New development: Walk on the bright side—what might we learn about public governance by studying its achievements?

IMPACT

The goal of this article is to identify evidence-based building blocks for smart and sensible practices of policy design, public leadership and management, while recognizing that universal templates for success are not the right approach. It is critical that strategies to improve governance show appropriate sensitivity to context. The authors offer an alternative for high-level assessments of institutional qualities of ‘good government’. The article presents a practical toolkit to identify, assess, interpret, compare, and learn from concrete instances of public policy successes, highly successful public organizations, and collaborative, networked governance.

ABSTRACT

Governments today often perform demonstrably well on many fronts, much of the time. Yet, their accomplishments can be taken for granted or overshadowed by their shortcomings. The public, the media, and even the public service itself are collectively predisposed to notice government failures over successes. A focus on failure, breakdown and crisis helps us to hold power to account, and to learn how to avoid malperformance. However, turning that focus around can help us to identify and interpret practices that are worth learning positive lessons from. To move beyond best practices requires the development of new assessment tools. The authors propose conceptual frameworks and methodological strategies that aim to assess and interpret governance success in situ and with an appreciation for complexity.

KEYWORDS:

• Collaborative governance
• performance measurement
• positive public administration
• public policy
• successful public governance

‘Doing better, feeling worse’: it is the perennial paradox of democratic governments. Despite performing well on many fronts, governments’ successes tend to be overshadowed by their failures. Governments are confronted with a deep-seated negativity bias (Marvel, 2015), amplified through mechanisms of monitorial democracies (Keane, 2018). Mechanisms such as media scrutiny, political opposition, complaints procedures and the court system are specifically designed to identify faults. Success-finding mechanisms, by contrast, are much less developed (Luetjens & ‘t Hart, 2019). Instruments to recognize and reward success reside mainly within professional bodies—for example through rankings, ratings and awards competitions.

On the whole, the deck is stacked. The public, the media, and even the public service itself are collectively predisposed to notice government failures over successes. Public governance scholars have also built up a rich language persuading us just how difficult it is to govern well, particularly in late modernity. We are told about the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, wicked problems; about crises of ‘the new normal’ post-Covid; and about the tensions, constraints, and unintended consequences of government action (King & Crewe, 2014; Savoie, 2015). There has been less engagement with what can be learned from governments’ pivotal achievements (Goderis, 2015).

If formal and informal monitorial institutions are biased towards finding failure, and much scholarship is focused on failure as well, then there is a real danger that a hegemonic discourse of disappointment and disenchantment becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy (Roberts, 2018). We believe it is high time for more students of public governance and management to lean against these tendencies. A focus on failure, breakdown and crisis helps us to hold power to account and to highlight what practices of policy design, decision-making and public management had better be avoided. However, turning that focus around by developing conceptual and methodological tools can help us identify and interpret practices that are worth learning positive lessons from.

This is what we have done in our ERC-funded 2016–2021 research programme ‘Successful public governance’ at Utrecht University: developing a language, assessment tools, and repository of cases of ‘positive deviance’ in the ocean of public policies, organizations and collaborations that together constitute how a particular polity or sector is governed. Our efforts are part of a wider push for a ‘positive public administration’, which is ‘devoted to uncovering the factors and mechanisms that enable high performing public problem-solving and public service delivery; procedurally and distributively fair processes of tackling societal conflicts; and robust and resilient ways of coping with threats and risks’ (Douglas et al., 2021; Douglas, 2021).

Though the ultimate goal of the endeavour is to identify evidence-based building blocks for smart and sensible practices of design, leadership and management (Nielsen et al., 2015; van Erp et al., 2019), universal templates for success are not the right approach. A ‘measure what works, then copy what does’ approach is devoid of sensitivity to context. We propose conceptual frameworks and methodological strategies that aim to assess and interpret success in situ and with an appreciation for complexity. Our research has therefore been guided by two key questions:

• How is ‘success’ in public governance defined and assessed by those who engage in it (policy-makers), those who experience it (stakeholders, citizens), those who evaluate it (professional and investigative bodies), and how can it be meaningfully studied by academic researchers?

• Based on this, how can we meaningfully identify, assess, interpret, and learn from instances of (both mundane and high-profile) public policy successes, highly successful public organizations, and collaborative—horizontal, interactive, networked, joined-up—governance?

As these questions make clear, rather than focusing on the high-level, foundational, institutional qualities of ‘good government’, we have chosen to get into the weeds of specific cases of success—public policies, programmes, collaborations and agencies.

These efforts have been guided by shared frameworks and tools to allow for transparent, systematic and nuanced analysis. For example, we created an open access repository of coded cases of collaborative governance allowing for both qualitative and quantitative forms of focused comparison (www.collaborationdatabase.org; Douglas et al., 2020). We also built on McConnell’s (2010) pioneering work to develop a four-dimensional assessment framework covering programmatic (ends–means–impacts), process (fairness and smartness), political (legitimacy and support) and endurance (temporal and adaptive) criteria (Compton & ‘t Hart, 2019). As Table 1 implies, this PPPE-framework allows analysts to identify different degrees of success on these criteria over time, and to identify where such success is conflicted (for example a programmatically ‘good’ policy that is politically precarious) and resilient (breadth, depth of support; duration of programmatic success). It also enables analysts to map the criteria and arguments employed in the claims-making of different policy actors and evaluators.

Table 1. Dimensions of policy success: the PPPE assessment framework.

Programmatic success: Purposeful and valued action	Process success: Thoughtful and effective policy-making practices	Political success: Many winners, firm support and reputational benefits
A well-developed public value proposition and theory of change underpin the policy Achievement of (or considerable momentum towards) the policy’s intended and/or of other beneficial social outcomes The pleasure and pain resulting from the policy are distributed fairly across the field of institutional and community stakeholders	The design process ensures carefully considered choice of policy instruments appropriate to context and in a manner that is perceived to be correct and fair The policy-making process offers reasonable opportunities for different stakeholders to exercise influence and different forms of expertise to be heard, as well as for innovative practices to be attempted before key policy choices are made The policy-making process results in adequate levels of funding, realistic timelines, and administrative capacity The delivery process effectively and adaptively deploys (mix of) policy instrument(s) to achieve intended outcomes with acceptable costs, and with limited unintended negative consequences	A wide array of stakeholders feel they have been able to advance their interests through the process and/or outcomes of the policy The policy enjoys relatively high levels of social, political and administrative support Being associated with the policy enhances the reputations of the actors driving it (both inside and outside government)
Endurance success: Consolidation and adaptation • High levels of process and programmatic performance are maintained over time through timely adaptation of instruments and practices • Stable or growing strength of social, political and administrative coalitions favouring continuation of the policy over time • Emerging narratives about the policy’s long-standing success confer legitimacy on the broader political system

Source: Adapted from Compton and ‘t Hart (2019).

Looking at the bright side

What can be learned from looking at the successes of public governance? We provide some first tasters of our emerging insights on organizational and policy success.

On organizational successes

Boin et al. (2020) offers 12 case studies of public organizations that have become and remained widely respected public institutions, including CERN, the European Court of Justice, and Singapore’s anti-corruption agency. Our studies show successful public organizations do not shy away from working through the conflicts they need to have. Our case studies suggest they have learned to become good at reconciling competing values, interests, and constituencies. Enduringly successful organizations gradually move from ‘great’ men and women—and their top-down leadership—to more consultative forms of governance that better allow them to adapt to changing contexts. Successful organizations have evolved structures and processes to harness difference and disagreement in ways that make them smarter and stronger.

For example, CERN developed a form of shared leadership between the physicists, engineers, and national science ministries’ bureaucrats on its board. This allowed it to evolve resilient norms and practices of ‘balance-seeking’ in its governance: between funding member states and the spending administrators; between small and large contributing nations; between the patience required to do the work necessary to achieve major scientific breakthroughs and the need to be seen to be active and impactful to maintain the institution’s support base. Organizations are often built by a few singular leaders with a powerful vision. To endure over time, though, organizations must open themselves up to more, potentially dissenting, voices.

On policy success

Our case studies of policies that ‘work’ shine a light on the intricate combinations of puzzling and powering, imagining and choosing, designing and delivering that make such successes possible: from the framing underpinning problem definition and strategic agenda-setting, to patient technocratic work of evidence-based design to prudent political work of amassing building supportive coalitions, to knowing when to charge head-first and when to tread gently and even pull back. We have begun to model the configurations of factors at work in clusters of cases (Compton et al., 2019). By 2022, there will be a published body of more than 75 case studies of policy successes, in Australia and New Zealand (Luetjens et al., 2019), Canada (Howlett et al., forthcoming), the Nordic countries (DelaPorte et al., forthcoming), and globally (Compton & ‘t Hart, 2019).

First, one cluster of cases suggests that successful policies tend to address a problem that was well defined and broadly acknowledged at the outset of the policy development process. For example, the design of the Higher Education Contribution Scheme in Australia was propelled by a broadly supported desire to expand the number of school-leavers attending university, while allaying the concerns about equity. The scheme was designed to ensure that the flow of benefits was not skewed towards more privileged groups in society.

Second, bipartisan support that was often lacking when policies were initially adopted was carefully nurtured as the policy itself attained a degree of maturity. Once achieved, such ‘oversized majorities’ allow the policy to endure across multiple changes in government and take root in the community’s value system and sense of identity. For example, New Zealand’s nuclear-free policy was introduced in 1987 by a Labour Government against heavy opposition from the conservative side. Yet subsequent right wing governments left the policy in place, having understood that this policy was what the public wanted and that it had become a symbol for how New Zealand saw it place in the world.

Third, there was a cluster of cases around leveraging a crisis to gain traction for well thought-out policy proposals that had been biding their time in bureaucratic ‘bottom drawers’. For example, in Australia, two decades with a series of mass shootings culminated in the 1996 Port Arthur Massacre, where a single gunman killed 35 people with military-style semi-automatic rifles. Policy change was swift and stark, with tightened licensing, banning of semi-automatic weapons, and buy-back schemes. While rapidly adopted in a crisis, the new policy was nonetheless the result of years of development. The government of the day united different parties and stakeholders to present a broad coalition in favour of the new laws and secured a lasting improvement in gun safety in Australia.

These first insights highlight the potential of also studying public governance successes, in addition to continuing to understand governance failures. Examining successful policies, institutions, and collaborations, in all their complexities and contingencies, can offer practitioners not only some validation of their efforts but evidence-based building blocks for smarter design and management. If we want our political systems to continue to live up to the promise of not just popular sovereignty and orderly transition of power but intelligent public problem-solving (Lindblom, 1965), we should make studying success part of our core business.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).