Transformational Public Policy
Transformational Public Policy examines how governments can more effectively handle uncertainty and risk in an uncertain and changing world. Unpredictable and changing circumstances often bring nasty surprises that can increase waste in governance and public debt. This book illustrates how new methods derived from signal processing techniques can improve the practice of public policy by transforming it through rapid learning and adaptation. Interventions are processes of discovery, not compliance.
Transformational Public Policy shows readers how the power of hypothesis testing in governance can be deployed. The book argues that public policy can be framed as tests of competing hypotheses subject to diagnostic errors. The aim is to learn how to reduce these diagnostic errors through cumulative experience. This approach can reduce the impact of negative unintended consequences a topic of great interest to policymakers and academics alike.
Mark Matthews is a public policy specialist who has worked closely with different governments from both private sector and academic bases. He has a background in science and innovation policy and is particularly interested in the consequences of shortcomings in the ways in which governments approach uncertainty and risk and what could be done to address these problems.
Routledge Studies in Governance and Public Policy
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/series/GPP
18 Inclusive Growth, Development and Welfare Policy
A critical assessment
Edited by Reza Hasmath
19 The New and Changing Transatlanticism
Politics and policy perspectives
Edited by Laurie Buonanno, Natalia Cuglesan and Keith Henderson
20 Childhood Citizenship, Governance and Policy
The politics of becoming adult
Sana Nakata
21 The Idea of Good Governance and the Politics of the Global South
An analysis of its effects
Haroon A. Khan
22 Interpreting Governance, High Politics and Public Policy
Essays commemorating Interpreting British Governance
Edited by Nick Turnbull
23 Political Engagement of the Young in Europe
Youth in the crucible
Edited by Peter Thijssen, Jessy Siongers, Jeroen Van Laer, Jacques Haers and Sara Mels
24 Rethinking Governance
Ruling, rationalities and resistance
Edited by Mark Bevir and R. A. W. Rhodes
25 Governmentality after Neoliberalism
Edited by Mark Bevir
26 Transformational Public Policy
A new strategy for coping with uncertainty and risk
Mark Matthews
First published 2017
by Routledge
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2017 Mark Matthews
The right of Mark Matthews to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Matthews, Mark, 1950 author.
Title: Transformational public policy : a new strategy for coping
with uncertainty and risk / by Mark Matthews.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge is an
imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business,
[2017] | Series: Routledge studies in governance and public
policy ; 26 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016004562 | ISBN 9781138824041 (hbk) |
ISBN 9781315741710 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Political planning. | Administrative agencies
Management. | Risk assessmentGovernment policy. | Risk
managementGovernment policy. | UncertaintyGovernment
policy.
Classification: LCC JF1525.P6 M335 2017 | DDC 320.6dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016004562
ISBN: 978-1-138-82404-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-74171-0 (ebk)
Typeset in Galliard
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
The discussion of how well governments cope with uncertainty and risk in this book stems from my experiences as an academic, a management consultant specialising in public policy, and as the inaugural director of a government-funded policy think tank based in a university. The more familiar I became with the reality of how governments operate, the clearer it became that there was a fundamental problem with how uncertainty and risk were handled or rather mishandled. The symptoms were powerful and pervasive and suggestive of an underlying pathology that revolved around a risk-averse preference for evidence, data, rules and procedures over the types of judgement and flexible and adaptive operating practices required of the uncertainty and risk manager of last resort. This pathology often appeared to be driven by an assumption that the public sector could operate more effectively if hard evidence were used rather than subjective judgement with the recourse to judgement being treated as a problem to be eliminated rather than something upon which circumstances dictate that we must rely. This preference for quantification also extends to how substantive uncertainties and risks are handled, resulting in an avoidance of substantive uncertainty and an aversion to risk that is not well aligned with governments role as uncertainty and risk managers of last resort. The result appeared to be an ideal type for governance being conjured up that was divorced from the reality of what governments must be able to do.
This ideal type reflected the deficit perspective: that the public sector was less effective than the private sector (and the non-profit sector) and must therefore be reformed via the combination of shifting some public services into the private sector (privatisation), the adoption of private sectorinfluenced performance metrics and hard targets (managerialism), assertions that the public sector should emulate private sector innovation practices (innovation), and various kinds of contractual partnerships between the public sector and the private sector and the non-profit sector (partnerships). As manifestations of an underlying pathology, these deficit-framed characteristics of modern governance pointed to a severe loss of confidence in governance that, to me, appeared to stem from neglecting governments role in dealing with all the truly nasty things that markets and the businesses that shape these markets, civil society and the general community as a whole cannot cope with. These nasty things will happen irrespective of whether we have evidence on them. Consequently, insisting on robust evidence tends to deflect the attention (and capabilities) within governments to those areas that are most remote from the most important core functions of governance. The result is a tendency to dwell on details of the past rather than the complex, ambiguous and often confusing prospects in the future to follow access to evidence gleaned from what has happened so far rather than do what really matters as regards trying to cope with the future.
