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ABSTRACT
Complexity poses challenges to policy makers who intervene in the world. Interconnectedness, a key aspect of complexity, requires that policy makers acknowledge the compounded nature of policy problems in their design of a robust, differentiated policy. Deliberative Policy Analysis recommends small group deliberation to address interconnectedness. However, higher-order phenomena that emerge through interactions in a complex system have properties that cannot be reconstructed from lower-order phenomena by simple extrapolation. They go beyond interpersonal relations in that they involve aggregate phenomena, such as laws, organizations, and institutions. To harness this kind of administrative interconnectedness requires an ability to intervene intelligently in these aggregate entities through institutional design. Our aim in this article is threefold. First, we describe a remarkably successful historical case of integrated governance: housing policy during the 15-year period after WW1 known as “Red Vienna”. Our purpose is to demonstrate that policymaking that is commensurate with interconnectedness is possible in real-world circumstances, even unpromising ones. Our second objective is counterfactual. We will show that the officials of Red Vienna de facto engaged in a particular form of institutional design that we call “design-in-practice”. Third, we will claim that design-in-practice is a foundational tool in the methodological armory of DPA.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Hendrik Wagenaar is a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna, senior academic advisor to the International School for Government at King's College London and Adjunct Professor at the Institute of Governance and Policy Analysis at the University of Canberra. He publishes in the areas of participatory democracy, interpretive policy analysis, (prostitution) policy and practice theory. He is author of Meaning in Action: Interpretation and Dialogue in Policy Analysis (Routledge, 2011), and Deliberative Policy Analysis (Cambridge University Press, 2003, with M. Hajer) In the area of prostitution policy he published Designing Prostitution Policy: Intention and Reality in Regulating the Sex Trade (with Helga Amesberger and Sietske Altink, Policy Press, 2017). He is the author of several award-winning articles on practice theory and citizen participation. His current research centres on civic enterprises and the creation of urban commons. He lives in Vienna, Austria.
Florian Wenninger, PhD, heads the Historical Institute of the Vienna Chamber of Labour. In addition to the history of democracy and dictatorship, his research focuses on the history of the labour movement and the relationship between the police and the population from a historical perspective. Several of his works and publications are devoted to the Austrian interwar period and the conflicts between social democracy and political Catholicism. Wenninger is editor of the journal “Zeitgeschichte” and lecturer at the University of Vienna.
Notes
1 These are the well-known nonlinear effects. Complex systems are not necessarily unstable. Through the mechanism of so-called attractor states, systems my exhibit considerable stability or homeostasis. However, such an equilibrium is nevertheless dynamic (the underlying interactions are always at work) and the system may suddenly “flip” into a wholly new state. The propensity of climate systems to undergo such phase transitions after a particular critical threshold value has been reached, is a case in point.
2 The emphasis here is on “purposeful”. Clearly, human intervention regularly results in system-wide effects. Climate change is an obvious example. But these are the negative unintended consequences of unreflective human action. One reason is that agents are often not aware of the different interacting systems they are part of (Szerszynski Citation2018).
3 Lowndes and Roberts convey a similar insight when they observe:
This insouciance to the possibility of design (within the political science literature. HW&FW) can be attributed to a broader tendency to deal with the coarse grain of institutions and broad span of history at the state level, rather than at the fine level of detail required to consider the process of design. (Citation2013, 175)
4 This is an unusual combination in the policy literature. To make a persuasive argument for institutional “design-as-practice” we needed to go beyond the conventional trope of a bit of explanatory theory illustrated by a brief, carefully stylized case. The nature of the argument therefore required the collaboration of a policy scholar (HW) and a historian (FW). The necessary historical detail also explains the greater length of the article.
5 This is evidenced among others by the city's consistently attaining the no 1 spot in global quality of living rankings. (https://www.mercer.com/newsroom/2019-quality-of-living-survey.html, accessed May 29, 2019).
6 https://www.smartertogether.at/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/2017-02-Beitrag_Wiener-Wohnbau_BDB-Jahrbuch-2017.pdf (accessed March 22, 2019).
7 It is common in the literature to label the political ideology of the Social-Democrats as Austromarxism. (Leser Citation1968; Butterwegge Citation1991; Öhner Citation2019). In our understanding, such an interpretation is misleading. First, it imparts to the Social-Democratic vision a coherence and concordance among its adherents that it simply didn't have at the time. Öhner (Citation2019) for example distinguishes at least three different conceptions of Austromarxism. Second, Austromarxism was widely used by political opponents of Vienna's Social-Democratic administration as a term of opprobrium; somewhat similar to the use of the term “socialism” by the contemporary Right to denounce mild social-reformist measures in health, housing and climate change. Similar to today's political situation, this rhetorical discrediting of the Social-Democrat's vision for Vienna obscures the fact that its actual measures were widely accepted by the general population.
8 The term “navigational aid” was suggested to me by Noam Cook (personal communication).
9 “There is always a process of problem setting and solving, which can be evaluated in terms of its adequacy to the emerging intentions, values and interests of the designers and other stakeholders in the design, and by reference to features in design discovered through design inquiry.” (Schön and Rein Citation1994, 173)
10 This is a popular term in circles of Marxist historians to “explain” the achievements of Red Vienna. Admitting that there was no Marxist masterplan, by having the general public experience the kind of social achievements that socialism would attain if capitalism were successfully abolished, the Marxist-inspired city officials would secure the loyalty of the working class for the next phase of the socialist transformation of society (Maderthaner Citation2019, 24).
11 With startling contemporary echoes, throughout his 11-year reign as finance alderman, Breitner's political opponents decried his tax policy as “tax bolshevism” that “strangulated” the economy. Breitner's finance policy was in fact quite conservative and based on principles of city “autarchy” and balancing the city's budget (Eigner Citation2019).
12 It's difficult to calculate the contemporary equivalent of these numbers. Depending on the method of calculation 11 Schillings is between €15 and €75; 22.770 Schilling between €34.310 and €161.676 (https://www.historicalstatistics.org/Currencyconverter.html. Accessed on 24/06/2019).
13 To illustrate the extent to which the characteristic architectural style of Red Vienna was the result of pragmatic decision making under conditions of constraint, the architectural historian Eve Blau comments: “That (the architectural form of Red Vienna) was a long process that was characterized by different experiments and practices. … The reason was that the Social-Democrats had lots of ideological and political but no architectural ideas.” (Blau, Heindl, and Platzer Citation2019, 158). She continues to explain that initially housing construction followed the model of the, spontaneous, settler movements at the periphery of the city, a movement that was actively supported by famous architects such as Adolf Loos. Only when the city obtained a budget for housing development and realized that it could not expand beyond its 1883 limits, did it change course. Blau thinks that the “superblocks” were inspired by Otto Wagner's designs for city planning. Many of the architects of Red Vienna were students of Wagner. Their characteristic, almost “romantic” form language, using bricks as the basic building material instead of steel and concrete, was also dictated by the historical presence of large brick factories in the city and the securing of employment for its workers (op. cit. 162).
14 Another measure of such identity-building was art. As still can be seen today, the municipality of Vienna had pictures, sculptures, ceramics and mosaics attached to the facades of every municipal building and public housing project. Public art served various purposes in Red Vienna. It was an opportunity to promote contemporary art, to expand the architectural repertoire of progressive forms of artistic expression, as key element of the city's civic offensive, and it brought art closer to the future residents.
15 A vision also moves pragmatist design-in-practice beyond muddling through. The design conversation is not defensive and not even necessarily incremental, but always guided, implicitly or explicitly, by the values and aspirations of the vision. It therefore transcends “directionless drift” or “reinforcing the status quo”. (Ansell Citation2011, 37).