On the LSE politics and policy blog are two posts by Patrick Dunleavy which anyone interested in public administration should take a look at.
He looks at whether the coalition has a 'governance strategy', and suggests that without bringing some allies on-side (not to mention changing their approach to reform) then attempts to bring about change will quite possibly fail.
Dunleavy also mentions a paper* that he and Helen Margetts from Oxford University presented to the Treasury over the summer, which extends and compliments the two posts.
New public management
The authors argue that "the movement of government services online has had major consequences for the previously dominant approach to government sector administration", which has been labelled "new public management" (NPM).
They define NPM as having three characteristics.
- Disaggregation, such as with the splitting up of large bureaucracies into smaller agencies and locally managed schools and hospitals.
- Competition, which sees quasimarkets, deregulation and a move away from bureaucratic monopoly providers.
- Financial incentives for actors or organisations via privatisation, PFI schemes and public-private partnerships, performance-related pay, etc.
Digital era governance
The paper says that such policies are now "intellectually dead-ends" and are being replaced by "digital era governance" (DEG).
The years from 2002 to 2010 saw the first wave of such change, say the authors, while the advent of the social web will likely mean a second wave of change from 2010 onwards.
In contrast to NPM, the characteristics of DEG are:
- Reintegration of services, for example to create new central government processes to do things once instead of many times, using shared services rather than having duplicate organisational hierarchies
- The creation of client-focused structures with an end-to-end redesign of services from a user's perspective.
- Digitalisation, which includes radical change to place electronic delivery "at the heart of the government business model", for example through centralised online procurement.
"Digitalisation also is a key stimulus behind radical disintermediation, the effort to strip out layers of redundant or non-value-adding processes and bureaucracies from service delivery. As in private services, this will partly involve making (able) citizens do more, developing isocratic administration (or 'do-it-yourself' government), and a transition to full open-book governance instead of previously very limited or partial 'freedom of information' regimes."
The authors suggest that these trends – with the possible exception of moves to take a more holistic approach to administration, because these take money to develop and implement – are also likely to be in tune with the imperatives of austerity in the public sector.
Where next?
Looking at three scenarios for the future, the authors suggest that DEG could face a crisis if austerity brings about a return to "contracting, outsourcing and privatisation as the key way to cut public sector budgets".
"Renewed fragmentation and disaggregation would result from moves to break up governmental projects to enable small providers to compete – particularly on IT projects in countries like the UK and Australia where ICT contracting has been striking uncompetitive over many decades now."
However they suggest that this is only possible in the event that there is an unlikely move to radically reduce the size of the state.
Their second scenario is that of a lengthy 'investment pause', "with large-scale DEG schemes that clearly can be investment-heavy being kicked into the long-grass".
"Under this scenario, patterns of government administration and especially the online operations of public services will fall progressively further and further behind the technologies and modes of operating of private sector organisations over the next five years. Although a short run pause on IT developments might have minimal implications, even in two years the gap between government and the private sector, and government and society will have increased and it will become more difficult to catch up."
And the third scenario would see "a major expansion of DEG as a response to a range of social, technological and organisational drivers".
"The key social drivers for government innovation come from the unrelenting waves of technological and social changes that show no signs of easing off. As tranches of social, political and economic life move on-line, people expect to interact with government in the same way as they do with firms, banks, social enterprises and each other, which puts pressure on governments to make use of these applications and focus on their on-line presence."
Together with technological changes such as a move to greater open source software, this scenario would see policy-makers "reach out to digital technologies, Web 2.0 applications and newer technological developments precisely for their potential to produce cost savings and conform with programmes of cutbacks".
Change in context
While Dunleavy's LSE posts are critical of some of the government's main reform proposals, this paper strikes a more nuanced note.
For example, the drive to reduce the number of executive agencies and the reintegration of their functions into central departments fits with the thesis at the NPM is on its way out.
At the same time, the warnings about the risks of reforms which move in an opposite direction, particularly in the NHS, are convincingly made.
The paper avoids technological determinism by basing its analysis on organisational and budgetary issues, citizen-orientated factors and "influences from the societal adoption and cultural adaptation of technological drivers".
And because of this it is perhaps most interesting for the way in which it places eGovernment developments in some historical and administrative context, as well as providing some context for analysing their implementation.
* Dunleavy, Patrick and Margetts, Helen Zerlina, The Second Wave of Digital Era Governance (2010). APSA 2010 Annual Meeting Paper. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1643850
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