Political Innovations

Creative Transformations in Polity, Politics and Policy

Eva Sørensen, Eva Sørensen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000286847
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

Political Innovations: Creative Transformations in Polity, Politics and Policy provides a theoretical framework for studies of political innovation as well as a number of empirical studies of innovations in the way policy strategies take form, in the exercise of political leadership, in community self-organizing, in political parties, and what implications informal governance has on political innovation.

Public innovation has risen to the top of the agenda among governments all over the Western world. The message is clear: the public sector needs to become more innovative in order to meet the demands of modern society. There is also a growing interest in public innovation amongst students of public policy and governance, who are currently working to define and conceptualize public innovation, analyze drivers of, and barriers to, innovation in the public sector, and prescribe ways to make the public sector more innovative. However, researchers have so far mainly theorized, studied and analyzed issues related to innovations in public services and public delivery. Few have payed attention to the fact that public service innovation takes place in a political context, and that innovations in polity, politics and policy are fundamental aspects of public innovation. A comprehensive research agenda on public innovation should therefore include studies of political innovation.

This book will be of great value to scholars and researchers interested in Public Administration, Policy Making and Innovation, Public Governance and Political Leadership.

It was originally published as a special issue of the Public Management Review.

Political innovations: innovations in political institutions, processes and outputs

ABSTRACT

Public innovation has become a key objective for governments all over the Western world and is a growing research area among students of public policy and governance. At the heart of this new agenda is the search for ways to make the public sector more innovative. Governments and researchers alike are mainly interested in assessing and promoting innovations in public service delivery, but have paid little or no attention to the need for innovations in polity, politics and policy. This article develops a research agenda for studying innovations in political institutions, in the political process and in policy outputs. It proposes a number of research themes related to political innovations that call for scholarly attention, and identifies push and pull factors influencing the likelihood that these themes will be addressed in future research.

Introduction

Public innovation has risen to the top of the agenda among governments all over the Western world (OECD 2012; US 2012, 2013; EU-Commission 2013; UK 2014). The message is clear: the public sector needs to become more innovative in order to meet the demands of modern society. There is also a growing interest in public innovation amongst students of public policy and governance, who are currently working to define and conceptualize public innovation, analyse drivers of, and barriers to, innovation in the public sector, and prescribe ways to make the public sector more innovative. However, researchers have so far mainly theorized, studied and analysed issues related to innovations in public services and public delivery, asking questions, such as: What new services, production methods, procedures and organizational set-ups for service provision have emerged? How are the innovations produced and who is involved? Which management capacities and tool kits are used, and to what effect? What impact do different innovations have on the quality and price of public service provision (Osborne and Brown 2005, 2013; Mulgan 2014)? This burgeoning body of research on public service innovation is both valuable and relevant, as it provides important knowledge about how the public sector shapes public service innovation, as well as about how, and to what extent, such innovations affect the efficiency and effectiveness of public governance. What has so far been overlooked, however, is the fact that public service innovation takes place in a political context, and that innovations in polity, politics and policy are fundamental aspects of public innovation. A comprehensive research agenda on public innovation should, therefore, include studies of political innovation that I will, at this point, tentatively define as intentional efforts to transform political institutions designed to make authoritative political decisions (polity), the political processes that lead to such decisions (politics) and the content of the resulting policies (policy).

The aim of this article is to put political innovation on the public innovation research agenda by proposing a number of research themes that, in this particular day and age, call for scholarly attention and debate. Before moving on, I should clarify that public innovation, be it a service innovation or a political innovation, is not a goal in itself. It is a means to an end, which is to transform the content of what is considered as public value as well as the conditions under which this content is formulated and authorized. At a given point in time, stability may be perceived as more important than innovation in achieving this goal, and much of the time the trick is to balance the need for stability against the need for change and innovation. The new public innovation agenda is important because it demonstrates that public innovation is actually an option. This is an important insight at a time when Western governments seem particularly eager to transform the public sector in order to improve its ability to deal efficiently, effectively and democratically with proliferating wicked and unruly problems (Levin et al. 2012), as well as to overcome growing legitimacy problems (Dalton 2004; Rothstein 2014).

The article starts by outlining the emerging public innovation agenda and its tendency to overlook political innovations. Political innovations are then defined, and their important role in public innovation is described. With a point of departure in cutting-edge public policy and governance research, I list a number of research themes and questions that call for studies of, and between, innovations in polity, politics and policy, and I assess the prospects for political innovation to rise to the top of the public sector innovation agenda in the coming years.

The emerging agenda on public sector innovation

Until recently, it was a truism that public bureaucracies were naturally, either for better or worse, resistant and aversive to change, and were capable of no creativity to speak of (Weber 1947; Downs 1957). Innovation was perceived as something businesses carried out in order to survive in competitive markets and, if anything, the role of the public sector was to give domestic firms easy access to innovation assets, such as cutting-edge scientific knowledge, a well-educated labour force, and a supportive infrastructure. The purpose was to spur economic growth and prosperity in society, and the private sector was perceived as the motor for achieving this (OECD 2015). A Google search for the terms ‘public sector and innovation’ illustrates that this approach to the relationship between the public sector and innovation still prevails, with triple helix and partnership models featuring among more recent developments in our understanding of how the public sector can promote private innovation and growth (Leydesdorff and Etzkowitz 1998; National Science Foundation 2015). However, a new public sector approach to innovation is gradually gaining momentum in Western liberal democracies, which focuses on how the public sector itself can become more innovative. In Canada, the government has set in motion an innovation process that aims to recast the public school system in order to focus on learning instead of teaching; Danish municipalities are currently engaged in developing services for the elderly that focus on rehabilitation rather than care; and the UK is on the lookout for new innovative measures to engage the public in ensuring public safety through different forms of community policing. What unites these endeavours is that they represent open-ended attempts to develop new, innovative approaches to solving public tasks.

Claims to causality are a risky business in the social sciences, and caution is called for when it comes to explaining why new issues enter government agendas. Robert Kingdon (1984) points to randomness, coincidence and policy entrepreneurs with a good sense of timing as important factors in agenda setting; and Christopher Pollitt and Peter Hupe (2011, 641) use the term ‘magic concept’ to describe topics, such as ‘innovation’ that have what it takes to attract broad-based attention from decision makers, notably a vague, fuzzy meaning and positive connotations. Yet none of these factors can explain why public innovation is entering government agendas right now. Innovation theory is helpful, however, in pointing out that innovations are driven by push and pull factors (Torfing 2016). Pull factors are when ambitions are voiced and appear realistic to pursue. Push factors are when a given state of affairs is perceived as dangerous and unsustainable.

Taking departure in this pull-push terminology, the growing interest in making the public sector more innovative can, on the pull factor side, be explained by positive experiences with introducing ICT in the public sector in the 1990s that have nurtured a growing belief in, and ambition to develop, a new and different kind of public sector (Contini and Anzara 2009). The push factors include: intensified global competition that has transformed nations into competition states (Cerny 1997). Whether a country wins or loses in the global competition for economic growth is no longer viewed as depending solely on the ability of domestic firms to innovate, and the support they get from public authorities in doing so. Winning or losing also depends on the efficiency and effectiveness of the way society is governed. Since the 1980s, governments have launched initiatives and reforms aimed at rendering public governance more efficient and effective (Hood 1991; Osborne and Gaebler 1993), but disappointing efficiency gains, growing fiscal austerity and rising citizen demands for public services at the beginning of the twenty-first century have put pressure on Western governments to find more radical ways to create more for less, and innovation promises exactly that (Pollitt 2010; Hood and Dixon 2015). In addition to the pressure for increased efficiency, there is a push to improve the quality of public governance. The public performance measurement regimes that emerged in the wake of the New Public Management reforms of the 1980s and 1990s have revealed an effectiveness deficit in a number of policy areas. The problem-solving capacity of the public sector is simply insufficient. Some researchers explain this effectiveness deficit as the result of a growth in wicked policy problems with a high level of complexity (Mayntz 1993; Kooiman 1993; Pierre and Peters 2000; Koppenjan and Klijn 2004); while others speak of policy execution problems stemming from misinformed policies (Macmillan and Cain 2010). The message is the same, however: the public sector must become more effective, and that calls for innovation.

After the turn of the century, many public policy and governance researchers parted ways with the general assumption that public innovation is an oxymoron, and embarked on open-ended studies of the realities of public sector innovation, developing theories that sought to identify the specific drivers and barriers to public innovation, and proposing ways to make the public sector more innovative (Borins 2001, 2014; Eggers and Singh 2009; Bekkers, Edelenbos, and Steijn 2011; Hartley, Sørensen, and Torfing 2013; Agger and Sørensen 2014; Ansell and Torfing 2015). The main focus of attention in this research has been on service innovation, for example, innovations in the content of public services as well as in the way they are provided. This service-oriented approach to innovation is inspired by traditional as well as newer theories of private sector innovation (Schumpeter 1939; Nijssen et al. 2006) that speak directly to the aspirations of current governments to develop a public sector that produces more and better public services for less.

The emerging research on public service innovation is important, but it tends to overlook the fact that, unlike in the private sector, public innovation takes place in a political-organizational context. Public service innovations are not only conditioned by what service users want but also by what political decision makers prioritize in terms of funding, and chose to regulate with reference to more or less contested political perceptions of what is right, just and valuable for the individual citizens as well as for society.

This political context has two immediate implications for a research agenda on public innovation. First, it calls for studies of how public service innovation is conditioned by existing policies and the political climate that exists in a given context. Studies are needed of service innovations in the light of whether or not they are developed in a context of intense political contestation. Also relevant are studies of how bottom-up service innovations initiated and developed by employees and/or relevant and affected citizens are endorsed by politicians, and of how, and to what effect, service innovations are initiated by governments as part of their political programmes.

Second, a comprehensive public innovation research programme must include studies of political innovations in their own right. Political institutions (polity), processes (politics) and programmes (policy) are more or less constantly being transformed, but these transformations are rarely analysed as instances of public innovation. Public innovation research must be able to provide descriptions, analyses and assessments of any resulting changes in the political system, as well as in their purpose and impact, including how the changes affect political systems’ own ability to innovate in the years that follow. The proposed distinction between innovations in polity, politics and policy is intended for analytical purposes only, and a research agenda should not fail to include studies of how the three are interrelated. Institutional innovations may or may not promote innovations in politics, and innovations in politics may either reduce or hamper political systems’ policy innovation capacity. A new, innovative policy may also affect political institutions in ways that promote or hamper future policy innovations. Hence, theory building and empirical research are needed that improve our knowledge about the interdependencies between innovations in polity, politics and policy (Agger and Sørensen 2014; Helms 2015). Figure 1 illustrates the types of innovations and interdependencies that lend themselves to theorizing and investigation as part of a research agenda on political innovation.

Figure 1. Research agenda on political innovation

What are innovations in polity, politics and policy?

The first step in clarifying what political innovation is must be to define innovation. Although definitions of innovation differ greatly, most innovation theories would agree that innovation involves an intentional development and realization of new cre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Political innovations: innovations in political institutions, processes and outputs
• 2 Open Access: Political innovation as ideal and strategy: the case of aleatoric democracy in the City of Utrecht
• 3 Strengthening political leadership and policy innovation through the expansion of collaborative forms of governance
• 4 Open Access: The challenge of innovating politics in community self-organization: the case of Broekpolder
• 5 Political parties and innovation
• 6 Assessing the impact of informal governance on political innovation
• Index