What does the attempted impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas say to us about the health of one of the core principles of US governance – the separation of powers ? Separation of powers is a founding concept of US civics. The idea goes back to 18th century French political philosopher Montesquieu’s book ‘The […]
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Citizenship: a key to better democracy?
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 […]
My book is now available to purchase in a paperback edition from Policy Press. It costs GBP 26.99 and USD 45.95 and you can receive a 25% discount when you register on the Press website. https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/towards-a-new-civic-bureaucracy?currencyCode=GBP
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Launch seminar video now available
The recording of the hybrid seminar on the book, held last month at Institute for Government in London, is now available here, together with my slide set, or below. Huge thanks to the sponsors Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development (especially to Peter Davies, Andrea Westall and John Lotherington) for their initiative in developing the […]
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 […]
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The limitations of Weberian bureaucracy
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 […]
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John Dewey on the struggle of democracy
‘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 […]
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Launch day again!
Towards a New Civic Bureaucrcay is published in North and South America today (29 March). Copies are available from the publisher here. You can also find it as an epub on a number of websites and as a hard copy through retailers. If your academic library hasn’t ordered it yet, do drop them an email!
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 […]