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Demos Quarterly Issue 7/1995 Demos Quarterly is published by Demos 9 Bridewell Place London EC4V 6AP Tel: 0171 353 4479 Fax: 0171 353 4481 e-mail [email protected] URL http://www.cityscape.co.uk/users/t;22/ © Demos 1995 All rights reserved Editorial team: Perri 6 Tom Bentley Rebecca Stanley Ben Jupp Joanna Wade Ivan Briscoe Design and Art Direction: Esterson Lackersteen Special thanks to: Helen Norman Steve Way Printed in Great Britain by EG Bond Ltd Open access. Some rights reserved. As the publisher of this work, Demos has an open access policy which enables anyone to access our content electronically without charge. We want to encourage the circulation of our work as widely as possible without affecting the ownership of the copyright, which remains with the copyright holder. 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To find out more about Creative Commons licences go to www.creativecommons.org Contents OVERVIEWS Governing by cultures 1 Perri 6 Seven maxims on the future of government 27 Geoff Mulgan Suspicious minds: public distrust of government 37 Simon Atkinson The limits of government 49 Sir Roger Douglas States of inertia: are governments slaves to history? 55 Richard Rose How government makes community 71 Steven Rathgeb Smith GLOBALISATION Global watch: retooling governments 79 Derry Ormond and Daniel Blume The paradox of power: globalisation and national 93 government David Goldblatt Public services on the world markets 99 Helen Margetts and Patrick Dunleavy Demos 7/1995 SERVICES More to learn from business 109 James Woudhuysen Back to direct government? 127 Diana Leat Close encounters of the digital kind 139 William Heath TOOLKIT Riding tandem: the case for co-governance 145 Jan Kooiman and Martijn van Vliet Regulation: an owner’s manual 153 Matthew Bishop Ethos in government: the ideas of Norman Strauss 163 Geoff Mulgan The grey and the good: government ethics around the world 167 Ben Jupp Governing by numbers 175 Tom Bentley and Rebecca Stanley REGULARS Vital statistics 185 Rebecca Stanley and Tom Bentley Graphic government 195 Governing forms 199 Ruling ideas: books about government 201 Signs of the times 213 Media watch 215 Demos projects 219 iv Demos Missionary government Over the last 15 Years, governments around the world have been engaged in frenetic reform – focusing on competition and incentives, indicators and new technologies. Often these reforms have sharply improved performance. But in many areas they have now reached the limits of their effectiveness. In part that is because they have failed to understand the complexity and range of human motivations – which financial incentives alone cannot address. In part it is because, as recent experience has shown, govern- ment cannot be effective unless both the public and its own employees genuinely understand and trust in its core ethos. In this collection, we argue that in the next phase of reform govern- ments need to pay far more attention to these questions of culture. For, despite fashionable warnings that governments’ powers are in irre- trievable decline, they can achieve much – but usually only where they are able to influence the cultures of their employees, their beneficiaries and their citizens. For example, it is possible to reduce crime and the fear of crime – but not without public involvement, and not by relying on changing the ‘tariffs’ of crime by manipulating sentencing policy. Education can be improved, but only by improving pupils’ motivations and finding ways to influence parents to invest more time and energy. People can become healthier, but only if top-down programmes are accompanied by changes in lifestyle. The environment can be improved, but only if taxes and regulations are matched by citizens taking responsibility for waste reduction or energy efficiency. Demos v Demos 7/1995 Some politicians understand this, albeit from very different per- spectives. In the USA, both New Gingrich and Bill Clinton have talked about government’s mission to change the cultures of single mothers or the unemployed. Here in Britain Shadow Chancellor Gordon Brown has picked up Francis Fukuyama’s ideas about building a high trust economic culture among firms, and Thatcherism was in impor- tant respects a project to change the cultures of family life, enterprise, bureaucracy and national pride – with success in some fields and fail- ure in others. The next phase of ‘missionary government’ requires us to take their ideas further. It requires us to understand that governments cannot function well without missions to influence cultures. In this Demos Quarterly, we therefore examine precisely what this means. We look at the impact of globalisation and of technology; at the lessons to be learned from business; and at how governments now need to work in partnership with other agencies and other governments. In the past culture was something invoked to explain why policies failed. In the next decade and beyond, it will be both a central goal and a key tool. Recent reformers concentrated on governing by numbers. The challenge today is to learn how to govern by cultures. vi Demos Governing by cultures Perri 6 ‘Economics is the method, but the aim is to change the soul’ (Margaret Thatcher) By the 1990s the British public sector spent over 40% of GDP (more than 4 times as much as it did a century ago) and employed the equivalent of over 4 million full-time staff, again vastly more than a century ago. This vast engine presides over many areas of life, from policing to families, money to water quality. Yet, when asked about its role, most people still think of managing the economy, control of exchange rates and interest rates, government borrowing and levels of taxation. The big debates about government in the twentieth century – ‘How big should government be, as a proportion of national wealth? By how much should it abridge liberty?’ – have all been conducted under the assump- tion that the overriding goals were to increase national economic wealth and welfare. By contrast, until at the earliest the nineteenth century, the tools of government that fascinated politicians, commentators and many citi- zens were those that enhanced the capacity of the nation state in war and imperial aggrandisement. Then as now, the big debates – the national siege economy and later the imperial preference versus free Perri 6 is Research Director at Demos. Demos 1 Demos 7/1995 trade, the costs of maintaining a global naval and military capacity – were about alternative means of achieving national power. From the perspective of the twenty first century, the economistic view of government’s powers in the twentieth century may come to seem as obsolete as the military and imperial view of earlier centuries. We may come to see the role of government in far broader ways, and to see the narrowness of the current and largely economistic conven- tional wisdom, which holds that the global integration of markets has drastically diminished the power of governments and blunted the tools at its disposal. Government is most effective when is has a clear mission. The mis- sion of governments at least in western Europe and north America in the twenty first century must be to facilite the development of high trust of self-organisation. Its service provision and regulation, its own culture and its size should be derived from that mission. Size isn’t everything For two centuries, the debate about government that has fired the great- est passion has been the one about how big it should be as a proportion of all economic activity. Directly related have been the question about how many services it should provide and which should be left for private action. These questions are still at the heart of the concerns of Libertarian Right politicians like Newt Gingrich in the USA1 and Alan Duncan in Britain,2 and of thinkers on the traditional Social Democratic Left like J. Kenneth Galbraith in the USA3 or even moderate centre Left politicians like Frank Field in Britain.4 These competing visions and claims for radical re-sizing will remain part of political debate. Yet it has become clear in the wake of the collapse of communism, the meltdown of the ‘Swedish model’ and the collapse of the 1981–3 Mitterand experiment on the one hand, and the chronic failures of the US to sustain both an effective and affordable system of either state education or private health care or even law and order, that size isn’t everything.