Political Mistakes and Policy Failures in International Relations

Andreas Kruck, Kai Oppermann, Alexander Spencer, Andreas Kruck, Kai Oppermann, Alexander Spencer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319681733
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This edited volume analyzes mistakes in different areas of international relations including the realms of security, foreign policy, finance, health, development, environmental policy and migration. By starting out from a broad concept of mistakes as "something [considered to have] gone wrong" the edited volume enables comparisons of various kinds of mistakes from a range of analytical perspectives, including objectivist and interpretivist approaches, in order to draw out answers to the following guiding questions:

• How does one identify and research a mistake?

• Why do mistakes happen?

• How are actors made responsible?

• When and how do actors learn from mistakes?

This book will be of great interest to scholars, undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as practitioners in International Relations, Foreign Policy Analysis, Security Studies, International Political Economy, and Diplomatic History.

© The Author(s) 2018

Andreas Kruck, Kai Oppermann and Alexander Spencer (eds.)Political Mistakes and Policy Failures in International Relationshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68173-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Mistakes and Failures in International Relations

Andreas Kruck¹ , Kai Oppermann² and Alexander Spencer¹

(1)

Institute of Social Sciences and History, Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, Magdeburg, Germany

(2)

Department of Politics, University of Sussex, Brighton, East Sussex, UK

Andreas Kruck (Corresponding author)

Kai Oppermann

Alexander Spencer

End Abstract

We all make mistakes. Mistakes are human. Mistakes happen not only in our individual lives but also in national and international politics. While mistakes have always been at the centre stage of International Relations (IR) as a discipline implicitly, due to the fact that events attract far more attention when they are considered to have gone wrong, the conceptualization of ‘mistakes’ as an explicit analytical concept and focus so far has been neglected. This edited volume is concerned with mistakes in different realms of IR including foreign and security policy, international political economy and issues of international public policy such as health and development, environmental policy and migration. In particular, the book and the individual chapters address the following key questions: What is a ‘mistake’ or ‘failure’, and how does one identify and research such a phenomenon? Why do mistakes and failures occur? How are actors made responsible, and what consequences do mistakes and failures entail? When and how do actors learn from mistakes and failures?

In pursuit of some answers to these questions, this introductory chapter first considers the concepts of ‘mistakes’ and ‘failures’ in IR and other disciplines and reflects on ontological and epistemological perspectives on how to study mistakes and failures. The second part turns to the question of what causes mistakes and failures and considers a range of theories from different fields for explaining and understanding mistakes and failures. Part three examines the notion of responsibility attribution and considers why and how actors get blame d for mistakes and failures. In these three parts, we both summarize the state of the art on the relevant questions and point out how the chapters in this volume add new insights and perspectives. Part four offers an overview of the chapters which are to follow and part five elaborates on the lessons learnt from these insights on mistakes and failures in IR.

The Concepts of Mistakes and Failures and How to Study Them

The study of situations in which something has gone wrong has, at least implicitly, always been a part of IR. Political events and decisions usually attract much greater scholarly attention if they are seen to be a failure than if they are considered a success. It is of little surprise then that many of the best-studied events are precisely those which have been linked to ‘disastrous’ failures or consequences. Mistakes such as the appeasement of Hitler, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the catastrophic mismanagement of diseases and pandemics (e.g. AIDS or Ebola) or the failure of banking regulations in the run-up to the recent financial crisis have always preoccupied scholars of IR. It is hardly a stretch to say that mistakes are omnipresent in IR research and that we do research and teach our students IR by studying mistakes. Many studies in IR, however, do not explicitly engage with or employ concepts such as ‘mistake’ or ‘failure’ as an analytical category but expect the consequences of the policy to be a sufficient indicator of a mistake or failure. Mistakes have rarely been the subject of systematic conceptual and comparative analysis in IR. This edited volume wants to address this gap in the literature by analysing mistakes of different dimensions in various issue areas.

As this volume illustrates, there is very little agreement on the definition of a political ‘mistake’ or a policy ‘failure’ and how to study such a phenomenon. In the literature, one encounters a number of very different concepts including ‘fiasco’, ‘catastrophe’, ‘blunder’, ‘crisis’ or ‘disaster’ denoting similar things (Dunleavy 1995; Gray 1996; Bovens and ‘t Hart 1996; King and Crewe 2013). While some try to make distinctions between these different concepts with regard to their severity, we consider a key difference between mistakes and failures to relate to the role of agency. While the concept of mistakes is necessarily linked to agents or their choices playing a substantial role in negative outcomes, the concept of failures zooms in on the negative outcomes but is less explicit about the role of agency . Beyond this basic distinction, the volume emphasizes the unifying characteristics of the phenomena and considers mistakes and failures as ‘something considered to have gone wrong’.

Overall one can distinguish two different approaches to failures: an objectivist and an intersubjective perspective. The first objectivist perspective tends to follow a foundationalist and positivist tradition that has long been dominant in policy evaluation studies (Marsh and McConnell 2010: 567). According to this perspective, policy failures are objective facts that can be independently identified and verified. Thus, policies count as a failure if they fall short of certain objective criteria or benchmarks for success (Howlett 2012: 541–542; McConnell 2010: 349–351). In the narrowest sense, the classic model of policy evaluation starts out from a policy’s official objectives and considers the policy a failure if it does not meet these objectives (Gray 1996: 76). In a slightly broader sense, rationalist understandings of policy failure may also bring in the costs of a policy, the damage caused by it as well as the policy’s unintended and adverse consequences (King and Crewe 2013: 4; Dunleavy 1995: 52).

A number of scholars have here emphasized the need to examine different levels of failure. For example, Michael Howlett (2012) developed a typology which differentiates between the magnitude of a failure in terms of its extent and duration and its salience in public debate with regard to its intensity and visibility (see Fig. 1.1). Thereby he articulates four types of failure including major failure (high in both magnitude and salience), focused failure (low in magnitude but high in salience), diffuse failure (high in magnitude and low in salience) and minor failure (low in magnitude and salience).

Fig. 1.1

Howlett’s typology of policy failure (Adapted from Howlett 2012: 544)

Allan McConnell (2016: 672–675) in contrast differentiates between process, programme and political failure. Process failure is here understood as failure with regard to the government’s inability to produce the necessary policy instruments or formulate desired outcomes, the illegitimacy of the policy process, the existence of widespread opposition and inability of governments to gain support for the policy. Programme failure is characterized by the failure in the implementation of policy, the inability to produce results, the damage to the intended beneficiaries of the policy, the inability to adhere by standard policy criteria and the existence of major opposition to the aims, values and means of implementation. Political failure is considered to be composed of reputational damage, inability to keep politically difficult issues off the agenda, danger to the entire trajectory of government and opposition to the government as a whole. In all these approaches there is little critical reflection on the subjective side of the ‘failure’ label, but it is taken as a starting point for the explanations of why policy failures occur and what conclusions can be drawn from these explanations.

The second intersubjective perspective sees ‘failure’ not to be an inherent attribute of policy but rather considers it a judgement about policy. Here, policy outcomes do not speak for themselves but only come to be seen as successful or unsuccessful because of the meaning imbued to them in political discourse . Policy mistakes and failures are understood as ‘essentially contested’ concepts (Gallie 1955). Since there are no fixed or commonly accepted criteria for the success or failure of a policy, such judgements are always likely to be subjective and open to dispute (Bovens and ‘t Hart 1996: 4–11). This holds no less for efforts at evaluating policies against the benchmark of officially stated objectives, which will often be vague, diverse and conflicting and which may have been formulated more for their strategic or symbolic functions than as a realistic guide to policy-making: ‘The goals of policy are often not what they seem to be, and it is a mistake to take stated purposes too literally’ (Ingram and Mann 1980: 20).

Policies that are seen as successful by some may thus well be dismissed as failures by others. Such opposite judgements can come, for example, from differences in the timeframes or geographical and social boundaries of assessing the impacts of a policy as well as from cultural biases or diverging evaluations of available alternatives (Bovens and ‘t Hart 1996: 21–32; Marsh and McConnell 2010: 575–577). They may also be driven by uneven levels of expectation or aspiration (Levy 1994: 305). Most notably, however, the designation of (foreign) policy as success or failure is inescapably intertwined with politics (Brändström and Kuipers 2003: 279–282; Bovens et al. 2001: 10). Policy evaluations will thus be influenced by the values, identity and interests of the evaluator ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Mistakes and Failures in International Relations
• Part I. Foreign and Security Policy
• Part II. International Political Economy
• Part III. International Public Policy
• Back Matter