Structure or agency? Discourse or meta-narrative? Explaining the emergence of the financial management initiative (original) (raw)

The Evolution of a 'Meta-Policy': The Case of the Private Finance Initiative and the Health Sector

British Journal of Politics & International Relations, 2004

This article examines the evolution of the Private Finance Initiative in Britain since 1992 with particular reference to the health policy area. The initiative is presented as a 'meta-policy' in so far as it was not sectoral, but was situated above and beyond the normal run of Whitehall policies; it was also heavily ideologically driven. The evolution of the policy, however, was influenced by the policy networks and institutional interplay. In turn the PFI, as it gathered momentum, affected the culture, personnel and institutional structures within which it operated. The history of the PFI is then set against some recent theories of the policy process, particularly those produced by Peter John, stressing evolutionary approaches, and by David Marsh and Martin Smith, suggesting dialectical approaches to networks. It is suggested that there is a need for some theoretical revision which recognises the possibility that a policy itself can make a distinctive contribution to the causal process of policy change.

2. Giving Accounts of Policy Work

Working for Policy, 2011

This book focuses on how we account for the work of policy, recognizing that there is more than one type of account, and that different accounts may 'make sense' in different contexts. In this perspective, we need to recognize that 'policy' is itself an account of government, a construct mobilized, both by academic observers and by practitioners, to make sense of the activity of governing. It presents government as a process of instrumental decision making, in which actors called governments address problems and identify goals; the practice of governing is then explained by referring back to these decisions, seeing it as the 'implementation' of the choices made by governments. Dye described public policy 'whatever government decides to do or not to do' (Dye 1985). The basic assumptions underlying this description are seldom examined because it seems like ' common sense,' but this is precisely why we need to examine these (and other accounts): in how (and why) they 'make sense' of the process? This account of government as a pattern of official problem solving is not the only version available. A much older interpretation (e.g., from Hobbes to Oakeshott) believes that government is concerned with order or the maintenance of stable relationships and practices as well as dealing with disturbances. The dominant paradigm in welfare economics considers government to be a mechanism that deals with market failure, while the processes of choice are simply devices that enforce calculated solutions to problems of collective action. A third interpretation sees government as a struggle for partisan benefit: 'who gets what, when and how,' as Lasswell (1936) described it. Linked to this, but also distinguished from it, is a perception of government as a competitive struggle for dominance among leaders, with statements about goals, choices or benefits being largely tokens in this continuing struggle. More recently, the term governance has been used to suggest that governing is the outcome of a complex interweaving of both official and non-official organizational forms, that often mobilizes different frameworks of meaning and rationales of ac

Modernisation by Consensus: The Impact of the

Policy, 1973

In October 1999 Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, gave the Mais lecture at the City University. He took as his theme 'The conditions for full employment' and used the famous 1944 White Paper on Employment Policy as his starting point (http//www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/press/1999/p168\_99.html). From this he proceeded to give a potted history of the development of economic policy in Britain and to highlight the reasons why postwar governments, both Labour and Conservative, had failed to maintain full employment and growth. Central to his analysis was the need, recognised in the White Paper, for the achievement of four conditions, stability, employability, productivity and responsibility, if employment policy was to be successful. Postwar governments had failed to achieve this necessary combination of requirements, whereas, with typical politician's optimism, the current Labour government had put in place a framework of policies which would correct these previous failings (Eccleshall 2000, pp.157-8).

Policy- based evidence: a political history of national accounts

Routledge, 2016

Gross domestic product (GDP) and other statistics based on national income accounting are ubiquitous but rarely understood today. GDP has been criticized for many reasons, including not reflecting well-being, leaving out the costs of environmental pollution, and not counting unpaid work, but on purely economic terms it has been mostly accepted as an indicator of economic performance. In recent decades, however, GDP has diverged dramatically from economic trends such as employment and median income. This book argues that GDP is flawed even as a narrow economic indicator, and traces the problem to the way financial services are measured. The first part of the book is a political history of the practice of national accounting from its beginning in the mid-seventeenth century to the present day, and explores how such income estimates were constructed for political reasons. The Financialization of GDP presents the practice of estimating national income as a historically and political contingent craft-driven by power and not only theory-culminating in the rise of the financial sector and the concomitant inclusion of financial services in GDP in 1993. The second part of the book focuses on the treatment of financial services in national accounting and develops an adjusted measure of output (final gross domestic product, or FGDP), which treats financial revenues as intermediate inputs (or costs) to the economy as a whole. The final part of the book explores the empirical and policy implications of treating finance as an overall cost to the economy. This volume shows that the Great Moderation of volatility was a statistical artefact; Okun's Law (relating changes in output and unemployment) never died, and even provides early signs for the Great Recession that analysts using standard GDP did not see. This book is of great interest to those who study political economy and macroeconomics.

Explaining dynamics without change: a critical subsector approach to financial policy making

This article uses a case study of financial sector policy making in East Asia in the post 2000 period to examine and help to resolve questions surrounding the origins of the phenomenon of ‘dynamics without change’ in public policy making; that is, the appearance of policy activity and alteration without affecting the overall nature and orientation of policy outputs or outcomes. This is a phenomenon which has challenged existing notions of policy dynamics which associate enhanced policy activity with fundamental changes in outputs and outcomes and is an issue which has concerned policy studies since Robert Alford’s seminal study of British health policy dynamics first noted the phenomenon in the mid-1970s. The article develops and extends the ideas put forward by Rayner et al. (2001, Privileging the sub-sector: critical sub-sectors and sectoral relationships in forest policy-making, Forest Policy and Economics, 2 (3–4), 319–332) that ‘critical subsectors’ or subsets of actors within a subsystem which control whether or not fundamental change occurs. Evidence from recent developments in the Asian financial sector is put forward supporting the argument that the uneven structuration and non-reciprocal nature of the relationships existing between components of a policy subsystem explain that policy’s propensity for change and stability. The discussion moves the general analysis of policy change, policy subsystems and their role in policy change forward from the existing orthodoxy of ‘dynamics with change’ and provides the foundation for a new research programme analysing intra-sectoral policy dynamics in an empirically robust manner.

Book - Chapter Ten Reconsidering policy our agenda revisted

Reconsidering Policy: Complexity, Governance and the State, Policy Press , 2020

Analysis of public policy is a daunting task. The esteemed Canadian writer Richard Simeon acknowledged this some decades ago when he rejected the emphasis on narrow analytical policy skills (Simeon, 1976), and instead called for a broad analytic approach that is ‘holistic and contextually situated’ (Skogstad and White, 2017 p 666). However over the last forty years, policy approaches have fractured and scattered rather than become holistic and integrated, with theorists attempting to make sense of this variety by identifying strands or families of theory, or proposing models for, or thematic approaches to, theoretical synthesis (Ayres and Marsh, 2013). Some are driven into narrow areas of specialisation where they build sub-fields that, in our view, lose efficacy and relevance for complex problem solving insofar as they neglect broader political and systemic contexts. However, not all policy analysis is concerned to assist with problem solving and improved policy, as we are in this book, nor concerned with our focus on the governance of wicked problems, crisis responses, and the building of more resilient, effective policy contexts.