Metagovernance, political demand and policy advice: a case from Brazil

ABSTRACT

There has been a call for a “second wave” of scholarship on policy advice to expand our understanding of the relational dynamics within a policy advisory system (PAS). In this article, we use a case from Brazil to address two key gaps in the PAS literature – the lack of attention to systems of network governance and the current predominance of “Westminster” empirical cases. To better understand the impact of policy advice within a system of networked governance, we apply the frame of “metagovernance” – the steering of governance networks. We then introduce and employ the concepts of funnelling, political brokering and gate-keeping to better understand how policy advice is shaped, modified and then either rejected or accepted. The contribution of the article is that, while much of the existing PAS literature describes the contours and key actors within an advisory system, we develop new conceptual scaffolding to better understand the trajectories and impact of policy advice, and the interplay between actors and agents, within a broader system of metagovernance.

KEYWORDS:

• Policy advice
• policy advisory system
• network governance
• metagovernance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Victor Albert is an Assistant Professor at the Public Policy Department, School of Political Science, Higher School of Economics, Moscow. His research interests include social movements and participatory democracy, urban planning, housing and environmental policy. He is the author of The Limits to Citizen Power: participatory democracy and the entanglements of the state (Pluto, 2016).

Rob Manwaring is a Senior Lecturer at the College of Business, Government and Law, Flinders University, Adelaide. His research interest include public policy, political parties and social democratic and labour politics. His latest edited volume (with Paul Kennedy) is Why the Left Loses: The Decline of the Centre-left in Comparative Perspective (Policy Press, 2018).

ORCID

Victor Albert http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4356-6162

Rob Manwaring http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3853-9250

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Individual names and names of organizations have been changed to maintain anonymity.