Dr. Md. Shairul Mashreque and Dr. M Abul Kashem Mozumder :
Public governance is an interdisciplinary field of study centring on relationships of power between government authorities, civil society and the market, in a context of transformations in the ability of political communities to legitimately govern themselves and act effectively.
Public governance is an interdisciplinary field of study centring on relationships of power between government authorities, civil society and the market, in a context of transformations in the ability of political communities to legitimately govern themselves and act effectively.
Public Governance has moved up in the awareness of the public policy community for quite some time now, very much driven by the protracted difficulties of managing the global economy out of its never ending series of crises, beginning with the financial meltdown in 2007/8 all the way to the social crisis of unemployment levels not seen for a very long while. In development economics, institutional weaknesses and lack of good governance are equally identified as the critical bottlenecks for sustainable growth. To cite a scholar:
In fact, one can get the impression that good public governance is elevated to the all around response, from improving policy performance, achieving better outcomes of development, to more effective sector policies and rebuilding or maintaining trust in government. And its capacities to deliver are expected at all levels of government, including the supra or international level, where the 2013 edition of the Report puts the emphasis with its discussion of sovereignty. Both blame and over extended expectations seem in my view based on the insufficient attention being paid to the empirical analysis of public governance and the fast changing context of public governance globally. The previously often stated path dependency of developments of national governance must also be taken into account in the international debate.
Against this background I would encourage the next editions of the governance report to continue vigorously the development of governance indicators, an area where the OECD’s “Governance at a Glance” is offering a unique set of internationally comparable data on public institutions, instruments, processes and performance in its 34 member countries. The benefits of wide collaboration among the proponents of quantitative and qualitative measurement of public governance would appear obvious.
Equally promising could be for the upcoming Governance Reports to look into three fast changing issues in particular: what role for evidence in decision making in increasingly complex situations? How does the multiple stakeholder context impact on the government’s ability to govern? To what extent is public governance an instrument to “solve public problems”? Moving to an understanding of public governance as a joint learning process in dynamic and networked economies and societies rather than a mechanism to deliver technically correct results or even outcomes could animate the debate and provide opportunities for urgently needed innovations.
There seems to be no shortage of evidence for the right public policies to deal with the burning challenges, such as climate change, the ageing of the population, poverty reduction or the reform of the financial sector, just to name a few. Really? Why is it then that policy action is not following suit? Are we appreciating fully the complexity of evidence, the degrees of uncertainty, the time horizons involved which could limit its usefulness for policy making? Are governance systems providing capacities and well structured “avenues” for evidence to enter into policy design and decision making? Regulatory impact assessment is a prominent example of an under utilised instrument of evidence based decision making in most countries. Ex ante expenditure assessments are even less common, a fact hard to understand, except if democracy and evidence were considered mutually exclusive. And what about the policy making relevance of ex-post evaluations?
Modern public governance implies multi-stakeholder processes at many levels, welcomed primarily as a means to reversing the decline in public participation in the political system. The tsunami of opportunities of communication and information technology opens a radically different dimension of interaction. Open government is the latest expression of commitments in that respect, but the consequences for public governance quality and performance are hardly understood. While “solving public problems” is a good working definition of public governance, it also risks missing some of the dynamic dimensions. Whether decisions qualify as solutions may be time dependent, and be viewed differently by stakeholders. What constitutes a public problem is changing quite dramatically since the traditional social contract around public services is challenged and private or public approaches are regarded as alternatives. Raising awareness and increasing understanding for these complexities could be major reform requirement for good governance in the future. They will make the key questions of delivery and accountability only more difficult to address.
The Governance Reports are well suited to become a source of both broader measurements of public governance and an inspiring debate on its potential and limitations. Public governance is of course a desirable intellectual intervention for its interdisciplinary nature. It is an umbrella concept encompassing various substantive areas of development – agriculture, industry, health, family planning, environment, food, urban affairs, rural development and so forth. On the non-developmental side, there are organizational policies, recruitment, appointment, transfer promotion, salary, allowance, remuneration, wage and other benefits in public service. Policy studies are in fact a systematic diagnosis of social problems associated with these substantive areas and others too that are found to be afflicting the public for a certain length of time. Our striving for panacea to heal up social ills must be tempered with understanding the problematic entangling the society as the “Governments are constrained by many powerful environmental forces like wealth, technology, population growth, patterns of family life, class structure, child raring practices, religious beliefs and so on.”
Bafflingly complex social problem is associated with the crisis of consensus in plural democracies. Conflict and confrontation pose a formidable threat to social integration. Community life becomes stressful with the advent of competing groups. Policy decisions may manifest a value preference for a certain interest groups on the altar of others thus providing sufficient ground for conflict. Preference for growth policy devoid of equity indicators might be frustrating to the downtrodden mass of people. Industrial dispute occurs off and on as industrial policy favors the interests of employers’ contrasted with human rights of working forces. Policy studies emphasize on addressing these constraints to provide recommendations for effective reforms or substantial changes in policy structure. By studying these phenomena in some depth one can be aware of ‘substantial vested interest concern’ in existing planning and programs and measures (Mashreque2015).
The central theme in policy studies concerns basic conditions of public life as well as institutional mode of action defined by ordinance, statutes, decrees, rules and regulations. “Under the political advisers in central policy cluster, there must be economists, statisticians, public administrators, planners, specialists, financial and other experts to analyze the policies and advise on them and the policy alternatives on a interdisciplinary basis (Sapru 1994:11).
Public governance becomes meaningful when it is oriented to the protection of HR. The end result of human development must be the realization of every citizen’s rights as enshrined in the universal declaration of human rights. Experts of course have conceptual understanding of HR standards. Nevertheless working knowledge about the application of such standards or principles is scanty. For right-base approach to be operationally meaningful it is necessary to devise a mechanism for reporting on in its implementation. Institutionalization of HR is ‘post-war (second Great War) phenomenon.
(Dr. Md. Shairul Mashreque, Public Administration, Chittagong University and Dr. M Abul Kashem Mozumder, Member PSC)
