Good Governance as Reflexive Governance: In Praise of Good Colleagueship

Abstract

Whereas the work of Leo Huberts has substantially contributed to the field of public integrity studies, this article argues that a next step is needed that takes a critical and reflexive perspective on (good) public governance systems. In addition, it will be argued that in recent years Leo Huberts is indeed developing such an approach.

Keywords:

• public governance
• reflexive principles
• second-order arrangements
• utopian thinking

PREFACE

Sometimes, when writing an academic paper, scientists have a particular scholar in mind. This may be because the work of this scholar is considered important, special, inspiring. I know social scientists who think of Michel Foucault all the time, irrespective of the subject they are working on.

But it can also be the other way around. Just because you hate the work of Mr X or Mrs Y (and, especially, the credits that he or she received for it), you write a poisonous paper that demonstrates, in subtle academic terms, that we deal with an amateur or even a fraud.

Here I must admit that I once wrote a paper with my dear colleague Leo Huberts in mind. But let me hasten to add that that was not because I had the ambition to challenge his academic work, not at all. Still, it was a critical paper, and there was absolutely a personal dimension to it. Let me explain.

It was at the beginning of my career at the Vrije Universiteit (VU), in 2008. I was hired as a full professor of Public Policy and Governance in the Department of Public Administration, and there was only one other full professor: Leo Huberts, Mister integrity himself. So we became close colleagues and, fortunately, we developed a warm relationship that was open, fair and productive. Yet that did not mean I was a blind supporter of his academic work. Actually, I had mixed feelings. I really appreciated his work on integrity in the public sphere; it was good, in a professional sense, and highly important, especially given the NPM (new public management)-driven trend towards fraudulent representations of ‘public performance’ (e.g., Huberts, Maesschalck, & Jurkiewicz, 2008) Leo’s focus on integrity was timely, precisely because neo-liberal politics had narrowed down the evaluation of public performance to mere ‘output measurement’.

Yet I found that Leo conceived integrity too much as just another public value that could and should be measured (‘efficiency is fine, but don’t forget to measure “integrity,” also very important…’). I reasoned that focusing on integrity—and more broadly, good governance—had to imply much more, namely a fundamental critique of the governing systems of (late-) modern societies. And I thought, if I can convince Leo of this argument, then we will have much more common ground, professionally, but also personally.

And thus I wrote a paper with Leo in mind, hoping that his work, and that of his research group, would adopt a more critical and reflexive approach. I presented the paper at our department but never tried to get it published. Good governance was not my area, at least not in those days, and I forgot about the paper. But here it is, after so many years, although in a highly stripped form, with only the body of the argument, which, in my view, is still relevant. In a new epilogue, I will add some further reflections, focusing mainly on the question: did this paper have any impact on our work at VU and, more importantly, on our colleagueship?

GOOD GOVERNANCE: IN SEARCH OF UTOPIA?

Dimensions of Good Governance

The coining of good governance as a normative ideal for public sector organization aims to combine the result-oriented principles of new public management with moral principles that belong to the heart of liberal democracies, such as participation, justice, equality before the law, accountability and legitimacy (cf. Hajer, van Tatenhove, & Laurent, 2004; Kersbergen & van Waarden, 2001).

At this abstract level, good governance is a promising concept, for it seems able to deal with the three problem areas related to simple output evaluations. First, it entails a much broader perspective on (intended) results, owing to its emphasis on values like (stakeholder) participation and social justice. Bovaird and Löffler (2003, p. 318) even argue that good governance is, in essence, about quality of life improvements and that achievement in this area should count as the intended policy outcomes to be assessed in governance evaluations. Second, good governance is also strongly concerned with public values and their impact on organizational processes. Bovaird (2004, p. 294) argues that many of the following elements, among others, are likely to be important in any given context of public policy implementation: democratic decision-making, citizen and stakeholder engagement, transparency, accountability, social inclusion, fair treatment of citizens, respect for the rule of law, respect for diversity and respect for the rights of others. Consequently, organizational innovations in an implementation must be judged against numerous criteria of value solidity. Finally, accounts of good governance reveal an open eye for environmental complexity and undesired system changes. Bovaird (2004) stresses the importance of sustainability of policies and governance approaches, whereas Parto (2005, p. 6) claims that good governance includes strong leadership in order to ensure ‘a consistent approach within a complex system’ and openness to the possibility of ‘learning and problem reformulation’.

Nonetheless, the other side of the coin of this rich perspective seems the superabundance of things that are considered valuable in the world of public governance. Given the highly normative and rather open character of the concept, people and institutions feel invited to add new elements to an ever-growing list of governance desiderata. This is explainable from the special origin of the concept, as a guiding principle for judging the quality of government in developing countries (cf. Doornbos, 2004). It is not desirable, however, mainly for three reasons. First, it turns good governance into a bran tub of arbitrary preferences largely decoupled from a more analytical perspective on government and governance. Second, long lists of equally important values are hardly manageable in practical evaluations. Finally, from these expanding lists of abstract values, a utopian rather than practical image of (good) governance emerges.

Measuring the Distance to Utopia?

Dutch people not only want their national football team to win all of their games but especially desire this to be done in a superior style, meeting the highest aesthetic demands that apply to the art of soccer. However, as most of the present-day coaches emphasize, winning is already a highly difficult task in modern football; if people insist on Brilliant Orange they have to accept poorer results (cf. Winner, 2000). From this example, two simple lessons follow: (a) accept that losing is part of life and (b) accept that trade-offs between competing values do exist all the time.

Similarities to the art of good governance are plenty. In today’s complex society being effective as a government is highly exceptional. As Renate Mayntz (1993) has argued, the concept of (multi-actor) governance, as opposed to the government, did emerge as a response to rising policy ambitions on the one hand and decreasing effect on the other. We also know that the art of governance is full of value conflicts and ambiguities. Effectiveness may go at the cost of democracy or even integrity, whereas investments in-process quality may propel a (temporal) reduction of performance levels. In itself, this ambiguity is not a problem, but a fact of social life. It does become problematic, though, if we continue to behave like Dutch supporters demanding the best of all worlds. Evaluating governance by measuring the scores on different value dimensions, while ignoring the potential tensions and conflicts between them, is like measuring the distance to Utopia. This is pointless and even dangerous, as it would feed the idea that Utopia can be reached indeed. As several political philosophers have convincingly argued, the major risk involved in utopian political thinking is the implication of ‘totalitarianism’ (cf. Achterhuis, 1998; Gray, 2007; Walzer, 1983). In the course of pursuing a world without evil, entire societies have been destroyed, according to Gray (2007). Hence, what to think of the pursuit of public governance that is perfect in all respects?

The problem is not so much that universalistic principles are being used in order to develop a good governance discourse. Universalism comes from generally accepted humanistic fundamentals, based on existing democratic constitutions and widely ratified declarations of human rights (Bouckaert & van de Walle, 2003, p. 330). What we need, though, is realism with regard to the applicability of principles, given a unique context and time horizon, as well as realism with respect to possible tensions and contradictions between normative principles. Interestingly, recent studies into good governance do acknowledge that abstract values should be decomposed into ‘contextualized’ elements, which fit both the contingencies within a particular field of public service provision and changing economic, social and moral standards (Bovaird & Löffler, 2003, p. 216; Montfort, 2004, p. 45). In other words, scholars begin to stress that spatial and temporal contexts matter and must be taken into account in any sensible assessment.

Yet this suggestion remains largely insufficient unless it goes hand in hand with a thorough account of actual value conflicts in a given setting of public governance. Without the latter, we keep behaving like demanding football supporters urging for both beauty and results. That is, we would resort to a kind of methodological totalitarianism, measuring as many (contextualized) variables as possible while naively assuming that good governance can be symbolized as the addition of numerical scores. It cannot. Unfortunately, however, although several authors stress that value tensions are a fact of life in public governance (Bovens, 2001; Pierre & Peters, 2005), many evaluators stick to the belief that comprehensive quantitative assessments are the way to go. This paper argues that a viable alternative lies in the sociopolitical recognition of two facts, namely that losing is part of the game and that during playtime several values are competing for priority. Consequently, good governance can be defined as developing prudent ways of dealing with these facts. Thus, good governance may involve a deliberate decision to value output over democracy for a certain period of time or to invest in process quality at the cost of productivity, while giving a public account of decisions of this type. To put it in more general terms, good governance involves the installation and functioning of institutional arrangements that deal with imperfection and normative ambiguity. Basically, good governance is reflexive governance.

GOOD GOVERNANCE AS REFLEXIVE (META)GOVERNANCE

From Reflex to Reflection

According to Bovaird and Löffler (2003, p. 316), ‘[T]here are few terms which are as vague in social science and in practice as “governance”’. If so, it does not seem a very good idea to come up with an adjective that is not known for its conceptual clarity. Yet it is precisely for purposes of specifying the governance concept that reflexive governance has received growing scholarly attention in recent years.

Reflexivity can mean lots of things (cf. Lynch, 2000), but here our intention is to see reflexivity as a defining characteristic of modernity, as suggested by Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens. Yet, even then, two rather contrasting definitions stand out. Beck (1986, 1994) argues that reflexivity refers to the permanent stream of side effects produced by human intervention in nature and society. Such interventions (through science, technology or, indeed, public governance) are ‘reflected’ in unforeseen and undesirable outcomes, while the nature of this process is largely ‘reflex-like’; it just seems to happen. Giddens (1990, 1994), on the other hand, argues that reflexivity stands for the increased ability of modern people to reflect on their values, motives and intentions, as well as on the social consequences that may follow from these behavioural drivers. This capacity is characteristic for late modernity, as opposed to simple modernity, according to Giddens. People have become ‘clever people’ capable of reflecting on self-induced problems.

Following Voss and Kemp (2006) and Hendriks and Grin (2007), it can be argued that these two concepts of reflexivity can be understood as first-order and second-order ones. That is, first comes the (naïve) experience of side effects, produced in a reflex-like manner under conditions of simple modernity, then the self-critical reflection on the manufactured nature of these effects. From this angle, the concept of reflexivity helps to further clarify the issues of ‘paradox and surprise’ involved in the new public management paradigm. New public management, although tributary to a sociological language that stresses state failure and increasing societal complexity, reveals a remarkable return to the (simple) modern belief in rational design. As a result, the experience of side effects could not have been less overwhelming, as established in so many studies. These studies help to transform the first-order experience into second-order reflection and may as such contribute to the design of modes of governance ‘that systematically attend to their own epistemological and ontological frameworks and the knowledge framings, tacit assumptions, normative commitments and power relations they embed’ (cf. Miller, 2006: 82).

Reflexive governance in this particular sense is closely related to work in the field of organizational learning and the process that Donald Schön and Martin Rein have labelled ‘frame reflective policy-making’. Schön and Rein (1994) argue against traditional policy conceptions based on sharp distinctions between action and reflection. Especially in cases of intractable policy issues, policymakers and stakeholders who strive for renewed policy action may benefit from a reflexive discourse on their mutual assumptions, beliefs and values. These ideas are linked to deliberative concepts of democracy (cf. Gerstenberg & Sabel, 2002; Hajer, 2003), as well as to theory on so-called reflexive law, emphasizing the self-regulative power of social systems, in contrast to more traditional forms of ‘command and control’ regulation (cf. Teubner, 1993). A substantial part of this literature, however, is concerned with processes rather than with institutional frameworks. The question of how to organize (second-order) ‘reflexivity’ as a core feature of public governance systems is still underexposed.

Institutional Principles

Whereas public governance generally aims at organizing ways to deal with social problems (‘the governance of risks’), this paper argues that the reflexive branch of governance concerns the institutional treatment of the side effects that accompany these efforts (i.e., ‘the risks of governance’). Dealing with likely failure should be at the heart of this reflexive endeavour.

As Bop Jessop (2004, p. 150) points out, ‘Indeed, given the growing structural complexity and opacity of the social world, failure is the most likely outcome of most attempts to govern it…’. Jessop argues that the modern concept of (multi-actor) governance, as it developed as a reaction to the failures of state and market co-ordination, is not necessarily less sensible to failure since it is certainly also a riskier form of co-ordination, involving many stakeholders with a large variety of interests and beliefs. Therefore, good (reflexive) governance is first of all meta-governance, similar to Bouckaert and Halligan’s (2008) notion of governing for performance (see also Meuleman, 2008). Meta-governance concerns ‘the organization of the conditions for governance and involves the judicious mixing of market, hierarchy and networks to achieve the best possible outcomes from the viewpoint of those engaged in meta-governance’ (Jessop, 2004, p. 154). Part of such a project is especially concerned with ‘governing for minimizing the risks of governance’. It is this particular art that is reflexive and most pertinent to the issue of good governance.

Which institutional arrangements and practices are crucial to this art? From our previous discussions, it follows that reflexive governance must adopt a modest and satisficing approach. The starting point is the acceptance of failure and value conflicts. This does not imply an indifferent, anti-rational or relativist attitude towards the quality of public governance; above all, it aims at mobilizing awareness of the dangers of incompleteness, inadequacy and side effects, and of ways to proactively deal with them. Following Jessop (2004), this (philosophical) principle may be labelled ‘public irony’. Irony seems especially relevant to the design dimension of the governance system. Regarding the other dimensions discussed earlier (implementation and environment), this paper presents two more principles that are assumed crucial to good governance: (a) public spirit, as a means to stimulate vital and authentic implementation practices and (b) public vigilance, as a means to stimulate responsiveness to environmental change. By elaborating the principles of irony, spirit and vigilance into practical arrangements, good governance acquires its tangible, institutional shape:

1. Organize public irony. Instead of designing a system that is supposed to be perfect in all respects, and that will inevitably yield side effects and cynicism on the longer run, it seems wise to promote a sense of irony from the start. As Rorty (1989) has argued, the irony is a form of productive pragmatism. It encourages one to be modest and realistic in design and to give a public account of this satisficing approach. It helps to show compassion with those who struggle daily with the likelihood of failure. According to Jessop (2004, p. 161), irony does not imply cynicism; rather it invites those involved in governance to make a reasoned decision in favour of the type of failures one would like to struggle with.

2. Organize public spirit. Ideas on implementation should not be based in distrust regarding the organizational and professional systems that become responsible for it. Instead of designing instruments for discipline and control, it must be ensured that all actors involved in implementation practices recognize the new governance challenges and share a common enthusiasm for them. Often, creating trust is considered crucial in this respect (cf. Gulati & Nickerson, 2008; Ruscio, 1996). Public spirit assumes the presence of trust, but it is more specific, as it refers to trust in the public project at stake.

3. Organize public vigilance. Instead of assuming stable environments and system continuity, discontinuities must be considered the normal state of affairs. Hence, promoting an open eye for environmental changes as well as public reasoning on their implications (cf. Miller, 2006) must be institutionalized within the governance system.

Together, these (provisional) suggestions establish good governance as a practice of reflexive (meta-)governance, rather than as a totalitarian evaluative framework. Of course, as these suggestions focus on general institutional principles, a more careful and refined elaboration is still needed and must be worked out in practice. One must realize that ‘governance’, as a new post-Weberian principle of serving the public interest, is still in its infancy. To a large extent, actors involved in this process are expected to design new organizational approaches without the support of second-order governance arrangements. There is an urgent need for studies that focus on these practices.

EPILOGUE

As mentioned in the Preface, I wrote this paper with a hidden agenda in mind. I hoped that my dear colleague Leo Huberts would be willing to broaden his research agenda. Until then, 2008, his reputation was built on strong and useful work on the normative aspects of public governance, particularly integrity, work that has been nicely collected in Huberts (2014).

What I hoped for was a move to the next step, implying a more critical approach to public governance as a (neo-liberal, NPM-driven) system. Did my attempt have any success in the years that followed?

I must be modest, but I think it did. Leo started the ‘quality of governance’ group, which did embrace a broader and more reflexive approach to contemporary public governance systems. And, as a later member of the Faculty Board, he even became the leading figure in developing the Institute for Societal Resilience (ISR), including a critical stream on resilient governance studies. That was good for the faculty of social sciences, and good for the research stream on public values, including the involvement of colleagues from other departments, such as organizational science. And it was really brave, as it implied a big step further away from the integrity agenda.

Remarkably, though, writing this paper with Leo in mind also reinforced my own agenda. In retrospect, I think this paper was a first step towards my 2009 inaugural lecture on ‘greedy governance’. Without knowing, Leo had stimulated me to elaborate my critical position in the field of public administration. And what is more, in the years to come, he frequently showed his appreciation for this position. I want to thank him sincerely for his deep involvement and encouragement and the many years of good colleagueship.