Essays extolling the need for governments to get âconnectedâ, lateral, vertical and all that kind of stuff â the need to find new models to engage stakeholders and to break down the silos of departments â are not usually my cup of tea. My problem with them is that as commonsensical as these ideas sound, they are frequently pretty superficial. And they donât show much awareness of the reasons for why one would arrange things in silos in the first place. (Those reasons would include trying to create manageable lines of accountability.) Budgeting is the same kind of exercise â an exercise in self constraint which doesnât make sense until you understand it in the context of building lines of accountability in a boundedly rational and knowledgeable world.

In any event I was impressed when I read this conclusion to a volume recently published by Demos by Tom Bentley. Itâs not that it proposes anything new, but I think the way it discusses the issues is mature and insightful. Iâve also become more and more convinced of the need for governments to develop much greater levels of responsiveness to their evolving environment.

The world is increasingly complex and it seems to me that there are two responses to this. A right of centre âfree marketâ approach takes the view that governments growing increasingly complex is an inherently bad thing. Governments should stick to their knitting â which is providing frameworks of law and basic public goods like defence. The problems with this approach are firstly, that the world is becoming more complex and so governments being embedded within our society and economy are drawn into that complexity. For instance if they want to engage in large financial transactions which they pretty much have to, they will need to master their complexity. Secondly and likewise, as the market becomes more complex it becomes more complex to regulate it. The corresponding kind of approach to regulation involved in this mind set is âminimum effective regulationâ in which governments do the least they need to achieve their objectives. The problem is that commonsensical as it sounds, no government in the Western world has managed to tame the inexorably growing complexity of regulation with the policy of minimum effective regulation.

The alternative â which might loosely be regarded as left of centre â is the pathway set out here where governments make themselves more responsive to their environment and the various stakeholders. Where they try to develop broader, looser ways of collaborating. The problem is always how to do so in a manner that improves regulation and service delivery (rather than makes it worse â not necessarily an easy thing) And one must do so further constrained by the need to do so consistently with being accountable to the public interest rather than private interests.

Anyway, I enjoyed the essay and asked Tom if I could post it here, which he agreed to and â which Iâve done over the fold.

Continue reading →