Policy change

Policy problems are complex. So what?

/ inlogov / 1 Comment

Koen Bartels, Selen Ercan and John Boswell

Image: Robert Couse-Baker

There is no denying that we live in complex times, featuring a global pandemic, climate change, and structural inequality. Complex problems are often incredibly difficult to address. Policy makers, practitioners and scholars have known this for a long time. In 1973, Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber introduced the term ‘wicked problems’ to describe problems that were so complicated and ambiguous that those involved could not even agree on what the problem exactly was, and how a good solution would look like. Twenty years later, Jan Kooiman argued that the governance systems in place to address these complex problems are equally complex.

Yes, policy problems are complex. So what?

We are not asking this question out of apathy. Instead, we want to find out what it actually means to call policy problems ‘complex’. What difference does it make to those involved to call a problem complex? How do they make sense of complexity and deal with it? In what ways can we understand and study complexity? And is it possible to somehow solve complex problems? These were the kind of questions we addressed during this year’s section ‘Navigating Complexity in Policy and Politics: Prospects and Challenges’, which we co-convened at the annual ECPR conference 2021.

Panels explored complex problems in different policy areas and contexts including ecological sustainability, criminal justice and urban transformations. We have learnt, for example, how Roma migrant women navigate and reorganise their everyday lives when their husbands ‘disappear’ to jail, leaving them in a tremendous state of uncertainty posed by highly discriminatory criminal justice system. Another panel speaker revealed the practical consequences of the complex child protection system in Chile: this system led to tragic policy failures that destroyed or even ended children’s lives. Several presentations explained how governance systems ‘locked in’ the status quo continued to frustrate policies and efforts to promote sustainability.

This year’s section also featured a roundtable on Nicole Curato’s recent book Democracy in Times of Misery. We had the opportunity to ask Curato questions about her ethnographic work in the Philippines, and the ways she uses normative political theory to make sense of the emerging democratic practices in the aftermath of natural disasters. As we heard from Curato and other contributors of the roundtable, one key challenge for democracy we identified is to listen to the ‘unspeakable tragedies’ taking place in the world and celebrate the ‘humble victories’ through which citizens reclaim public space.

What emerges as an important avenue for better understanding complexity both from the panel discussions and the roundtable on Curato’s book is the need to focus more on the everyday lives of ordinary citizens. Shifting the focus from the trade-offs policy makers face when dealing with complex policy problems to the ways citizens experience complexity can offer novel ways of comprehending and addressing complexity. One of the panel speakers explored how citizens make sense of austerity and the ways this influences their political views. Another panel speaker explained how a focus on people’s experiences of the area in which they live can help understand how to best give shape to economic development policies, such as the UK government’s Levelling Up agenda.

Similarly, a focus on the everyday practices of policy makers can cast new light on how they deal with complexity. One panel speaker for instance explained why they publicly remain proponents of collaboration to deal with ‘wicked problems’, despite their privately held ‘wicked thoughts’ about the frustrations and limitations they experience in practice. If you must know, they do it to get access to other actors, build alliances, infiltrate networks, or channel conflict. So, by acknowledging the complexity of policy problems, policy makers can justify inaction or reinforce the status quo.

Methodological innovations, such as ‘Trajectory-Based Qualitative Comparative Analysis’, can help to trace the complexity of urban transformations. While action research can help to foster joint learning about how to work with, rather than control or resolve complexity. One participant wrote in her paper: “We are drowning in the ocean of theories and case studies of water governance, but why does it not match up with the successful implementation of those goals?” There is an important role here for policy analysts to foster learning and change in collaboration with stakeholders. In fact, many presentations demonstrated significant (untapped) potential for helping to harness the complex problems they identified.

We might even say that, like the weather, many participants were talking about complexity but not doing anything with it. Nearly everyone evoked the notion ‘wicked problems’ to frame their research, but relatively few actually used looked at the world in terms of complexity. Complexity theory is one of the major innovations of the past decades in the Social Sciences and has also gotten a foothold in the field of Public Policy. It views the world in terms of complexity that cannot be controlled or known objectively. Like the flight patterns of a flock of birds, the world is unpredictable and emergent. We need to accept this and make sense of the ‘complex adaptive systems’ that take shape (and are constantly changing) in interaction between webs of interdependent actors. This, again, asks for stakeholders to engage in ongoing learning and adaptation as they collaboratively confront the complex problems they face in everyday practice.

Koen Bartels is Associate Professor at INLOGOV and Co-Convener of the ECPR Standing Group Theoretical Perspectives in Policy Analysis

Selen Ercan is Associate Professor at the Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis at the University of Canberra, and Co-Convener of the ECPR Standing Group Theoretical Perspectives in Policy Analysis

John Boswell is Associate Professor at the Centre for Citizenship, Globalisation and Governance, University of Southampton and Co-Convener of the ECPR Standing Group Theoretical Perspectives in Policy Analysis

Decarbonising Transport: How Can we Work Together to Make an Impact?

/ inlogov / Leave a comment

Dr Louise Reardon

With the COP26 climate change conference only days away, the media is awash with pieces on the challenge we face and the policy options available (or not) for us to meet our net-zero commitments. One of the areas needing significant attention is transport.

Transport contributed 28% of total domestic Green House Gas emissions in 2018, making it the UK’s largest emitting sector. To date the sector is proving a tough nut to crack, with transport emissions 4% higher now than they were in 2013 and only 3% lower than in 1990. To be on track we need an annual rate of emissions reduction of at least 6%. We therefore need bold and significant action.

While electric vehicles have been the primary focus of central government attention and are an important part of the policy mix, many experts have highlighted how they alone will not be enough to achieve the sustainable transition we need. We also require significant behaviour change (shifting from car use to walking and cycling for example) and less travel full stop.

Easier said than done. Our current CREDS research is identifying the multitude of different ways organisations are (and can) work together to decarbonise transport at the city level and their views on the barriers and opportunities for affecting change. Some of the issues arising are cultural (the car as a status symbol for example), some are institutional (lack of capacity to focus on decarbonisation, for instance), and others political (will the electorate support this?).

Whatever the issues, no two towns and cities will have the same mixture of challenges, solutions and therefore pathways to a more sustainable transport system. Moreover, the reasons why we travel in the first place (and the means of doing so) are a result of complex intersections of social, economic and political factors. To change this system therefore requires a multitude of coordinated interventions, including action from individuals and a diverse range of institutions all pushing in the same direction.

With that said, it can be hard to know where to start. While the climate change challenge is global, there is real opportunity and need to act locally on transport to make significant progress. While many rightly turn to their local authority for action, it is unrealistic to think they can act alone, especially when many of the changes we need to make may be potentially controversial (at least for some).

To help identify ways forward we will be hosting a webinar (on 11 November) as part of the ESRC’s Festival of Social Science. Two inspirational panellists – Karen Creavin (CEO, The Active Wellbeing Society) and Chris Todd (Director, Transport Action Network) – will join us. Both of whom, in their different ways, have sought to transform our transport system to a more sustainable and fair one and have plenty of insights to share.

The session will be interactive, aiming to get a real conversation going about the strategies we can employ to make sustainable transport a reality. It’s free to attend and we’d love to hear your views and insights. You can register here. Do join us!

Louise Reardon is Associate Professor of Governance and Public Policy at INLOGOV and currently leading the CREDS funded project Facilitating Policy Change towards Low-Carbon Mobility, in collaboration with INLOGOV Lecturer Timea Nochta and Li Wan, University of Cambridge. You can also follow Louise on Twitter @LouiseReardon1

Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris and me

/ inlogov / 1 Comment

Chris Game

If only Birmingham weren’t in Tier 3 … I could prop up bars in city centre pubs, casually conversing with fascinated fellow-drinkers: “You know that Kamala Harris, the American Vice-President-elect – yeah, the one wearing the Elvis-style white trouser ‘power suit’ for her victory speech.

“Well, I was a professorial contemporary of her Dad, Donald, at California’s prestigious Stanford University, don’t you know?  Thanks, mine’s another Plum Porter.”

Sadly, with Plum Porter purveyors currently closed, I’m driven to search for alternative captive audiences.  However, in contrast to bits of the current series of The Crown, this boast, while it may not ‘ring true’, actually IS true.  Before coming to INLOGOV in 1979 my employers for the previous five years were indeed Stanford – the posh, private, but definitely prestigious university north-westish of Silicon Valley.  

At least, that was Kamala’s Dad’s main workplace – I said ‘contemporary’ not ‘colleague’!  Mine was Stanford’s British Studies Center – note the spelling – at the also posh but less sunshiny Cliveden House on a National Trust estate near Maidenhead, where some hundred or so American students would come to spend two or three semesters of their undergrad years.

And the ‘Professor’ bit?  Well, as everyone knows, almost all US university academics have that generic title. ‘Full’ Professors are the real deal, while my Cliveden colleagues and I were ‘academic personnel’ – but on envelopes from HQ ‘Assistant Professors’.

It’s been mildly disquieting to see some UK universities going down the ‘Assistant Professor’ route – Warwick, for instance – but I’m not in the least bitter. I just regret not saving at least a few of those envelopes, because in four subsequent Birmingham decades I never managed even that.

Jamaican-born former economics Professor Donald Harris is/was at the distant other end of the scale: an Emeritus Professor since retiring early from Stanford after an exceptionally distinguished career and numerous international academic awards.

Here’s the thing, though.  Harris joined Stanford in 1972, yet in my creepily retained 600-page 1974/5 Stanford University Bulletin we Clivedenites and our taught courses all get several individual mentions, yet Donald not one.  Which, for apparently “the first Black person to receive tenure in Stanford’s economics department”, seemed rather odd.

Still, it provides a link to his elder daughter’s string of ‘firsts’ that actually prompted this blog: the first major personal career choice made by the first woman, first African American, and first Asian-American US Vice-President-elect.  California-born – for those, like President Trump, still questioning her Presidential eligibility; and her name, incidentally, pronounced not at all like ‘Pamela’, but ‘Comma-lah’ – from the Sanscrit for lotus flower.

Which is also relevant, because Kamala’s parents divorced when she was just seven, meaning she and her sister, Maya, were brought up largely by their Indian-born mother, Shyamala Gopalan – a bio-medical scientist, whose career in breast cancer research was every bit as outstanding as her husband’s, but who in 2009 would die of cancer herself.

It was her mother’s acceptance of a research post at McGill University Hospital in French-speaking Montreal that chiefly determined that Kamala went first to a French-speaking elementary school.  Then her mother moved the family again, so Kamala could attend Westmount High School, Quebec’s only public school offering so-called Advanced Placement courses for potentially university/college credit.

That university/college choice in by now the early 1980s, though, was definitely Kamala’s. After several majority-white schools, and her parents working in eminent but predominantly white institutions, she sought a wholly different experience. Young, gifted and black, she would live, learn, socialise, and at times protest against South African apartheid, with black students in a black university in a black city.

She would therefore attend one of the hundred or so HBCUs – Historically Black Colleges and Universities – and arguably the most renowned: Howard University in Washington DC, the African American community’s ‘Chocolate City’. And a short subway ride to both her current Capitol Hill workplace in the Senate and her future one in the White House. Back then it was no part of any life plan, but it can serve as a useful putdown today to those who accuse her of being ‘not really black’ or ‘not black enough’.

In the early 1970s Stanford University – students and staff – was unmistakeably Californian and white.  But I remember quite early learning of and being fascinated by the whole HBCU concept – partly because of the then still relatively recent appointment of Thurgood Marshall as the first African American Supreme Court judge.

The HBCU initialism itself – not technically an acronym – is comparatively recent, a product of the historic 1964 Civil Rights and 1965 Higher Education Acts. But the Black Colleges themselves date back in some cases 170+ years to before the Civil War and abolition of slavery.

Even following abolition, certainly in the Southern states, there was a century of institutionalised racial segregation of housing, medical care, employment, transportation and, of course, education.  And even universities and colleges that didn’t completely bar African Americans usually applied tight quotas, with all the other manifestations of discrimination.

One of those barred was future Justice Thurgood Marshall. He had applied to the University of Maryland Law School and been rejected through its segregation policy effectively banning blacks studying with whites.  He therefore attended and graduated with distinction from, yes, Howard University Law School – and later successfully sued Maryland for its discriminatory admissions policy.

Quite a role model, had Kamala been looking for one at the time – just as she surely will be to this and future generations of aspiring university students, female and male.

 

A version of this article appeared in The Birmingham Post on 26th November 2020.

Photo

Chris Game is an INLOGOV Associate, and Visiting Professor at Kwansei Gakuin University, Osaka, Japan.  He is joint-author (with Professor David Wilson) of the successive editions of Local Government in the United Kingdom, and a regular columnist for The Birmingham Post.

What Interpretive Policy Analysis can do for you!

/ inlogov / Leave a comment

Dr Koen Bartels

What do Covid-19, salmon fishing, post-earthquake resilience, the circular economy, and internet blackout have to do with each other? They were among the wide variety of issues addressed at the virtual event ‘Interpretive Approaches to Policy Studies: Developments, Challenges and Ways Forward’ that I recently co-organised with several colleagues from the Interpretive Policy Analysis (IPA) community.

To many people, IPA is, as one newcomer mentioned at the event, a nice beer. But to me and my colleagues, it is a well-established and compelling way of doing research. In the 1970s, a number of policy scholars began to question the dominant way of analysing policy. Inspired by recent advances in social theory, they pointed out that ‘facts’ cannot settle policy controversies, while language was not just used to represent policy issues but to shape them along the lines of particular values, interests and agendas. Since then, IPA has developed and spread so extensively that a large repertoire of interpretive methods is now available that suits analysis of every possible policy issue. There is also a dedicated journal, several academic networks, significant conference activity across the world, and a huge collection of publications indicating that the field has come of age.

The event aimed to bring together the wide variety of interpretive approaches to policy studies to take stock of the development of the field, celebrate its achievements, examine its challenges, and propose ways of moving forward. Far from a self-congratulatory exercise, we did so to identify ways to approach the pressing policy issues of our time, such as climate change, continuing discrimination of women, hostility towards refugees and migrants, and rising global economic and health inequalities. In this context, panel discussions examined:

  • how we can better understand and address policy conflict,
  • what it means to be critical of policy,
  • how to analyse policy discourses,
  • in which ways we can approach ‘malign’ policies, and
  • how action research can make IPA more transformative. 

A common thread in these discussions was that interpretive approaches reveal the underlying problems and unintended consequences of policies and identify innovative ways of addressing these. Policies are inevitably understood in different ways, ways which are bound to conflict and come with significant differences in power, values and interests. If we are unaware of this diversity in interpretations, and its impact, we are bound to get stuck or do more damage than good. As Heidrun Åm of the Norwegian University of Science & Technology aptly put it in her paper, “we need an interpretive approach that is sensitive to meaning making …, multiplicity and struggles over ideas …, seeking to understand and explain the practical bearings of specific meanings expressed and mobilized”.

So, what can IPA do for you? Let me return to the examples I offered at the start to illustrate. By critically analysing current Covid-19 policy discourse in the UK, it can predict that health inequalities will arise from the underlying behavioural ‘nudge’ approach. By revealing how what is constituted as ‘common’ or ‘public’, it can explain why big companies have managed to prevent an ecologically sustainable system for salmon fishing in Norway from taking hold. By identifying and integrating different ‘theories of change’ together with stakeholders, it can mobilise shared reflection, responsibility and future visions for community resilience in post-earthquake areas in Italy. By problematising ‘circular economy’ policy, it can foretell that economic interests will take precedence over environmental sustainability in Victoria (Australia). And by analysing how new technologies are mobilised by those in power, it can expose how an internet blackout was used in the armed conflict in Myanmar.

There are many other examples I could give you. But I hope that I have illustrated the significant value of IPA for critically analysing the complex policy issues of our age. And I invite you to join us as we move forward with addressing these, together finding answers to some of the pressing conceptual, methodological and practical questions that we now face: How can we go beyond thinking of policy conflict as an escalation that needs to be resolved by creating consensus? How can we critically reconstruct policies to address ‘meta-changes’? And how should we conceptualise and inspire transformative policy change?

Koen Bartels is Senior Lecturer at INLOGOV and Co-Convener of the ECPR Standing Group Theoretical Perspectives in Policy Analysis