Beyond better borders? Policy dilemmas of transnational security threats TIM LEGRAND National Security College, Crawford School Of Public Policy The Australian National University Canberra, 0200 Email: [email protected]

Abstract The growth of transnational security threats has eroded policy officials’ capacity to deliver local policy outcomes without substantial international collaboration. This paper looks at the evolving and diffuse threats posed by international terrorism and contemporary concerns around ‘foreign fighters'. Drawing attention to the proliferation of transgovernmental policy networks amongst countries, the paper argues that the advent of transnational security threats has prompted governments to further diminish democratic scrutiny by establishing exclusive and opaque security policy networks under the rubric of national security. Here I consider the implications of this trend for public administration scholarship and the attendant challenges of resolving this global-local dilemma.

Introduction The paradigm of Australian national security has never seemed more fragile nor less calibrated to tackle the transnational threats of terrorism. Fears of radicalization, ‘foreign fighters’ and violent extremism have driven the Commonwealth to adopt security laws of increasing severity in an attempt to counter the corrosive effects of such non–traditional threats to the polity, economy and society. These laws and the Commonwealth’s overarching policies have manifested in considerable scholarly attention to the outcomes of security policy; the ‘exceptionalisation’ of security laws (Agamben 2005), the impact on privacy (Lynch et al, 2007), the erosion of civil liberties (Hocking, 2003), the questionable oversight of security agencies and, indeed, the uncertain efficacy of security laws and policies (Lum et al, 2008; Legrand et al, 2015). Yet while these efforts focus on the outcomes of national security legislation, Public Administration scholars have yet to seriously interrogate the inputs to security policy (Ripberger, 2011; Eller and Gerber, 2010) or, the focus of this paper, uncover the opaque role of international alliances and policy learning in influencing how ‘national security’ is constructed by domestic officials.

1 This paper engages directly with the effects of these complex and overlapping trends on Australian security policy. To do so, it interrogates the role of security policy networks in the development of domestic security policy and laws generally, and recent laws pertaining to so-called foreign fighter laws specifically. The paper begins by considering the changing nature of the domestic/international socio-economic landscape, arguing that the architecture of Anglosphere states have been (i) reconfigured by transnational forces, and (ii) drawn together by the era of new public management. The paper then addresses three established Anglosphere security policy networks in the context on the literature on transgovernmentalism. It claims that these networks, by virtue of their informality and exclusivity, are opaque and increasingly immune to democratic scrutiny.

TRANSNATIONAL DYNAMICS OF AUSTRALIAN SECURITY Two trends in the domestic and international spheres underpin the growing tension in Australia’s security paradigm. The first trend concerns the fragmentation of global security governance. Prompted by the demise of the Soviet Union as a ‘unifying threat’ to western democracies (Krahman, 2003), today’s international security environment is marked by a complex multipolarity of state powers. Despite the establishment of international institutions, treaties and powers, global security governance suffers from a fundamental shortfall in resources and political cohesion to meet emergent transnational non-state security challenges (Held and Young, 2013). In particular, the rise of ‘non–traditional’ threats of terrorist organisations, cyber–attackers and criminal organisations (Lesser, et al., 1999) is seen to have bankrupted the state–centric balance of power and created a ‘New Collective Insecurity’ (Maclean, et al. (2013).

Against this backdrop of weakening global governance, Australia’s long-standing transnational alliances in the Anglosphere have become increasingly salient. Though long-associated with the political right, the notion of the Anglosphere is ‘at the heart of a re-emerging political world-view’ (Kenny and Pearce, 2015), sustained by a ‘special bond’ between the Anglo–Saxon countries of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK and US (Bennett, 2007; Vucetic, 2011). These states share deep historical and cultural ties and trusted cross–national institutional relations that have manifested in the past twenty years in an increased propensity to collaborate through transgovernmental policy networks (Legrand 2015) and, importantly, maintain security collaboration in the long–standing Anglosphere intelligence network: the ‘’ community. Yet, little is known about how such international security alliances comport with the norms, settings and outcomes of Australian security policy and practices (Walsh and Miller, 2015).

2 A second trend concerns domestic changes to and within the nation state. The putative shift from government to governance in the 1990s transformed how public ‘goods’ were defined and delivered (Rhodes, 2007) in an era of diminishing and disaggregating state capacity, especially among Anglosphere states (Common, 1998; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011). Yet the Public Administration discipline has yet to generate critical insights into how these shifts affected the nature and scope of security policy–making (Raadschelders, 2011). This neglect is a major concern, since there are signs that security policy institutions have bucked the disaggregation trend, instead aggregating, centralising and ‘securitizing’ policy-making (i.e. Buzan & Wæver, 1998). It is thus observed that Australian governments ‘have few if any expectations that Parliament has a part to play in national security policy and practice’ (Uhr, 2004). This weakening scrutiny of security policy and laws is regarded as a serious problem of democratic legitimacy across the Anglosphere (i.e. Legrand & Jarvis, 2014; Neal, 2012), especially given the increased propensity of government officials to collaborate in exclusive security networks, the subject of this paper. Such changes in the processes of public administration are manifestly important. The enterprise of contemporary public administrators is to act in the public interest. Yet they operate in an uneven, fragmented and complex policy environment in which policy officials contest political outcomes alongside corporate actors, non-government organizations, thinktanks and civil society action groups. Against this uncertain backdrop, this paper asks how modern public administration can meet the challenges posed by transnational threats.

Transnationalism and the weakening of state autonomy Authors concerned with the forces of globalization have raised important questions of whether the ‘the state’ is made redundant, diminished, emasculated or merely transformed by surging global markets and emboldened corporate actors. The globalization debate of the 1990s was framed as head-to-head collision between the beleaguered state on the one hand, and out-of-control global economic forces on the other. A wave of globalization theorists sought to make sense of the upsurge of economic, social and political interaction that seemed to define a new epoch. Those championing the virtues of a qualitatively new form of globalization vaunted the benefits rendered by a bullish new breed of multi-national companies that had ‘carved out entirely new channels for themselves’ (Ōmae, 1995, p.2), making redundant the inefficient nation-state’s role as a regulator. Others were more apprehensive and foresaw a moral peril in the declining capacity of the nation-state to rein-in private enterprises that were ‘more powerful than the state to whom ultimate political authority over society and the economy was supposed to belong’ (Strange, 1996, p.4; see also Falk, 1999). For others, perhaps most notably David Held and Anthony McGrew (1998), today’s patterns of international interdependence and interaction can rather be construed as regionalization, rather than

3 as globalization, and an extension of forms of international interaction that have existed since the birth of the state. In contrast to scholars envisioning a weakened nation-state battening down the hatches to weather the maelstroms of increasingly powerful global forces, Held argues that the state has been transformed: ‘Far from globalization leading to the ‘end of the state’, he claims, ‘it is stimulating a range of government and governance strategies and, in some fundamental respects, a more activist state’ (2000, p.395). At the same time, and often linked to or exacerbated by ‘globalization’, we are witnessing a rising tide of transnational security threats that require concerted response by more than one state actor. The challenges posed by climate change and environmental pollution, economic instability, international terrorism and organized crime, pandemics and asylum seekers, amongst others, transcend sovereign borders to the extent that meaningful policy measures require multi-lateral action. These issues are often entrenched and difficult to define, let alone manage, in what is sometimes referred to as ‘wicked policy problems’ in the public policy literature (see Ferlie et al, 2011, p.329).

Challenges from below: emergent network governance For public administration scholars, the disaggregation of the state is by now a familiar refrain. The pressures of globalization, the gradual transfer of sovereignty to international institutions, and the now-defunct reforms of new public management (NPM) are contributors to governments’ diminished capacity to exert central control over the design and delivery of policy outcomes. These changes to the state have been witnessed across a raft of states and notably associated with the new public management reforms introduced by the neoliberal administrations of Ronald Reagan in the U.S. and Margaret Thatcher in the U.K. For this New Right cohort the state had become a costly and sluggish leviathan, inefficient in the delivery of public goods and services. The reforms of NPM were intended to reshape the state in the image of unfettered markets: performance management was introduced to pep-up the productivity of public servants, and ‘state monopoly’ public services were sold into the competitive market-place of the private sector where, it was hoped, the public would reap the benefits of cheaper, better services. State sectors that could not be easily excised were radically restructured to promote arms-length management of public service delivery through target-setting. There is an energetic literature in public administration exploring the ramifications of the NPM era, but here I would draw attention to two aspects to emerge from this scholarship; (i) the disaggregation of the state and the rise of policy networks; and (ii) the preponderance of Anglosphere states leading the way in NPM.

4 First, the net effect of NPM was to disaggregate the state further and lend greater power to the diffuse set of policy networks that had always been a feature of British politics and, to a lesser extent, those of its Anglosphere counterparts. Rhodes argues that while NPM was intended to bring an end to policy networks, the powerful shots of marketization and managerialism injected into the state had unintended consequences:

They fragmented the systems for delivering public services and created pressures for organizations to cooperate with one another to deliver services. In other words, and paradoxically, marketization multiplied the networks it was supposed to replace (Rhodes, 2007, p.1245).

On this perspective of the disaggregated state, policy networks now play a central role in the growth of new modes of administering and delivering public goods, while the capacity of the core executive to steer policy outcomes is reduced. The emergent patterns of ‘governance’ refers to an emergent interdependence of state and non-state institutions, which includes state, private and civil society organizations, in which policy outcomes are generated through networks. The constituent policy networks are populated by members who negotiate policy aims and share resources. These policy networks have game-like rules which shape the interaction of network members. Crucially, they are seen to have a significant level of autonomy from the state, which can only ‘indirectly and imperfectly steer networks’ (Rhodes, 1997, p.53; Rhodes, 2007). For Rhodes, these policy networks are predicated on relationships: ‘Shared values and norms are the glue which holds the complex set of relationships together; trust is essential for cooperative behaviour and, therefore, the existence of the network’ (2007, p. 1246). Second, while the disaggregation of the state may well affect a broad range of states globally, NPM induced a series of structural changes that are largely distinctive to Anglosphere states. As Common finds: ‘it appears that this particular global “revolution” in the public sector is in fact confined to a small handful of English-speaking countries, notably the UK, USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand’ (Hood, 1991; Common, 1998; Krahmann, 2003; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011, p.12; Rosta–Miklos, 2011). Though the extent of NPM reforms have sparked considerable debate, there is consensus that the core tenets of marketization, managerialism and measurement took hold in these states during the 1980s and early 1990s and manifested in a series of distinctive structural outcomes to the architecture of public administration:

As elsewhere in the Anglosphere, organizational and managerial reform was widespread, with considerable change in executive, legislative and managerial structures and practices.

5 The influence of the NPM is evident in the goal-centred and information-based approaches, including program budgeting, ‘management by objectives’, management information systems (Dollery Garcea and LeSage, 2008, p.13)

Together these changes in the architecture of the state under the auspices of NPM reforms engendered qualitatively new patterns of governing praxis in Anglosphere states. Crucially, the reforms resulted in a series of governing artefacts common especially to Anglosphere states, including arms-length management; agencification; target-setting and public-private partnerships. This lends support to the idea, developed further below, that while Anglosphere countries may not be significantly different to any other state facing the tide of global forces, they operate under a series of common and recent state idiosyncrasies. Just as the tide of NPM reforms had begun to take effect in Anglosphere countries, policy-makers from Anglosphere governments began to establish exclusive, elite policy networks (see Table 1 below).

Network Name Portfolio Windsor Arrangement Group Social Security Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, UK, US Six Nations Benefit Fraud Social Security Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, Conference Payments UK, US International Heads of Child Child Support Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK, US Support Agency Meeting Five Country Conference Immigration Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK, US The Technical Cooperation Intelligence and Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK, US Program (AKA: The Five Eyes) Security International Quintet Meeting Attorneys-General Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK, US Food Safety Quadrilateral Group Food Safety Australia, Canada, New Zealand, US Standards Five Nations Consular Colloque: Consulates Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK, US Shared services Four Countries Conference Electoral Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK Agencies Vancouver Group Intellectual Australia, Canada, UK Property Tri-Treasury Conference Treasury Australia, New Zealand, UK unknown name International Australia, Canada, UK, US Development The Rev-Sec Group Tax revenue Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK, US collection

6 Network Name Portfolio unknown name National Statistic Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK, US Agencies

The growth of these networks over the past twenty years has reached almost every agency of Anglosphere governments.

TABLE 2 : NETWORK CHARACTERISTICS

Governing Anglosphere security threats The governance of Australian security is becoming radically transformed in both its domestic and international dimensions. Since 2001, a spectrum of non-traditional transnational threats, including terrorist organisations, cyber-attackers and organized crime has proliferated, spurring successive Australian governments to list all three as national security threats and increase the national security budget from $17b in 2001 to a projected $42b in 2017; introduce more than sixty new anti-terrorism laws; designate twenty terrorist organisations; and substantially reconfigure civil liberties. Despite these efforts, a recent national survey has found Australians see ‘terrorism, security and war’ as the second greatest problem affecting the country, after the economy (Monash/Scanlon, Oct 2014).

The capacity of the Australian government to unilaterally guard against threats is weakening. Security agencies are struggling to contain the rapid growth online of radicalizing discourses, which spur individuals to undertake attacks on Australia, or to fight alongside Islamic State in Syria/Levant, Al-Shabaab in Somalia, or Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsular. Australia’s economic prosperity is also threatened by: maritime piracy in south-east Asia waters affecting Australian trade; a rapid escalation in number and sophistication of cyber-attacks on government and commercial infrastructure; and transnational organized crime. In addition to the billions of dollars spent combating them, these emergent threats continue to unsettle Australian society. Transnational terrorism undermines public safety and social cohesion, and piracy, crime and cyber-attacks disrupt economic activity; meanwhile, such itinerant groups weaken already fragile states and their vulnerable populations. These threats confound orthodox unilateral security measures and have curtailed policy officials’ capacity to deliver local policy outcomes without substantial international collaboration.

To tackle these transnational threats, Australian officials have increasingly turned to collaboration with trusted alliance partners. Specifically, my recent research (Legrand, 2015) reports that since

7 2002 Australian domestic agencies with counterparts in Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom and United States (hereafter, the ‘Anglosphere’) have established three powerful collaborative Security Networks, mandated to tackle transnational terrorist, cyber and organised crime threats to their individual and collective interests. These networks remain opaque, under-researched and yet critical to a complete understanding of Australia’s national security paradigm.

Security Network 1: Law And Cyber–Crime Primary Network: ‘The Quintet of Attorneys–General’ Secondary Network: ‘Strategic Alliance Group’ & ‘Strategic Alliance Cyber Crime Working Group’ Participating Institutions: Departments/Offices of Attorneys–General Policy collaboration: e.g., Foreign fighters returning from the conflict zones in Iraq and Syria; ‘Organised Crime Strategic Framework’; freedom of expression laws; cybercrime collective strategy; intelligence sharing on organised crime; Joint capacity building initiatives; Plea bargaining in Quintet prosecutions Security Network 2: Immigration, Borders & Asylum Primary Network: ‘The Five Country Conference’ (FCC) Secondary Network: ‘The Border Five’ Participating institutions: Immigration & Border agencies: Policy collaboration: Automated matching of non–FCC citizens’ biometric data, citizenship, asylum Working groups: Five Country Citizenship Conference; Data Sharing Working Group (Biometrics); Sub–networks: FCC Resettlement Network; FCC Returns and Repatriation Network; FCC Training & Change Security Network 3: Domestic Violent Extremism Primary Network: ‘The Five Country Ministerial’ Secondary Network: ‘The Critical Five’ Participating institutions: Home Affairs/Homeland Security/Critical Infrastructure Policy collaboration: Collective national security interests; Countering violent extremism; radicalisation; terrorist use of the internet; information–sharing on travellers; intelligence–sharing on foreign investors; cyber threat to critical infrastructure; child online sexual exploitation ‘Critical 5’ collaboration: Critical infrastructure protection; and developing ‘shared narratives’ of security. TABLE 3: ANGLOSPHERE SECURITY POLICY NETWORKS

INSERT: Discussion on security policy outcomes, viz. foreign fighters

TRANSGOVERNMENTALISM A rich vein of International Relations research has been dedicated to understanding the complex linkages between the state and the host of international actors, including but not limited to international institutions, concerned with the development of international regulatory structures that induce changes to global structures and fundamentally influence the governing architecture of the state itself. These might exist separately from the state or be partly constituted by states. On the former, Slaughter (2002) points to the powerful influence of Basle Committee on Banking Supervision, populated by representatives of the world’s major banks, and the International 8 Organization of Securities Commissioners, which operates as ‘the global standard setter or the securities sector’. These are unorthodox organizations in the sense that they are not composed of states or established by treaties, have no legal basis and, indeed, are without a bricks-and-mortar offices or stationery. Nevertheless, their influence on the shape and nature of the international financial sector is profound, and being non-state bodies are absent of democratic authority. On the latter, Stone (2012) describes a remarkably diverse landscape of policy actors active in global settings who produce, disseminate and endorse policy knowledge in a complex interplay of transnational policy processes. These ‘international policy intermediaries’ include not only international organizations (such as the IMF and World Bank), but also global policy partnerships, framed as international regimes, soft law and private regulatory standards and non-state actors such as think tanks, business groups, academics, philanthropic organizations and NGOs.

Transgovernmental policy networks Addressing the emergence of new spaces of politicking, a distinctive strand of scholarship has emerged exploring arenas of policy decision-making located neither within the state nor in international institutions and, in particular, the vector of transnational collaboration that has carved out a distinct, though ‘not always prominent oeuvre’ on transgovernmentalism (Slaughter and Zaring, 2006, p.211). Focusing on the informal interplay of government actors with international counterpart in self-forged political spaces, the literature on transgovernmentalism has begun to generate conceptual insights into the movement of political power into informal transnational settings. Born from a recognition that the global sphere plays host to a range of actors besides states and international organizations (Slaughter and Zaring, 2006), transgovernmental relations seemed to capture at least some of the politicking not adequately described, much less explained, by international relations or political science authors. The origins of this literature lie in two seminal papers, Transgovernmental Relations and International Organizations and Power and Interdependence, in which Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye offer a critique of the realist conceptualizations of world politics and the role of states as unitary actors playing out their national self-interest. Developing a conceptual position that relies on a disaggregated, rather than unitary, model of the state, they claim that international outcomes cannot be adequately explained without considering the role of growing state interdependence. They contend that emerging patterns of societal international interdependency drive transgovernmental relations, which play out in international organizations that in turn drives policy interdependence (1974, p.61). For Keohane and Nye, the resultant transgovernmental relations are defined as ‘sets of direct interactions among sub-units of different governments that

9 are not controlled or closely guided by the policies of the cabinets or chief executives of those governments’ (Keohane and Nye, 1974, p.43). More recent scholarship on transgovernmentalism has shifted emphasis away from the role of international organizations in transgovernmental networks that had been central to Keohane and Nye’s early work (Eberlein and Newman, 2008, p.27). Anne-Marie Slaughter, writing in A New World Order, points to patterns of transgovernmental policy networks that are closely associated with changes in the make-up of the state. Echoing Rhodes, she contends that ‘Government networks are a technology of governance that are probably both cause and effect of [the disaggregation of the state]’ (Slaughter, 2004, p.31). Against a backdrop of increased interdependence, Slaughter contends that ‘the same officials who are judging, regulating, and legislating domestically are also reaching out to their foreign counterparts to help address the governance problems that arise when national actors and issues spill beyond their borders” (Slaughter, 2004, p.16). The patterns of international networking posited by Slaughter are predicated on ‘an intricate three-dimensional web of links between disaggregated state institutions” (Slaughter, 2004, p.15). These networks of domestic agents operate at an inter-institutional and inter-organizational level:

The defining feature of government networks is that they are composed of government officials and institutions—either national to national, in horizontal networks, or national to supranational, in vertical networks’ (Slaughter, 2004, p.131-2).

Trangovernmental challenges, Democracy and Security Oversight One of the features that provokes the most concern amongst transgovernmental scholars is the absence of transparency and oversight associated with these networks. The informality of network interaction, which strengthens levels of trusted interaction, operates outside of orthodox government protocols of recording formal interaction, communication and outcomes. Since the networks operate informally, with non-binding agreements preferred, it is rare that the outcomes of meetings are made publically accessible. In any mode of public policy, this militates against fundamental norms of transparency and accountability. Yet, the accountability concern is amplified in the scope of security policy. In parliamentary democracies, security policy is widely regarded as the ‘natural’ prerogative of the Executive (Uhr 2012; Neal, 2012), yet legislatures are ‘almost completely neglected analytically’ by security scholars (Neal, 2012, p.262) in spite of growing fears of security actors ‘over-reaching’ into civil society to the detriment of long-standing civil liberties. ‘Copenhagen School’ scholars have drawn attention to the manner in which the ‘national security’ paradigm is gradually encroaching on non-security policy issues by framing security as ‘a special kind of

10 politics or as above politics’ (p.214; Wæver). On this view, ‘security’ has a political and discursive force: is not merely a status, but it is an act (Buzan, p.214). Thus, we see policy issues drawn into the security nexus, such as (im)migration (Finnane; Ceyhan & Tsoukala, 2002); education (Gearon, 2012); the environment (Trombetta, 2011); religion (Vuori, 2011); and health (Sjöstedt, 2011). The policy themes addressed by the Anglosphere security networks echo these concerns. Themes of citizenship, radicalization and counter-terrorism, for example, are subsumed by the issue of foreign fighters. Announcing the new legislation to deprive foreign fighters of their citizenship, the Prime Minister, Tony Abbott; the Attorney-General George Brandis; and the Immigration Minister, Peter Dutton.

Figure 1: (L to R) Peter Dutton, Tony Abbot, George Brandis.

The Implications for Public Administration These developments echo long-standing fears of political scientists who have warned against the emergence of a ‘garrison state’ in which the incoherence of the concept of ‘national security’ (Wolfers 1952) was used to trump freedom and liberal values (Lasswell, 1941). The premise of international organisations is that nations cooperate to resolve issues of common (usually cross- national) interest (Keohane, 1984).

In this context, the establishment of opaque transgovernmental security networks developments provokes significant normative concerns for democratic legitimacy. The lack of serious legislative scrutiny to security legislation is cause for concern across Anglosphere scholars (i.e. Neal, 2012; Rempel, 2004) and amongst Australian political science scholars, who observe that ‘governments have few if any expectations that Parliament has a part to play in national security policy and

11 practice” (Uhr, 2004). The strategy, policy life-cycle, and delivery mechanisms of security agencies are subject to far fewer scrutiny mechanisms than other policy domains (Uhr, 2012). The funding and resources of security programs defies austerity measures; agencies are rarely subject to reviews of their effectiveness, though the effectiveness of many programs has been doubted (Mueller and Stewart; Lum et al). It is therefore a growing concern amongst critical theorists, notably Carl Schmitt and Georgio Agambian (2005), that security politics has become stymied by ‘the state of exception’: this is the notion advanced by that constructions of security threats enable forms of extraordinary politics that are immune to liberal democracy’s checks and balances. Yet there has been no serious public administration challenge to this issue.

CONCLUSION: Policy networks and the return to the public interest. In 1955 Walter Lippmann suggested that the public interest is ‘what men [sic] would choose if they saw clearly, thought rationally, acted disinterestedly and benevolently’ (1955). Yet, sixty years later, the relationship between the state and the public has changed radically. Justifying calls for anti-terrorism laws, policy officials invoke the ‘public interest’ or perhaps more commonly, ‘the national interest’ (herein I prefer the former term). These are terms that are rarely, if ever, defined by public officials for whom, it seems, invoking the greater good is a self-evident basis of policymaking. Yet, as with all of politics, how the public interest is understood is a matter of perspective. Leslie Pal and Judith Maxwell (2004) have identified at least five perspectives on how the public interest can be understood: (i) as a process in which the public interest emerges from inclusive, fair, free and transparent deliberations; (ii) the majority opinion, formed by a ‘reasonably significant’ majority of the public; (iii) a utilitarian ‘balance’ of competing interests, arrived at through compromise; (iv) a common interests approach derived from social goods required by all, such as water, clean air, healthy economy, security, and so on; and (v) a set of ‘shared values or normative principles’. These perspectives can be pursued simultaneously via any number of institutions in liberal democracy: parliament, the courts, the executive, regulatory agencies, and so on. In recent years, public administration scholars concerned with the form and function of contemporary network governance have tended to prefer the language of ‘public value management’ (Stoker) rather than public interest. For these scholars, the central concern is to determine who defines and how the public interest is defined, rather than any universal values that might constitute it. In PVM, the public interest is manifested via Pal and Maxwell’s procedural public interest perspective:

Individual and public preferences produced through a complex process of interaction that involves deliberative reflection over inputs and opportunity costs. Individual and public

12 preferences produced through a complex process of interaction that involves deliberative reflection over inputs and opportunity costs (Stoker et al, 2006, p.44)

Yet the determination of the public interest in the context of security policy decision-making is far more challenging. Networks, not individual or population preferences, generate a plurality of public interests as a variable output of deliberations that occur across networks. Viewed through the PVM lens, the fragmentation of the state militates against utilitarian or ‘majority opinion’ conceptions of a public interest: many public interests supplant a singular interest settlement. In some ways this is a welcome relief to those public administration scholars who were unsure if the ‘holy grail’ of determining a public interest was ever a feasible goal. The array of interests that constitute society might be better served by a nimble, responsive state that is no longer wedded to arcane interests and values. Yet our optimism may be premature. Governance by and through networks is not a panacea to the complex challenges of public administration. Though we might be broadly welcoming of any development in government that achieves progress towards determining the best interests of the public; it is clear that the aggregating trend in security policy renders this goal almost impossible. Security policy displays centralising tendencies; is hostile to scrutiny, even by legislatures and courts; excludes non-government actors. Moreover, the effects of these trends is compounded by the emergence of transgovernmental policy networks; these reduce further the opportunities for scrutiny and transparency and, by virtue of their existence, raise significant questions of whether collaboration is always in the interests of the constituencies represented by government.

REFS INSERT

13