Beyond the Policy Cycle

The policy process in Australia

HK Colebatch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000256369
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

It is common (and comforting) to see public policy as the result of careful craft work by expert officials who recognise a problem, identify and evaluate possible responses, and choose the most appropriate strategy the policy cycle'. The reality is more complex and challenging. Many hands are involved in policy-making, not all of them official, they are not all addressing the same problem, they have different ideas about what would be a good answer, and the process is rarely brought to a neat close by a clear decision. The development of policy can resemble firefighting, with players rushing to react to demands for action in areas that are already in crisis, or it can be a less frenetic process of weaving, as they search for an outcome which reflects the concerns of all the stakeholders. Effective participation in the policy process calls for a clear understanding of this complexity and ambiguity. Beyond the Policy Cycle sets policy in this wider context. It recognises that participants in the process are drawn from both government and diverse areas outside government, and looks not at a model' process but rather at how the game is played: how issues rise to prominence, who is actually doing the work, and exactly what it is that they are doing. With detailed Australian case studies, and examining the implications of recent trends in policy such as the outsourcing of service provision, Beyond the Policy Cycle offers students and practitioners a critical and engaged look at the activity of policy that reflects the reality of the policy experience.

1
MAPPING THE WORK OF POLICY

H.K. Colebatch

When we talk about policy, the focus is usually on the subject matter: health policy, transport policy, environment policy, etc. This is not surprising. If policy is, in Dye’s often-quoted words, What Governments Do, Why They Do It, and What Difference It Makes (Dye 1976), then our attention will naturally go to the object of policy: what is the problem, and how is the government trying to address it? The process of policy gets less attention; it is seen as complex and a source of difficulty. It is recognised that there are many players and they are not all reading from the same script, but this simply means the policy worker has to be adroit in steering through this complexity to the accomplishment of the goal.

This book takes a different approach. It recognises that the world of policy is populated by a range of players with distinct concerns, and that policy-making is the intersection of these diverse agendas, not a collective attempt to accomplish some known goal. It also recognises that for most of the players, policy activity is work—that is, a specialist occupation, but not necessarily one with policy in the title. The people doing policy work may be called policy analysts, but they may have titles like ‘customer service manager’, ‘chief veterinary officer’ or ‘president of the association’. Who the actors are, and what they do to shape the outcomes, is part of the question, and passing references to ‘policy analysis’ or ‘policy advice’ do little to answer the question. The concern of this book is how the work of policy is put together in Australia, and about the variations, tensions and changes that are part of policy-making.

POLICY PRACTICE AS WORK

Not all activity is work. Refereeing a football match may be an unpaid voluntary act performed for the love of the game, or a task reluctantly accepted as one of the obligations of parenthood. When the referee is paid, it may be a full-time job, a modest addition to the main occupation, or an incidental task incurred in performing another job (such as a schoolteacher). It is not an either/or choice between ‘work’ and ‘not work’; there are different aspects and degrees of each. Are referees recruited on the basis of qualifications? Do they wear a uniform? Do they have any other duties? Is there a career path? In this case, as in others, there are many different answers to these questions, and the extent to which refereeing is work is variable and specific (see Pahl 1988).

This analogy helps us to think about the changing ways in which policy is made. For some participants, such as cabinet ministers, their involvement in the policy process is a consequence of their success at demonstrating political leadership. They are unlikely to see themselves as policy experts, and they move between policy fields, or out of them, as a result of shifts in the political terrain. Others, like members of a cabinet secretariat, are permanent, paid, expert custodians of policy processes. Some participants may be experts in functional areas (e.g. soil erosion) who become involved in policy activity as a part of their expert work. And there may be unpaid participants, such as a group of cancer sufferers who have become very knowledgeable in relation to their condition. They devote a great deal of time to pressing their case not because they are paid, but because they are committed to the cause, and to each other. Since there is such a diversity of activity involved in making policy it is important to explore what it is that people do—the work of policy—and the ways in which it is changing.

POLICY AS AN ORGANISING CONCEPT IN AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT

In the past few decades, policy has developed a higher profile in the organisation of governing in Australia. There has been a marked rise in the use of policy to designate organisational units and position titles, and in the demand for the definition of policy on subjects as diverse as the need for foreign language skills and the amount of water used in showering. Within government, policy has developed an identity as a function quite distinct from technical knowledge in the relevant field. Health policy or transport policy, for instance, came to be recognised as bodies of expertise in their own right, and as bases for the critique of the activities of technical specialists in these fields. A focus on policy was seen as a counter to the functionalist inertia of institutionalised technical expertise; for instance, by not posing the question as ‘How do we build another dam to satisfy the rising demand for water?’ but as ‘Is building another dam the best way to bring supply and demand into alignment?’ For this reason, it was common to find people with non-technical backgrounds in the newly established policy units.

Developing policy units was also seen as a way of strengthening political control over the technocrats. A review of the New South Wales public service recommended the creation of policy units separate from the function-oriented departments and reporting directly to the minister, as a way of focusing attention on the outcomes of government action rather than on technical processes (RNSWGA 1979). In the United Kingdom, Richard Crossman had made a similar point: he found that he needed to have matters included in the party policy statement (the election manifesto) in order to strengthen his hand against his permanent department secretary (Crossman 1975).

These developments, in the practice of government in Australia and their implications for the analysis of the governmental process, did not attract a great deal of interest from researchers and writers in the field. There was much more interest in policy content than in the process through which policy was generated. The writing on public policy often seemed to be covering the same ground as earlier texts about Australian government—a point noted in the US context by Hale (1988). Some argue that there has been a shift to public management that makes discussion of policy and administration rather old-fashioned (e.g. Hughes 1998). The leading text on policy, Bridgman and Davis’s Australian Policy Handbook (1998, 2004), which stresses its practical ‘how to’ nature, is essentially an exercise in exhortation and does not seek to show that its prescriptions are derived from actual practice. For this reason, there is a need for an empirically grounded but theoretically informed examination of the work of policy in Australia. This is particularly important because the nature of policy work in Australia has changed markedly in recent years. We can (I would argue) identify three broad changes: formalisation, professionalisation and participation.

Formalisation

The formal enunciation of policy has become a more significant element of the governmental process (including, in many cases, nongovernmental bodies). The identification of a problem area—foreign language skills, adoption of IT, gender differences in learning among schoolchildren—is accompanied by demands for the definition of policy. There has been a continuing drive by cabinet secretariats and other central agencies for compliance with rules about the policy process (e.g. format and consultation)—‘procedural integrity’, as Bridgman and Davis (2004) put it. This process has also been noted in relation to medical practice, which is increasingly governed by explicit protocols and clinical guidelines instead of professional judgement and shared norms (see Harrison 2004; also Ouchi 1980).

Professionalisation

Formalisation has been reflected in the increasing professionalisation of policy work. As we have noted, there has been a marked growth in the number of officials and organisational units with policy in their titles, and these new policy specialists are likely to move between organisations, particularly between functional departments and central agencies, in the course of their career. This increasing stress on policy expertise has led to the specific acquisition of what has been seen as policy-relevant skills—for example, welfare agencies hiring economists in order to strengthen their policy claims against the critique of Treasury. This has also been reflected in non-government organisations, which have developed specialised expertise in policy to facilitate communication with their counterparts in government, and in many cases have received government subsidies to enable them to do this.

Participation

There has been a great increase in participation in the policy process—both within government, as more effort is put into ironing out friction between agencies, and between government and non-government (business and the community). There have been strongly asserted claims for the right to participate, and various procedures have developed: forms of community consultation, circulation of drafts for comment, and the establishment of consultative bodies. This has been linked to the increasing degree of organisation among the ‘outsiders’, and the development of symbiotic relationships between these stakeholder organisations and the part of government to which they relate. There is argument about (for instance) when it is appropriate to consult, and whether that consultation is ‘real’ or ‘symbolic’ (Bishop and Davis 2002; also Arnstein 1969), but participation remains a powerful rhetorical theme in policy practice.

CONCEPTUAL MAPS AND POLICY WORK

It is common for policy practitioners to declare that they are not interested in theory, and sometimes the writers of texts join in the chorus—Bridgman and Davis are anxious to declare the conceptual framework around which their Australian Policy Handbook is built is ‘a toolkit, not a theory’ (2003: 102). This is a curious position to take for authors who cite Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith’s statement that:

… it is logically impossible to understand any reasonably complex situation—including almost any policy process—without some theoretical lens (‘theory’, ‘paradigm’, or ‘conceptual framework’) distinguishing between the set of potentially important variables and those that can safely be ignored. (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993: xi, cited in Bridgman and Davis 2004: 23)

Any ‘pragmatic guide’ to action—whether it is about making policy or playing football or staying married—rests on a conceptual map of linked understandings about the underlying dynamic of the process; that is, a theory. To claim a guide to policy practice is not theoretical simply indicates the underlying conceptual framework will not be disclosed or investigated.

Commonly, writers on the policy process do not investigate the conceptual framework within which they are working: it forms the ‘taken for granted’ part of their map of social practice. Why this should be so is one of the questions to be addressed in this chapter, but it means it is not clear on what assumptions their explanations are based and to what extent they would need to be reviewed if new research challenged the basis of these assumptions (as it has done). So it is worth examining the way that people construct maps of the policy process, and the place and nature of policy work in these maps.

What we see as the work of policy reflects the perspective from which we approach policy. We can identify three major approaches here: policy as authoritative choice, policy as structured interaction and policy as social construction.

Authoritative choice

The dominant paradigm sees policy as authoritative choice; as one leading American writer puts it, it is ‘whatever the government decides to do or not to do’ (Dye 2005), which is certainly conceptually clear, even if it is not much of a guide to the landscape. This focuses attention on the policy, which is seen as a thing created by authorised decision-makers. It is (or should be) expressed in a document or a series of documents—or, for some American writers, in a statute. Policy practice is therefore seen as being focused on making the decision: the activity is that of authorised leaders (who make a decision) and senior officials who work to them (who give advice to the leaders). So the activity associated with policy is seen as decision-making (usually, but not always, by ministers) and advice.

Structured interaction

It was clear to both researchers and practitioners that policy could not be understood simply as the transmission of the preferences of authorised leaders, and that it had to be understood as a process of structured interaction. This approach is less readily recognised as a distinct framework, though it is part of the ordinary knowledge of all the participants and most of the observers (see Scott 1995). It does not assume (as the authoritative choice approach does) that government is an actor; rather, it sees government as an arena, a framework in which a variety of actors interact with one another. To some extent they pursue known objectives (which may or may not be shared with other participants), but to a large degree they respond to the actions of other participants, or to forces in the environment, in ways which make sense to them. Policy is a collective process, not an act of individual choice writ large. And it is an ordered activity. The participants are not free-floating individuals, nor do they act in random ways. Their participation is almost invariably a consequence of their official position: they act in the name of an organisation that is recognised by the other participants as having a right to a place at the table. This recognition is a consequence of their following shared norms of interaction, using appropriate language, and accepting the legitimacy of the other participants (stakeholders). Through this pattern of interaction, policy activity is institutionalised. What things are matters of concern, who may address them and what sorts of action are seen as possible, are determined by continuing patterns of interaction. The pattern is one of ‘negotiated order’ (Strauss 1963), and is always subject to change as new players and new discourses contest established practice, as a result of which they and their concerns may be absorbed into the policy order. It is about the alignment of different organisations and agendas as much as it is about the selection of preferred outcomes (see Bardach 2000). Policy is then seen as an outcome of this process of continuing interaction (rather than as a process of choice by an authoritative actor. It is a ‘horizontal’ view of the process.

Social construction

Taking note of this horizontal perspective emphasises the extent to which policy development is an exercise in social construction (Berger and Luckman 1975). What are seen as matters for policy attention reflect the way in which participants make sense of the world: what knowledge is seen as valid and relevant, and who can command attention. For example, the environment was not something that was just there, waiting for policy-makers to decide to act on it; it was a way of interpreting social practice that made some forms of activity problematic and, as such, suggested ways in which public authority could be deployed to combat the problems this analysis disclosed. So policy work is concerned with the construction of meaning (see interpretive policy research by Yanow 2000; Fischer 2003; Hajer and Wagenaar 2003). This is, of course, what many policy officials would see themselves as doing: channelling the flow of political activity into familiar patterns. But this construction is not simply concerned with identifying matters for ‘the government’ to act upon, but with the organisational forms and social practices through which governing is accomplished: what experts are listened to, what rule-making takes place, and through what means conduct is governed. In this perspective, policy work encompasses the processes of problematisation, the organisation of expertise and the devising of ‘technologies of governing’ (see the literature of governmentality by Dean and Hindess 1998; Dean 1999; Rose 1999; website <http://www.qut.edu.au/edu/cpol/foucault/>). The focus is on the underlying processes that shape social action; along the way that practice is described and recorded, knowledge is assembled, expertise is recognised and certified, forms of reporting and accounting are devised, problems are identified, and ways of governing practice are discovered:

… the study of government involves the examination not only o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1 Mapping the work of policy
• Part One | Organisational Complexity and Policy Work
• Part Two | The Widening Policy Arena: Public Participation in Policy
• Part Three | The New Gatekeepers
• Part Four | Discourse, Context and Conflict in Policy
• Notes
• References
• Index