I’ve been reflecting further over the past year on the present existential threats to democracy and how they relate to fundamental tensions. In ‘Towards a new civic bureaucrcay’, I explored the single issue of how public bureuacracy has been shaped to move from a guarantor of equal treatment before the law and a potential agent […]
The last two months I spent in Europe increasingly gave a feeling of an end of a democratic era. This is the era of representative social democracy which followed the second world war, survived counterculture movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s and emerged as a broad neo-liberal consensus from the 1990s (with the […]
I’ve been working on a paper for the upcoming European Consortium for Policital Research annual conference in which I link changing views of public administration with thinking about sustainable development governance and I find myself reflecting on the continuing legacy of Max Weber’s description of bureaucracy. There are many things to appreciate in his early […]
So, the UK Prime Minister has announced that civil service numbers should drop by nearly 20% over the next three years (a reduction of 91,000). This would return them to the 2016 level of peak austerity cuts (and the lowest since World War II), a level achieved before the implications of Brexit and, to a […]
‘The task of democracy is forever that of creation of a freer and more human experience in which all share and to which all contribute.’ – John Dewey, The public and its problems (1927) I was kindly invited to participate in a graduate seminar this morning at CU Denver School of Public Affairs, given as […]
I’ve just completed a co-edited Special Issue of Sustainability on the theme of troubled times. You can view it here. When Susan Baker and I started on the task in 2019/2020, the troubled times we envisaged were government austerity policies (which had so refocused governance and reduced public sector capacity) and the rise of right […]
The idea of New Public Management which was adopted almost worldwide from the 1990s – and which still casts its shadow today – saw the problem of public administration as one of efficiency and long-term affordability. If only services could be provided more cheaply and quicker, then all would be well. For the right, the […]
Our current structuring of public bureaucracy (and arguably private sector bureaucracy too) is based in a 19th and early 20th century industrial model of how the world works. It divides the responsibilities and functions of governance into separate tasks, with their own goals and hierarchies. It seeks a managed, rational approach to delivery which is […]
In the late 2000s, I attended a public policy seminar in Edinburgh exploring issues of public sector delivery. I had come to present the Welsh experience of forging collective common purpose between the Welsh Government Housing Department, the social housing sector, tenant interests and local government. It became clear early on in the event that […]
Is knowledge-power dead in our new populist world? Are we perhaps moving to a world of ‘Ignorance-Power’? Or is there a scope for constructive dialogue? Knowledge-power is a term coined by Michel Foucault for the way in which public bureaucracy or professions can exercise power through the choice and exercise of disciplinary or technical knowledge. […]