Structural Adjustment in Public Policy

Impacts of Globalisation

The consequential impacts of globalisation embody both de jure (measurement criteria) and de facto (outcomes) dimensionalities (Kaufmann & Kray, 2008) to governance indicators. Specifically, the preeminent impacts of a transnational world are: (i) Global Public Domain; (ii) Security Demographic; (iii) Geo-political Power Blocs; and (iv) Stochastic Framework.

Global Public Domain

The global commons (natural resources) has become an expanded concept of the The Commons, per se, indicating those resources deemed to be ‘held in common’, collectively owned and shared among populations e.g. environmental, cultural, intellectual property, scientific and life (genomic) commons, inter alia. The political economy counterpart to the commons is the Global Public Domain (Ruggie, 2004) and refers to a now institutionalised arena of transnational discourse concerned with the production of global public goods.

Security Demographic

Security demographic (Cincotta, 2003) denotes a state of human health and safety characterised by a distinctive range of population structures and dynamics that make civil conflict less likely. The security demographic is premised on the demographic transition (to lower rates of birth and death) and calls for demographic analysis as a core feature of policy development. In order to obtain global peace and a more secure world, the security demographic requires political stability in weak states. Explicit policy recommendations by Population Action International are: (i) promote demographic transition (lowering of birth rates); (ii) promote access to reproductive health in regions of crisis and conflict; (iii) encourage improvements to access for women (legal, education, socio-economic); and (iv) make demography part of the analysis.

Geo-Political Power Blocs

Based on historical, cultural and economic realities, the globalised world order is pre-configured by geo-political power blocs. A variety of power typologies characterise the contemporary world system: (i) Super power, meaning great power and the capacity to mobilise power such as the British Empire, The Soviet Union, and the United States, potentially also China; (ii) Great Power, referring to strong powers of political, cultural and economic influence such as China, France, Germany, Italy and Japan; (iii) Regional Power, indicating powers over a defined region as is the case for South Africa, Egypt, Israel, Turkey, South Korea, Brazil, Mexico and Indonesia; and (iv) Middle Power, to denote those nation states considered to have second-tier political influence.

Stochastic Framework

Associated with the rise of Complex Systems Theory and Uncertainty, the stochastic framework signifies the stochastic process underlying the policy setting, meaning that the prevailing systemic state (equilibrium condition) is determined by components that are both predictable and unpredictable. Public management and policy work necessarily subsists within and explicitly attends to the latent uncertainty of the stochastic framework.

Twenty-first Century Statecraft

Twenty-first century statecraft designates increased scale, organisation, interdependence, and complexity of global engagement. This is most pre-eminently evidenced by increasingly consolidated positivism in terms of: (i) institutional order; (ii) multi-level framework; and (iii) policy transfer.

Institutional Order

Through the turbulent 20th century, the post industrial, post-modern and post-structural international system has defaulted to an orthodoxy of neo-liberal globalism. Institutional orderliness is now firmly pivoted on politics of institutional economics and new public management, yielding to principles of market liberalisation and economic development. Foundational concepts in 21st century statecraft correspond to state argumentation, namely, observed technologies of the liberal democracy: (i) convention technology; and (ii) commitment technology.

• Convention Technology

Empirical data demonstrate that participatory political regimes, enable higher quality growth, permit greater predictability and stability, are more resilient to shocks and generally deliver superior distributional outcomes (Rodrik, 1999). Convention Technology, therefore, expounds that democracy is preferable (less of a gamble/lower risk) to an authoritarian regime.

• Commitment Technology

The vitality of social institutions (legal, judicial, electoral, trade union, etc.) are also configured to serve as institutions of conflict management. Ibid explains that the composite of societal institutions entail a ‘double commitment technology’: (i) warning potential ‘winners’ in social conflict of limited gains; and at the same time, (ii) assuring ‘losers’ that they will not be expropriated; this dual-incentivisation structure promotes cooperative behaviour by reducing the payoff to socially harmful strategies.

Multi-Level Framework

Ladi (2005) establishes a holistic multi-level framework for understanding policy development by integrating the differentiated layers of the policy landscape. Specifically, at the: (i) macro-level, extant processes of globalisation and Europeanisation are determinative; (ii) meso level, the internationalisation of policy transfer is profligate; and (iii) micro-level, ensues the politics and diffusion of international policy research institutes, technocratic regimes and think tanks.

Policy Transfer

Considering that socio-political reality is a: (i) dynamic phenomena that changes over time; and that (ii) always constitutes the external environment to the actions of agents, Ibid explains that public policy is appropriately understood as a structured phenomenon. A further caveat, going to the practical domain of public management, is that “for an entity to be defined as an agent, it should be able to make decisions” (Sibeon, 1999; Hindess, 1986 in ibid). Therefore, globalisation has had the effect of convergence of political thought, political agents, and the globalisation of governmental structures resulting in policy transfer as the net impact of globalisation. The phenomenon of policy transfer itself, may be decomposed into underlying processes of: policy ideas; policy programmes; and policy institutions. While the content of policy transfer is premised on orthodox economics as propounded by the supranational institutions - such as the Civil Service International (SCI), the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD)/World Bank – the trajectories of policy transfer are geopolitical in nature, most broadly conforming to a north-south demarcation.

Globalised Public Management

Policy Implications

Higher level public management is a multi-dimensional exercise interfacing a multi-actor world system and engaging counterparties at the inter-sectoral level. Policy implications, inter-alia, pertain to (i) sovereignty; (ii) megapolicies; (iii) diplomacy; and (iv) adaptive policies.

• Sovereignty

The ascent of supra-national institutions and transnational corporations have the propensity to deprecate state sovereignty, especially the precarious position of small states. State sovereignty is therefore to be seen as circumscribed by measures of vulnerability and resilience (Briguglio et al, 2010) bearing a cost-benefit (risk) trade-off subject to the preferences of the local population (Imam, 2010)

• Megapolicies

Drawing on prototypical case studies of the Marshall Plan (1950s), The Taiwan Bonds-for-Land Swap (1950s), the Chinese and Korean Reverse Brain Drain (1970s) and the Japanese Internationalisation of Secondary Education (1980s-1990s), Montgomery and Rodinelli (1995) identify the invention of ‘megapolicies’ designed to attend to observed significant disparities and a general ‘puzzle of inter-sectoral problems’ of their times. Megapolicies have the potentiality to capture both negative and positive inter-institutional and inter-sectoral externalities at the complex systems level and Ibid also argues that a moral purpose should be an explicit dimension of megapolicies.

• Diplomacy

Globalisation tends to escalate opportunities for multilateral, summit, developmental, and aid diplomacy. Diplomacy thus affords inter-institutional (Tanzi, 1999) and inter-sectoral pre-emptive strategy and international bargaining, depending on the prerogative of state.

• Adaptive Policies

By systematic programme design, the practice of policy-making may be better adapted to complex, dynamic and uncertain conditions. Swanson & Bhadwal (2009) argues for adaptive policies which are designed to anticipate the complete spectrum of possible future scenarios by judicious deployment of: (i) integrated and forward looking analysis; (ii) multi-stakeholder deliberation; and (iii) monitoring of key performance indicators used to trigger automatic policy adjustments. Adaptive policy yields policies that are robust across a range of plausible futures and can adapt to anticipated conditions and deeper engagement of key stakeholders to ensure commitment and operationalisation (Barg & Tyler, 2009 in ibid).

Practice Implications

Practice implications defer to the agency of governmental officers, specifically, the evaluative criteria of policy work and output as well as imputed professionalisation. Practice implications are: (i) efficiency; (ii) effectiveness; (iii) entrepreneurship; and (iv) standards.

• Efficiency

Aspects of efficiency relate to timeliness, within a framework of an institutionalised ‘Window of Opportunity’ [2], and competency, of policy design both operational and results-driven Policy Programming [3], to deter the opposition from hampering reform efforts and also to sequence deployment of policy (Thomas, 1999).

• Effectiveness

Fulfillment of government mandate anticipates effectiveness of policy practice. While implementing the right policies demands sensitivity to historical and contextual parameters (Ahmad, 2008), public management may approach policy effectiveness by explicit methods such as Opportunity Set (Bates, 1999), the pursuit of evidence-based policy that is encapsulated in a Best Practice Policy Cycle (Banks, 2009) to target desired objects, and the systematic inter-sectoral design (Thomas, 1999) of a Social Rate of Return (Tanzi, 1999). The World Bank also provides basic principles for public sector policy-making (Kaufmann & Kray, 2008) [4].

• Entrepreneurship

The fostering of an entrprenerial culture of reform is necessary to mobilise and maintain a working party of policy entrepreneurs.

• Standards

Modernised codes of conduct include the Civil Service Code (UK), the Standards of Ethical Conduct for Employees of the Executive Office (USA, 2002), the Australian Public Service Values Framework (AGPS, 2003) which aligns with the United Nations Standards of Conduct for the International Civil Service (2001).

Summary

Structural adjustment in contemporary Public Management subsists in an intricate global context of complex systems and extant uncertainty auguring for both adaptive capacity and absorptive capacity in processes and practices of public management. Deferring to organisational management methodologies, attending to global transition requires a critical cognitive-behavioural repertoire contingent on (i) receptivity (cognitive awareness); and (ii) innovative routines (successful behaviours).

Endnotes:

[1] Globalisation is the integration of human societies through processes of convergence of people, ideas, culture and technology characteristically by means of proliferation of communication, transportation and trade. It most commonly refers to economic globalisation, embracing the way in which sovereign states pursue economic development in order to secure material welfare, and human development of their constituencies. Whereas globalisation may be theorised in a multitude of ways, it is often understood according to the effects it produces, which concords with the manner by which the globalisation phenomenon is measured, including the constructive objects (geographically bound nation states). Constructed using a methodology of normalisation and country weighting, and drawing on the main dimensionalities of globalisation, namely: (i) social; (ii) economic; and (iii) political, as well as (iv) nominal flow variables, the KOF Globalisation Index provides the leading indicator of globalisation. A composite of sub-indices of the Globalisation Index, afford typological summary of transformational outcomes.Economic Globalisation sub-indices include: trade, foreign direct investment (FDI), portfolio investment and income. Social Globalisation sub-indices are: (i) people (foreign stock, foreign flow, worker remittances, and tourists), (ii) ideas (telephone calls, internet users, films, books and newspapers, mail). Political Globalisation sub-indices measure the prevalence of: embassies, UN Missions, and international organisations.

[2] Window of Opportunity (Kingdon, 1984 in Howlett & Ramesh, 2003) occur as compelling problems and or events happening in the political stream stir policy entrepreneurs to couple both problems and solutions to politics. Ibid exhibit a model of policy window types according to the degree of institutionalisation and predictability: (i) routined political windows occur when institutionalised procedural events dictate predictable window openings; (ii) discretionary political windows, occur when the behaviour of indicvidualpolitical actors leads to less predictable window openings; (iii) spillover problem windows, occur when related issues are drawn into an already open window; and (iv) random windows are those in which random events or crises open unpredictable windows.

[3] The Imperative of Policy Programming: Thomas (1999) argues that the evidence offers little support for going all out for short-term economic growth (as a stylized Kuznets curve might imply) before turning to the equality of human development, the sustainability of the environment, and the transparency of the bureaucracy. That sequencing - whether it be liberalize-first and regulate-later, or privatize-first and ensure-competition-later, or grow-first and clean-up-later, or grow-first and seek-liberties-later - is far too costly. Regulatory actions, environmental management, and anticorruption measures must go with liberalization - to manage financial risks, ensure predictability, and sustain results, even if that means sacrificing some short-term growth.