Transformational Public Policy

Transformational Public Policy
Author: Mark Matthews
Publisher: Routledge Studies in Governance and Public Policy
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2018-06-28
Genre: Administrative agencies
ISBN: 9781138317871

Transformational Public Policy examines how governments can more effectively handle uncertainty and risk in an uncertain and changing world. Unpredictable and changing circumstances often bring nasty surprises that can increase waste in governance and public debt. This book illustrates how new methods derived from signal processing techniques can improve the practice of public policy by transforming it through rapid learning and adaptation. Interventions are processes of discovery, not compliance. Transformational Public Policy shows readers how the power of hypothesis testing in governance can be deployed. The book argues that public policy can be framed as tests of competing hypotheses subject to diagnostic errors. The aim is to learn how to reduce these diagnostic errors through cumulative experience. This approach can reduce the impact of negative unintended consequences -- a topic of great interest to policy makers and academics alike.

Transforming Public Services by Design

Transforming Public Services by Design
Author: Sabine Junginger
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2016-12-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1317007875

For policy makers and policy implementers, design challenges abound. Every design challenge presents an opportunity for change and transformation. To get from policy intent to policy outcome, however, is not a straightforward journey. It involves people and services as much as it involves policies and organizations. Of all organizations, perhaps government agencies are perceived to be the least likely to change. They are embedded in enormous bureaucratic structures that have grown over decades, if not centuries. In effect, many people have given up hope that such an institution can ever change its ways of doing business. And yet, from a human-centered design perspective, they present a fabulous challenge. Designed by people for people, they have a mandate to be citizen-centered, but they often fall short of this goal. If human-centered design can make a difference in this organizational context, it is likely to have an equal or greater impact on an organization that shows more flexibility; for example, one that is smaller in size and less entangled in legal or political frameworks. Transforming Public Services by Design offers a human-centered design perspective on policies, organizations and services. Three design projects by large-scale government agencies illustrate the implications for organizations and the people involved in designing public services: the Tax Forms Simplification Project by the Internal Revenue Service (1978-1983), the Domestic Mail Manual Transformation Project by the United States Postal Service (2001-2005) and the Integrated Tax Design Project by the Australian Tax Office. These case studies offer a unique demonstration of the role of human-centered design in policy context. This book aims to support designers and managers of all backgrounds who want to know more about reorienting policies, organizations and services around people.

Transforming Food and Agricultural Policy

Transforming Food and Agricultural Policy
Author: Carsten Daugbjerg
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2019-12-18
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1351118285

Western democratic welfare states often featured sectoral governance arrangements where governments negotiated policy with sectoral elites, based on shared ideas and exclusive institutional arrangements. Food and agriculture policy is widely considered an extreme case of compartmentalized and ‘exceptionalist’ policy-making, where sector-specific policy ideas and institutions provide privileged access for sectoral interest groups and generate policies that benefit their members. In the last two decades, policy exceptionalism has been under pressure from internationalization of policy-making, increasing interlinkage of policy areas and trends towards self-regulation, liberalization and performance-based policies. This book introduces the concept of ‘post-exceptionalism’ to characterize an incomplete transformation of exceptionalist policies and politics which preserves significant exceptionalist features. Post-exceptional constellations of ideas, institutions, interests and policies can be complementary and stable, or tense and unstable. Food and agriculture policy serves as an example to illustrate an incomplete transformation towards a more open, contested and networked politics. Chapters on agricultural policy-making in the European Union and the United States, the politics of food in Germany and the United Kingdom, transnational organic standard setting and global food security debates demonstrate how ‘postexceptionalism’ helps to understand the co-existence of transformation and path dependency in contemporary public policies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy.

Future Politics

Future Politics
Author: Jamie Susskind
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2018-09-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0192559494

Politics in the Twentieth Century was dominated by a single question: how much of our collective life should be determined by the state, and what should be left to the market and civil society? Now the debate is different: to what extent should our lives be directed and controlled by powerful digital systems - and on what terms? Digital technologies - from artificial intelligence to blockchain, from robotics to virtual reality - are transforming the way we live together. Those who control the most powerful technologies are increasingly able to control the rest of us. As time goes on, these powerful entities - usually big tech firms and the state - will set the limits of our liberty, decreeing what may be done and what is forbidden. Their algorithms will determine vital questions of social justice. In their hands, democracy will flourish or decay. A landmark work of political theory, Future Politics challenges readers to rethink what it means to be free or equal, what it means to have power or property, and what it means for a political system to be just or democratic. In a time of rapid and relentless changes, it is a book about how we can - and must - regain control. Winner of the Estoril Global Issues Distinguished Book Prize.

Successful Public Policy

Successful Public Policy
Author: Joannah Luetjens
Publisher: ANU Press
Total Pages: 551
Release: 2019-04-30
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1760462799

In Australia and New Zealand, many public projects, programs and services perform well. But these cases are consistently underexposed and understudied. We cannot properly ‘see’—let alone recognise and explain—variations in government performance when media, political and academic discourses are saturated with accounts of their shortcomings and failures, but are next to silent on their achievements. Successful Public Policy: Lessons from Australia and New Zealand helps to turn that tide. It aims to reset the agenda for teaching, research and dialogue on public policy performance. This is done through a series of close-up, in-depth and carefully chosen case study accounts of the genesis and evolution of stand-out public policy achievements, across a range of sectors within Australia and New Zealand. Through these accounts, written by experts from both countries, we engage with the conceptual, methodological and theoretical challenges that have plagued extant research seeking to evaluate, explain and design successful public policy. Studies of public policy successes are rare—not just in Australia and New Zealand, but the world over. This book is embedded in a broader project exploring policy successes globally; its companion volume, Great Policy Successes (edited by Paul ‘t Hart and Mallory Compton), is published by Oxford University Press (2019).

Policy Transformation in Canada

Policy Transformation in Canada
Author: Carolyn Hughes Tuohy
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2019-04-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1487519877

Canada's centennial anniversary in 1967 coincided with a period of transformative public policymaking. This period saw the establishment of the modern welfare state, as well as significant growth in the area of cultural diversity, including multiculturalism and bilingualism. Meanwhile, the rising commitment to the protection of individual and collective rights was captured in the project of a "just society." Tracing the past, present, and future of Canadian policymaking, Policy Transformation in Canada examines the country's current and most critical challenges: the renewal of the federation, managing diversity, Canada's relations with Indigenous peoples, the environment, intergenerational equity, global economic integration, and Canada's role in the world. Scrutinizing various public policy issues through the prism of Canada’s sesquicentennial, the contributors consider the transformation of policy and present an accessible portrait of how the Canadian view of policymaking has been reshaped, and where it may be heading in the next fifty years.

The Transformation of Governance

The Transformation of Governance
Author: Donald F. Kettl
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2015-04-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1421416360

An updated edition of the classic text on public administration presents practical steps for managing government effectively in an age of hyperpartisanship. Co-winner of the Louis Brownlow Book Award from the National Academy of Public Administration The traditional theory of public administration is based on entrenched notions of hierarchy and authority. However, as the structure of public work has grown less hierarchical, managers have adopted a wide variety of non-authoritarian strategies. This growing gap between theoretical ideas and actual practice poses enormous challenges for front-line leaders struggling to deal with ever-larger expectations and ever-tighter budgets—and for American government in determining how best to hold public administrators accountable for their performance. The Transformation of Governance offers a new framework for reconciling effective administration with the requirements of democratic government. Instead of thinking in terms of organizational structure and management, Donald F. Kettl suggests, administrators and theorists need to focus on governance, or the links between government and its broader environment—political, social, and administrative—through which social action occurs. In this updated edition, a new epilogue shows Kettl urging political leaders to step back from the political barricades of hyperpartisanship to consider government’s contemporary dilemma: Is there any practical way forward for public administrators to manage government effectively? Reinforcing the ten principles of bridge building which he developed in the original book, Kettl adds an eleventh, which lays out five transformative strategies: redefining public law to promote public accountability; re-conceptualizing government agencies as instruments of leverage; launching government leaders as boundary spanners; using information technology for building authority and trust; and incorporating performance management into processes that drive collaboration. With a new preface from Michael Nelson, editor of the Interpreting American Politics series, this award-winning book will be sought out by public policymakers eager to read a leading scholar's newest insights into the field.

Comparative Public Policy

Comparative Public Policy
Author: Francis Geoffrey Castles
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 376
Release: 1998
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

Castles (political science, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National U.) offers a systematic account of the growth of government and the emergence of the modern welfare state, based on analysis of data covering some 30 years for 21 nations and 12 policy areas. The study examines the ways in which the role of the state has affected labor markets and such personal issues as home ownership, fertility, and divorce. In addition, it addresses such issues as why the trajectory of policy transformation has varied from country to country and throughout time throughout the Western nations. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Policy-Making in a Transformative State

Policy-Making in a Transformative State
Author: M. Evren Tok
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 413
Release: 2016-08-10
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1137466391

This book explores, in a series of detailed case studies, how public policy is actually made in Qatar. While Qatar is a Gulf monarchy, its governance is complex. Other analysts have tried to come to grips with this complexity using qualified descriptions of the system such as 'late rentier,' 'pluralized autocracy,' 'tribal democracy,' or 'soft authoritarian.' The authors of the volume use the lens of a transformative state. Qatar is deliberately engaged in a rapid process of radical economic and societal transformation. That process has its contradictions and tensions, particularly with regards to achieving a balance between Islam, social traditions, and modernity. This book explores how it also has a specific policy dynamic of generating ideas and institutions, developing policy and program designs, implementation and coordination.

Transforming Social Action Into Social Change

Transforming Social Action Into Social Change
Author: Shana Cohen
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2017-05-25
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1351683519

Cohen offers a new framework for analyzing social projects and local social activism. Rather than look at how single projects are designed and managed to evaluate their impact, the approach calls for analyzing fields of social action: policy and politics, institutional behavior, social networks among policymakers and practitioners, and availability of funding and other resources. Combined, they affect the conceptualization of a social problem and the design and practice of social intervention. More broadly, through circumscribing the range of thinking about social problems, they delimit possibilities to generate social change. Analyzing fields also allows for linking macro-level trends in areas like policy to decision-making within individual organizations and the effectiveness of projects at instigating the desired transformation in individual and collective behavior. Working together, policymakers, individual activists, nonprofit organizations, and staff in public institutions like schools and hospitals can critique and alter fields to challenge more effectively social problems. This collaboration, in turn, affects how social policies are designed and, ultimately, the politics of social change.