The Politics of Governance Transformation: A good news story?
Kate Macdonald brings readers Global Policy’s final Response to the The Governance Report 2013 by Hertie School of Governance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, February 2013. 176 pp, £9.99 (paperback), 978 0199674428. For a quick introduction to the report and other Responses please click here.
The Hertie School’s Governance Report 2013 is being launched amidst widespread recognition of a daunting array of governance challenges, for which the stakes are high and the obstacles innumerable. As the opening to the Report highlights, contemporary governance challenges are located within a turbulent and often bitterly contested political environment, characterised by disorientating tugs of war between a proliferation of political interests and values at local, national and global levels.
Despite these challenging political circumstances, the authors assert firmly that the Report’s intention is not “to lament the changes and uncertainties of today’s world; nor is it to bemoan the complexity of the often contradictory movements and counter-movements that are taking place”. Rather, the authors offer a constructive mix of evaluative, diagnostic and prescriptive tools to help both scholars and practitioners of contemporary governance navigate the obstacles of this difficult political environment and deliver on an agenda of ‘good governance’. Amidst the conflict and uncertainties of today’s world, therefore, the Report seems to offer a good news story about the potential of global governance innovation to make a real difference in tackling some of the most pressing policy challenges that currently confront governments and societies around the world.
The analytical toolbox offered by the Report in pursuit of this end contains a number of useful elements. These include conceptual frameworks for analysing governance ‘performance’ (encompassing considerations of legitimacy, efficacy and effectiveness), governance ‘readiness’ (which examines the performance of a governance system from the perspective of its adaptive capacity), and governance ‘innovation’ (understood as capacity for generating new ideas and approaches). These three dimensions then provide a foundation for the Report’s development of a provisional framework of governance indicators, designed to offer a more multi-dimensional view of governance actors and performance than exists amongst the array of indicators currently on offer.
In developing these frameworks, the Report’s analysis is greatly enriched by the diversity of well-chosen examples on which the authors draw—building in turn on the insights of an impressive array of experts whose ideas have been systematically gathered and integrated into the Report. This detailed repository of contrasting examples and illustrations constitutes a valuable resource and reference point for students, scholars and practitioners of cross-border governance. Moreover, it provides powerful empirical ammunition to support the Report’s substantive analysis. These analytical and empirical resources offer an important contribution to contemporary governance debates.
While there is much of purely academic interest in this analysis, the Report’s authors also appear committed to ensuring the relevance of its real world applications. The tools the Report offers for analysing the operation of complex systems of contemporary governance are therefore ultimately designed to answer very practical questions about why good governance is so hard to achieve, and how governance actors could do better.
Translating the Report’s analytical toolbox into an actionable agenda of governance practice and reform requires more than simply clear diagnostic and evaluative tools. It also requires a clear account of the political underpinnings of evolving governance arrangements, and thus the drivers of—and obstacles to—desired governance reform. There is no doubt that the Report’s authors acknowledge the importance of politics in shaping both pathways and obstacles to better governance. They reject the notion that agendas of good governance might meaningfully be advanced through clever technocratic fixes. And they draw a central analytical distinction between ‘first order’ governance challenges that are overtly political in character, and the more technocratic, ‘second order’ challenges of working out what institutional tools will best deliver desired political outcomes. Nevertheless, in crucial sections of the Report, this political undercurrent to the analysis often seemed to become lost.
The persistently technocratic flavour of the Report’s proposed governance indicators offers one illustration of this tendency. The indicators seem to have been developed mainly as a way of articulating and disaggregating the multiple ingredients required to generate and sustain ‘high performing’ governance institutions. Complications in the form of legitimate political contestation concerning the public purposes to be promoted by such institutions are side-stepped by tying the rather functionalist analysis of governance capacity to the (supposedly normatively-neutral) goal of supporting ‘global public goods’. Accordingly, the indicators incorporate no explicit means of assessing the capacity of governance arrangements to mobilize sustained support from key political constituencies at global and domestic levels. The question of whether (and under what conditions) a sustained political support-base should be regarded as a requirement of ‘good governance’ is undeniably both complex and controversial. Nevertheless, without some clear and transparent means of minimally assessing the political feasibility of governance institutions (with reference to their compatibility with existing patterns of incentives and power), the ability of the indicators to offer actionable guidance to practitioners will surely remain constrained.
The Report’s tendency to downplay the political forces that condition and constrain the accessibility of functionally ‘desirable’ governance arrangements is also reflected in the framing of the Report’s concluding recommendations. One rather interesting example of this concerns the Report’s advocacy of a new norm of ‘responsible sovereignty’—itself one of the more overtly political arguments advanced by the Report’s authors. In short, the authors suggest that entrenched ideas and practices of sovereignty constitute a pervasive barrier to achieving the deep governance transformations that are required to address some of the hardest governance problems the world currently confronts. Overcoming political resistance to much needed reforms on these specific policy issues could be achieved, however, if we could first secure broad-based recognition of the potential of multilateral action to empower rather than constrain the governance capacity (or ‘sovereignty’) of national governments.
Yet despite the deeply political character of this argument, the Report has remarkably little to say about the political drivers that might realistically support widespread uptake of such a norm. The Report’s central recommendation on this issue is that the UN should establish “a high level Commission on responsibility”, which could issue a report and seek support for the principle of responsible sovereignty from the UN General Assembly. Although the political logic of this position is not spelled out in any detail, the focus seems to be on shifting beliefs among strategically targeted, elite decision makers such that they will be willing to interpret the demands of sovereignty in new and more enlightened ways. Indeed, the Report’s Recommendations chapter also includes some interesting suggestions about how new norms might be promoted among “a new generation of policy experts, administrators and managers”. It seems reasonable to think that strategies targeting such networks of policy-making elites could play an important role in shaping evolving agendas and debates. Yet it seems far-fetched to suggest that deeper forms of normative and political transformation—such as that entailed by the principle of ‘responsible sovereignty’—could come about without also mobilizing widespread support amongst the domestic political constituencies to whom such policy elites are ultimately accountable.
The Report is rich in analytical resources and instructive practical examples to help participants in established policy-making circles reflect on both challenges and weaknesses of existing governance practice, and potential pathways to reform. Professional policy-makers searching for inspiration and guidance towards a project of building better governance will find a great deal of good news in the Report. The bad news is that the deeper governance transformations to which the Report’s authors also aspire appear to remain somewhat elusive—bogged down in the darker and murkier terrain of domestic and transnational political contestation. Our understanding of these underlying political dynamics could benefit enormously from the depth of empirical and analytical insight on display in the Report’s premiere edition. Perhaps we should hope then that subsequent editions of the Report devote greater attention to telling us more about the bad news.
Kate Macdonald is a lecturer in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. She is also a member of Global Policy’s academic board.
