Public Governance: All about solving public problems or something more?

Matthew Coghlan
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The OECD's Rolf Alter brings readers Global Policy’s third 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 first in a series of planned annual reports on the state and challenges of public governance very effectively whets the appetite for more of the fresh thinking Helmut Anheier and others present in the diverse chapters of the 2013 edition.

Public Governance has moved up in the awareness of the public policy community for quite some time now, very much driven by the protracted difficulties of managing the global economy out of its never ending series of crises, beginning with the financial meltdown in 2007/8 all the way to the social crisis of unemployment levels not seen for a very long while. In development economics, institutional weaknesses and lack of good governance are equally identified as the critical bottlenecks for sustainable growth.

In fact, one can get the impression that good public governance is elevated to the all around response, from improving policy performance, achieving better outcomes of development, to more effective sector policies and rebuilding or maintaining trust in government. And its capacities to deliver are expected at all levels of government, including the supra or international level, where the 2013 edition of the Report puts the emphasis with its discussion of sovereignty.

Both blame and over extended expectations seem in my view based on the insufficient attention being paid to the empirical analysis of public governance and the fast changing context of public governance globally. The previously often stated path dependency of developments of national governance must also be taken into account in the international debate.

Against this background I would encourage the next editions of the governance report to continue vigorously the development of governance indicators, an area where the OECD’s "Governance at a Glance" is offering a unique set of internationally comparable data on public institutions, instruments, processes and performance in its 34 member countries. The benefits of wide collaboration among the proponents of quantitative and qualitative measurement of public governance would appear obvious.

Equally promising could be for the upcoming Governance Reports to look into three fast changing issues in particular: what role for evidence in decision making in increasingly complex situations? How does the multiple stakeholder context impact on the government’s ability to govern? To what extent is public governance an instrument to "solve public problems"? Moving to an understanding of public governance as a joint learning process in dynamic and networked economies and societies rather than a mechanism to deliver technically correct results or even outcomes could animate the debate and provide opportunities for urgently needed innovations.

There seems to be no shortage of evidence for the right public policies to deal with the burning challenges, such as climate change, the ageing of the population, poverty reduction or the reform of the financial sector, just to name a few. Really? Why is it then that policy action is not following suit? Are we appreciating fully the complexity of evidence, the degrees of uncertainty, the time horizons involved which could limit its usefulness for policy making? Are governance systems providing capacities and well structured "avenues" for evidence to enter into policy design and decision making? Regulatory impact assessment is a prominent example of an under utilised instrument of evidence based decision making in most countries. Ex ante expenditure assessments are even less common, a fact hard to understand, except if democracy and evidence were considered mutually exclusive. And what about the policy making relevance of ex-post evaluations?

Modern public governance implies multi-stakeholder processes at many levels, welcomed primarily as a means to reversing the decline in public participation in the political system. The tsunami of opportunities of communication and information technology opens a radically different dimension of interaction. Open government is the latest expression of commitments in that respect, but the consequences for public governance quality and performance are hardly understood. What is happening in this environment to the accountability of governments, the role of parliaments, the issue of legitimacy of CSOs if they have no obligations for being transparent themselves? At supra national level additional questions arise: what is the democratic legitimacy of the G20 process, and what if any is the role of stakeholders at that level of policy coordination?

While "solving public problems" is a good working definition of public governance, it also risks missing some of the dynamic dimensions. Whether decisions qualify as solutions may be time dependent, and be viewed differently by stakeholders. What constitutes a public problem is changing quite dramatically since the traditional social contract around public services is challenged and private or public approaches are regarded as alternatives. Raising awareness and increasing understanding for these complexities could be major reform requirement for good governance in the future. They will make the key questions of delivery and accountability only more difficult to address.

The Governance Reports are well suited to become a source of both broader measurements of public governance and an inspiring debate on its potential and limitations.

Since 1 July 2009, Dr. Rolf Alter has been the Director for Public Governance and Territorial Development of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris. Previously, he served for three years as Chief of Staff of OECD Secretary-General, Mr. Angel Gurría. Prior to joining the OECD in 1991, Dr. Alter was an economist in the International Monetary Fund, in Washington D.C. Mr. Alter holds a doctorate degree from the University of Goettingen, Germany.

For more GP Responses, please cleck here.