Activism and the Policy Process

Anna Yeatman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367717377
• eBook ISBN: 9781000248425
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Activists - protecting rainforests, demanding increased childcare, developing local community housing, campaigning for AIDS funding or protecting consumers - are as much part of the political landscape as the media, parliament, peak industry groups, political parties or trade unions. This collection explores the idea of policy activism and its relationship to the processes that not only set but implement and deliver the policy agenda.

Policy activists operate both inside and outside government. They include community-based organisers, activist bureaucrats, service providers and professionals.

Policy activism has been barely explored in existing literature. This collection puts the idea on the map. It is an innovative contribution to the literature, using case studies across a broad range of policy areas.

'This volume opens the window on an aspect of the policy process that rarely receives attention from students of politics or policy anywhere across the globe. The framework presented and the cases included in these pages provide a glimpse of the workings of a complex democracy, describing a range of actors responding creatively to the dynamics of social, political and economic change. It is fascinating to see how policy functions and social values appear to be more important to these processes than the formal structures of the government in which they are placed.' - Beryl A. Radin, Professor of Public Administration and Policy, State University of New York at Albany

1 Activism and the policy process

ANNA YEATMAN

Activism and the policy process

This chapter is concerned with the particular kind of activism which comes into being when policy is understood to involve not only the decisions of policy makers and their directions to others for implementation but also to be a complex process which involves a host of different kinds of actors who are engaged in different stages of the policy process. These stages are: setting the policy agenda, policy development, policy formulation, policy implementation, policy delivery, policy evaluation and policy monitoring. The relationship of these stages to one another is more complex than that of a linear-circular sequence of feedback loops as it is often conceived. These stages can overlap in time and in ways which preclude any neat systemic view of the whole feedback loop.

Policy does not have to be viewed as a complex policy process. The alternative conception of policy is one that sees policy in terms of the policy decisions that are made by the executive government of the day. In the Westminster system, this refers to decisions made by Cabinet. The idea is that an executive government will equip itself so as to be able to make good decisions, and that it uses whatever mechanisms are needed to ensure that these decisions are carried out by those charged with doing this. This model of policy is not just a decisionistic one (see Majone 1991) but an executive one. The focus is on the quality of executive decision-making rather than on the talent, wisdom, skills and vision of all those who are affected by policy and which could be tracked into a more participative approach to policy. Emphasis on an executive conception of policy must privilege what is actually often only a relatively minor, though important, stage of policy-making: deciding what policy direction to adopt. When it is believed that sound policy emanates from strong executive leadership, this is an elitist conception of policy that must privilege the moment of policy-making that seems to exemplify strong leadership: decision-making.

The executive conception of policy is not one that can legitimately excite policy activism except of the kind which is oriented to changing the composition of the executive, either in individual membership or the nature of the party which is in power. However, when policy is conceived as a complex, multi-layered process involving a whole host of different actors, policy activism of various kinds is provoked into being. Thus, there is a phenomenological point to be made here. Policy activism is more or less legitimate, and more or less developed, depending on whether the government of the day favours an executive approach to policy or a participative approach to policy which turns it into a policy process. When the executive model is the one adopted by the government of the day, policy activism is less legitimate and developed even though policy activists of various kinds may resist the executive model. When the participative approach is favoured by the government of the day, policy activism becomes both more legitimate and developed.

For the conception of policy as a policy process to be possible, the work of state administration has to be conceived democratically. What this means is that paternalistic and top-down conceptions of state administration have to be replaced by conceptions which require state administration to be open to public accountability and to public-participation. When state administration becomes democratised in this way, the work of turning policy into operational practice can become visible both in its complexity and its dependency on the agency of those who are involved in this work. These agents include:

1. The public servants who are responsible for turning general policy directions into operational policy, plus those who are responsible for turning this operational policy into programme management, and those who co-ordinate the relationships between programme management and the non-government organisations on which government depends for the delivery of policy.
2. The different kinds of service provider who are responsible for delivering policy on the ground.
3. The users, both potential and actual, of policy.
4. All those who give evaluative feedback on the policy process whether these be professional evaluators, ordinary citizens, organised lobby groups or political party organisations.
5. Ombudsmen, administrative lawyers, and sometimes the wider judiciary, who determine whether principles of justice, due process and equity have been adequately responded to within particular instances of the policy process.
6. A number of agencies charged with monitoring and auditing the policy process—these include the Commonwealth and State Auditor-Generals.

The increasing subjection of social life to policy

The areas of social life which are subject to 'policy' have grown extraordinarily over the last two or three centuries. The development of the modern 'interventionist state' extends the scope of conventionalised phenomena, that is phenomena which are understood to be subject to the artful intervention of policy. For a phenomenon to become subject to policy intervention means that it is brought into the domain of political action where it is reconstructed in relation to contesting narratives about who we are as citizens, what it is we think we should do, and why (my debt to Weber 1948, and Arendt 1958, here is evident).

Social life becomes subject to policy to the degree that it is denaturalised, that is, no longer left to the implicit direction of customary practice. In all societies, social actors think about what they are doing and why. In many societies, the grounds of this reflection does not implicate 'policy' but, rather, refers to a body of customary law and practice which requires to be interpreted by those who are seen as closest to its divine source (elders, a priestly caste etc.). Policy occurs when social actors think about what they are doing and why in relation to different and alternative possible futures. To consider different possible futures means that social actors arrogate to themselves the power of determining their own fate. This is a project which requires them either as individuals or collectivities to weigh alternative courses of action in relation both to explicit statements of value or purpose and to consideration of the consequences of following one course of action rather than another. It also requires the collectivities to enter into dispute and contestation regarding alternative and contrary views of their shared future.

The state can be seen (Durkheim 1965) as the organised centre of social life. It is the sphere of action in which a society names itself to itself. This is why Durkheim was able to take law as the index of social solidarity. Law names and thereby constitutes particular ways of instituting social relationships, status and obligations. This constitutive role of the state (see also Franzway, Court and Connell 1989, p. 52) is expressed not only in how the state names social phenomena but in how it proceeds to regulate them and to subject them to policy. Viewed in this way, the history of the state is coterminous with the history of the subjection of social life to policy. The interventionist state, thus, is as old as the emergence of the modern state in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the constitutional and absolutist monarchical regimes of Western and Middle Europe.

There are quite different types of policy regime which constitute the history of the state. For instance a patriarchal-absolutist monarchical state enjoins a different type of policy regime from that of a patriarchal-liberal democratic constitutional state, or that of a post-patriarchal and post-colonial liberal democratic constitutional state. In each case, how the culture of policy-making operates and who is constituted as being appropriately participant in, and/or influential with regard to, policy-making, varies. In addition, each type of policy regime has its own distinctive type of administration. From a topdown perspective, the business of administering, or as it has come to be called, managing, the state is the business of turning policy directives or decisions into authoritative operational guidelines, instructions and regulations for the conduct of all those (including a host of non-state organisations) which come under the jurisdiction of the state. This business extends also to the monitoring of the impact of the state's programmatic action on the conduct of those who are affected by it.

The issue of the democratic accountability of the administrative state and its impact on how policy is conceived

Policy, then, is inseparable trom the state, and both the state and policy are dependent upon the apparatus of state administration or management. In a liberal democratic state-society, the question arises as to how the policy regime as the work of this administrative state is to be accountable to those whom government is meant to represent. As the work of the administrative state became, in the era after the Second World War, both more extensive and more complex, this question became a pressing one. There have been two responses to this question which work in different directions and, together, provide for a serious degree of incoherence in contemporary ideas of democratic accountability. The first response would have the elected executive level of government ('the government of the day' or, simply, GOD), with the assistance of its most senior officials, design and institute a series of controls over those who manage the work of the administrative state, including all the non-government agencies to whom the work of the state is contracted. These controls are intended to reduce the degree of slippage which occurs between the various stages of formulating and implementing a particular policy decision. This is the executive model of policy referred to above.

The second response to the problem of democratic accountability for the administrative state is to make the work of this state more open to the observation and participation of those who deliver and use its services and who are subject to its regulation. Where the first response is control-oriented and top-down in character, the second response is collaborative and bottom-up in character. The second response works in terms of metaphors of partnership and co-production. The policy process is seen as needing the input of all those who contribute to making it happen.

Different kinds of partnership and co-productive relationships are indicated at different levels. For example, policy development may need a partnership approach which involves senior government officials working with community-based groups and non-government providers to identify what needs to be done, and what kind of response to this need makes most sense. However, a different kind of partnership approach is indicated at the point of policy delivery when, for example, a domiciliary care physiotherapist makes a home visit to an individual whose bed needs adjustment for her to be more comfortable, to be as mobile as she can be, and to permit ease of her transfer from bed to wheelchair. In this instance, the physiotherapist may need to talk with someone from the domiciliary care workshop in dialogue and consultation with the client and her carer to undertake the problem-solving that will bring about an outcome that the client, carer and the professional find to be satisfactory or good enough. The partnership here may be four-way, and the outcome of the problem-solving process is one which depends on co-production.

The two responses to the problem of accountability of the administrative state are, then, respectively the executive model and the partnership model. To the extent that these two models coexist, they do so as an unexamined incoherence of the policy regime (what the left hand is doing is independent of what the right hand is doing). There is a current attempt to force coherence where control-oriented models of performance management, using performance targets, measures and monitoring, are synthesised with market-oriented models of competition for clients. Here, the service user or client does not get to participate in the policy process. Rather, the policy regime presents as a given to the citizen and instead, he or she is invited to 'choose' which particular service he or she wishes to use.

The difference between policy (the policy process) and politics (the political process)

The policy process is related to what is called 'politics' and 'the political process', but these also need to be kept distinct. As before, the policy process refers pre-eminently to the work of developing, formulating, implementing, delivering, monitoring and evaluating policy. To be sure, all of these aspects of policy—policy formulation, policy implementation and policy evaluation—are subject to politics. More accurately, they invite their own distinctive type of politics. This politics is one internal to the policy process and is shaped by it.

While the policy process intersects with official politics and the political process, they are not the same thing. Politics and the political process refer to the organised public theatre and private backrooms of party political contestation over governmental power and its distribution. When a Senate Estimates Committee, for example, calls be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Tables
• Introduction
• 1 Activism and the policy process
• 2 Policy from the margins: reshaping the Australian Broadcasting Corporation
• 3 Development of professional competencies—a case study in the complexities of corporatist policy implementation
• 4 Children's services and policy activism
• 5 The art of insider activism: policy activism and the governance of health
• 6 Community activism in the health policy process: the case of the Consumers' Health Forum of Australia, 1987-96
• 7 Discourse analysis and policy activism: readings and rewritings of Australian university research policy
• 8 Pink conspiracies: Australia's gay communities and national HIV/AIDS policies, 1983-96
• 9 Policy activism, community housing and urban renewal: Bowden-Brompton 1972-96
• 10 Activists in the woodwork: policy activism and the housing reform movement in New South Wales
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index