about them.

In examining public policymaking, certain questions arise: If public policymaking has failed so miserably, what does this tell us about the state of policy analysis? While policymakers are facing a crisis of legitimacy, policy analysis have been forced to reconsider the validity o their knowledge claims and the extent of their impact on the practice of policymaking. Understanding Policy Fiascoes will provide social scientists, policymakers, and political scientists with compelling perspectives on old problems and a path-breaking way to handle new problems.

CHAPTER 1

Understanding Policy Fiascoes

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.

Sir Ernest Benn¹

The Ubiquity of Failure

In many respects, the last decades of the twentieth century have had the air of a fin de siècle for the theory and practice of government. During the 1980s especially, the state of governance was paradoxical. Never before had the public sector been so big, never before had the impact of government decisions and activities on the daily lives of citizens been so diverse and comprehensive. Yet at the same time the idea of government as the primary institution for steering economy and society came under increasing attack. Neoconservative critics of government intervention in the economy rose to positions of political and bureaucratic power. The alleged excesses of the welfare state and its bureaucracy were heckled. The politically dominant view of government became a skeptical one: "the smaller, the better." Concerted attempts were made to limit government spending, to terminate programs, and to slim down the size of the bureaucracy - albeit with varying degrees of pugnacity and success.²

It was, in other words, a period in which what Hirschman calls a "rhetoric of reaction" prevailed.³ While the unmitigated cynicism of Sir Ernest Benn's observation quoted above might have seemed too extreme to many, government itself and conventional politics and policymaking as its key constituent components, were definitely running out of favor among important bodies of public and expert opinion. The tide was turning sharply against the seemingly unstoppable expansion of the scope of public-sector intervention. Little good could be expected from it. It was portrayed as inefficient, slow, unresponsive, rigid, often rude, and very costly if not wasteful. Moreover, big government was said to have created a marked degree of apathy, cynicism, and irresponsibility among citizens. Negative stereotypes about government bureaucracies and bureaucrats reigned freely.⁴

Apart from relying on emerging economic doctrines and new formulations of old political ideologies, contemporary critics of big government claim to have "the facts" on their side. In particular, they have often pointed to various highly publicized instances of government failure: concrete and numerous cases of incompetence, red tape, fraud, waste, abuse, irrationality, and other serious deficiencies in government organization and the implementation of public programs. The specific cases referred to differed according to national experiences, but the seemingly endless stream of political scandals and policy fiascoes that burst into the open throughout the 1980s and 1990s seemed a clear indication of the idea that the public sector has grown out of hand and needs to be curbed drastically. Examples from many different domains of public policy have been used to make this case. Especially popular have been alleged excesses of the welfare state, for example well-publicized failures in the administration of social security, health care, education, and public housing. Often, the acronyms that had been taken from the initials of the program or from the main actor involved have become local synonyms for fiascoes: CETA and HUD in the United States; RSV or WAO in the Netherlands; NHS in the United Kingdom.⁵

In addition many large-scale public works, vulnerable especially to cost escalations, corrupt practices, and emergent citizen protest, have been dismissed as "planning disasters."⁶ Major public buildings (Sydney's opera house, Amsterdam's city hall and opera complex, Bonn's aborted new parliament house), nuclear energy installations and power plants (Washington State's aborted 5-reactor project, the aborted 3-coun-try breeder reactor project at Kalkar, Germany) and airports (London, Tokyo, Frankfurt) have been notorious in this respect. More hesitantly during the Cold War but with increasing vigilance following its end, defense acquisition programs have come under attack. Specifically, various forms of political manipulation and waste and abuse of public funds were uncovered in the construction and acquisition of helicopters (United Kingdom), submarines (Netherlands), or high-tech weapon systems (United States).⁷

On top of that have come those traumatic cases where senior public authorities seemed to belie the public trust placed in them, engaging in secret and illegal practices and subsequently seeking to cover up their involvement after the events were publicly exposed. Following the Watergate prototype of the seventies, the eighties have given us some other "gates": Irangate in the United States (illegal arms for hostages deals with Khomeini's Iran), Belgranogate in the United Kingdom (a conspiracy to cover up the decision to sink a non-combatant Argentine vessel during the Falklands war), Recruitgate in Japan (secret corporate slush fund payments to senior Japanese politicians), and Boforsgate in Sweden (secret arms deals with India). In the nineties, major corruption scandals have rocked officials, government agencies, and political parties in countries like France, Belgium, and Spain, and have brought about a fundamental crisis of the political order in Italy.

The emergent social, political, if not moral, delegitimation of government and the increasing sense that many government policies are fundamentally flawed is not only a problem for modern states and their politicians and bureaucrats. The ubiquity of failure is also a profound challenge to those proponents of social science who have traditionally claimed to seek to understand and help improve the practice of government and public policymaking. While policymakers are facing a crisis of legitimacy as a result of the general mood of disappointment and skepticism towards politics and the state, policy scientists and students of public administration have been forced to reconsider the validity of their knowledge claims and the nature and extent of their impact on the practice of policymaking. Why have they not been able to help prevent major policy failures and scandals from happening? Why is it so difficult to explain the genesis of these failures more effectively, so as to facilitate policy learning and prevention? Is it because policy scientists are not listened to by policymakers, hence do we face a problem of knowledge dissemination and utilization? Or does the problem lie within policy science itself, that is, with its analytical tools for studying, comprehending, and in some cases predicting social and political processes? If so, what does this imply for its prescriptive aims and ambitions?

This problematique, the interrelated crises of policymaking and policy science, as dramatized especially by the stream of widely publicized and recurrent instances of major government failures - commonly referred to by observers and analysts as "policy fiascoes" - forms the background against which this book is written. Doing this research has taught us that the very questions we ask about government performance need to be sharpened and partially reframed. Policy "fiascoes" may seem concrete and ubiquituous, but to study them empirically and to learn the right lessons from them turns out to be very complex. This complexity has both intellectual and political components, that in combination tend to produce intractable and enduring public controversies about the interpretation of negative policy events. This book attempts to dissect the various dimensions of this complexity, and will challenge its readers to face up to the many conceptual, empirical, and normative dilemmas of contemporary policy evaluation and analysis, as it attempts to understand the public controversies through which policy fiascoes and their roots are constituted. Before we come to preview the book's design and content, let us first illustrate some major analytical challenges and dangers inherent in the study of policy fiascoes that prompted these questions.

The Relativity of Failure

The absence of fixed criteria for success and failure, which apply regardless of time and place, is a serious problem for anyone who wants to do a comparative study of major policy failures. Feldman's study of the politics of airport construction in London and Paris provides a wonderful illustration of this.⁸ In the late fifties, a third airport in the London region was considered an essential requirement to accommodate the anticipated steep increase of air traffic to and from the British capital. An interdepartmental government committee was established which, in 1964, recommended to develop the former Stansted military airfield into London's third civilian airport. The report triggered local protests, new inquiries were held, and in the following years many other sites were considered and proposed in various reports issued by a number of official committees. Decades of public deliberation, extensive studies, and constant planning changes failed to result in any positive decision, let alone to construction activities. In the late eighties, Stansted was made London's third airport, but would operate on a small-scale basis for many years to come.

On the other side of the Channel, the French aviation authorities did much better apparently. Forecasts about the growth of air travel similar to those available to their British counterparts led the French to the same conclusion: by the end of the 1960s the Paris region would need a third airport in addition to Le Bourget and Orly. In contrast to their British colleagues, however, French planners operating in the more centralized French administrative system were able to move fast and rigorously. As early as 1957, a site north of Paris was chosen. Meanwhile, studies for the location of yet another, fourth airport were launched. By 1963, the master plan was ready, the site was officially announced, and land acquisition was started. The scope of the project was enormous. It was "the largest single construction project in France since the royal palace at Versailles."⁹ Nonetheless, in 1974, only two years later than originally planned in the fifties, the new Charles de Gaulle Airport was officially opened.

British planners spent a great deal of money and effort yet clearly failed to accomplish their objective of building a third international airport. But should this be considered a policy fiasco or, in Hall's terminology, a "great planning disaster?"¹⁰ Let us have a look at some of the policy outcomes in both cases. Air traffic indeed increased in the sixties and seventies, but certainly not to the extent predicted in the mid-fifties. The development of larger aircraft made it possible to carry more passengers on the same flight. Heathrow and Gatwick did become much more crowded, but new terminals and more efficient baggage-handling facilities made it possible to absorb the extra demand. In the end, the failure to develop a third airport did not greatly harm the overall objective of satisfying the air demand throughout the remainder of the twentieth century. On the contrary, it "may even have helped achieve the goal of serving the air-travelling public efficiently with minimal disruption to other services."¹¹

On the other hand, the success of the French planners becomes much bleaker if looked upon from a broader socio-economic and political perspective. The plans for Charles de Gaulle Airport were developed in great secrecy and implemented in a highly centrist, almost autocratic fashion. Participation in decision making by local groups and authorities was denied. As a consequence, their interests and viewpoints were plainly ignored. Moreover, the development of the airport resulted in the forced evacuation and destruction of the nearby town of Rossy-en-France and to severe noise pollution and traffic nuisances for the remaining villages. In addition, the airport itself turned out to be costly and inefficient. Many of the major airlines complained about it and would have preferred extra terminals at Orly. Most importantly and as explained above, the number of flights did not expand as steeply as expected, leaving the Paris region with three seriously underutilized international airports. As Feldman concludes:

The building of Charles de Gaulle Airport can no more be called a ''success" than the nonconstruction of a third international airport for London can be termed a "failure.' Aéroport de Paris accomplished its objective of building a technologically sophisticated airport able to absorb all traffic through Paris for the foreseeable future, but it failed to provide adequate access, satisfied clients (the airlines), or contented neighbours. It did not rationalize services with a second Paris international airport, and because it did not do so it may have contributed to a decline in the region's traffic; nor did it stimulate major economic growth. The goal, therefore that of assuring Paris its place as the premier air facility attraction in Europe may have been sacrificed to the narrow objective.¹²

This brief case comparison highlights the proposition that judgments about the success and failure of public policies are, first of all, a matter of perspective. From a technocratic, planning perspective, Charles de Gaulle Airport was a success and the nondevelopment of Stansted or any of the competing options a failure. The French planners reached their operational objective of building a new airport without too much delay or cost escalations. Yet a convincing case can be made that the British were more successful. They succeeded in meeting the common strategic goal of accommodating the growth of air traffic at far lower financial and social costs than their colleagues in France. Moreover, this was the result of a process which left room for a variety of interested parties to state their case and exert influence in a pluralistic process of partisan analysis and political debate.

Secondly, the analysis suggests that failure and success are also a matter of time. De Gaulle Airport was initially considered a success: at first most policymakers and observers focused on the remarkable feat that the planners had succeeded in getting the job of building such a major infra-structural facility done pretty much as scheduled many years before. It took a few years before the airport's structural underutilization and "hidden" social costs became evident. Similarly, however, during the long years of upgrading the existing facilities there, many regular users of Heathrow would have disputed the more positive assessment of British policies made above. Nowadays the benefits of concentration might have become more apparent. Ironically, the temporal dynamics of evaluating major policy ventures are such that in ten more years or so, a comparative judgment on both cases might need to be readjusted once again. A sudden sharp rise in air traffic in the twenty-first century can be absorbed much more easily in the Paris region, thanks to its current overcapacity. Meanwhile, London planners have succeeded in the late eighties in reviving the Stansted option in a small-scale fashion, but might experience great difficulties in expanding it further to accommodate Heathrow's saturation over the next decades.

The Inevitability of Failure

What would have happened to the plan to attempt a military rescue operation for Americans held hostage in Iran if, during the final meeting of the National Security Council on the issue, Admiral Stansfield Turner had brought out for discussion the highly critical CIA estimates he had recently received, which predicted that even in the best of circumstances a significant number of Americans would die? What would have happened to the building of the Sydney Opera House if the 1965 elections in New South Wales had not brought to office a new minister for public works less likely to give carte blanche to architect Utzon in supervising the construction process? What would have happened to the Space Shuttle Challenger if the temperatures would have been just a few degrees higher at the time it was launched?

It is only when we start wondering what might have been that we fully realize that what in fact has happened need not have. It makes sense to do this kind of wondering especially when studying momentous historical events and highly controversial policy episodes. Often it seems the difference between what became stigmatized as a policy fiasco and what went unnoticed as a "nonevent" or was hailed as a major policy success, was extremely thin, trivial even. The more one knows about the intricacies of the actions and events that shaped a particular policy's fate, the more important small details seem to be in determining the collective appreciation of it. Change some of these details, and one could have changed the course of history.¹³ If A had only talked to B earlier; if C had been a more forceful personality; if D had lived longer; if group X had been composed a little differently; if the weather had been different; if this distracting side event had not happened at that point in time; if that verification procedure had not been routinely ignored in organization Y; if party Z had just obtained one more seat in parliament than it did; if there had been no previous success to serve as a reference point; if ...

These counterfactual questions are often asked by both the victims and some of the perpetrators of major failures and disasters. They are part of the trauma caused by these events. On quite another level, they make for intriguing novels and movie scripts. In some cases, these questions are pointless bec...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Understanding Policy Fiascoes
• copy
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Understanding Policy Fiascoes
• 2. Assessing Policy Outcomes: Social and Political Biases
• 3. Identifying Agents: The Ontology of Policymaking
• 4. Identifying Agents: Misfortune or Mismanagement?
• 5. Explaining Agents' Behavior: Implicit Frames
• 6. Evaluating Agents' Behavior: Analysis as Accusing and Excusing
• 7. Epilogue: Making Sense of Policy Fiascoes
• Bibliography
• Index