How can UK government be more effective when addressing chronic problems like inequalities or crises like climate change? This idea of ‘effective government’ has no clear, coherent, or agreed definition. Rather, advocates of reform identify multiple principles to which to aspire, including to: - Hold to account the people and organisations responsible for policy. - Anticipate and prevent policy problems rather than react to crisis. - Avoid power hoarding at the ‘centre’. - Co-produce policy with citizens. - Ensure policy coherence and policymaking integration. - Foster evidence-informed policymaking. - Mainstream equity, fairness, or justice across all policy. - Ensure that public services deliver public value. There is no technical way to combine these principles or resolve their trade-offs. Rather, policymakers make political choices to signal rhetorical support for all of these aims but demonstrate strong support for some. This tension between effective government principles is at the heart of a dominant and pessimistic academic story of UK policymaking in which the principle of Westminster-style accountability overshadows all others. Consequently, policymaking is inevitably short-termist, elitist, and centralist, and other reform efforts are doomed to failure. We recognise this problem but present a cautiously optimistic account about future prospects, grounded in new efforts to promote ‘Positive Public Policy’ (PoPP). We describe the potential to reinvigorate a range of approaches including: - Strategic state approaches to encourage more policy coherence and policymaking integration. - Systems thinking and place-based approaches to situate holistic government in more local decision-making contexts. - Evidence-informed government, to reflect massive UK government investment in research for policy. - Renewed forms of public participation to boost democratic legitimacy and inform policy. - Behavioural public policy, to understand how people think and behave and support behavioural change. What is a more positive account of the limited progress of these reforms? First, although rather ambiguous, they are all sufficiently clear to prompt debate and collaboration on how to translate abstract aims into concrete change. Second, although we may witness short-term setbacks, repeated reform efforts often have a cumulative effect. Third, although there is limited financial capacity to support major reforms, these initiatives support the new government’s focus on reforms that offer tangible rewards from low investment. This new reality provides an important window of opportunity for learning and applying the lessons of Positive Public Policy. Full article: Paul Cairney, John Boswell, Sarah Ayres, Catherine Durose, Dr Ian C Elliott, Matthew Flinders, Steve Martin, Liz Richardson (2024) ‘The state of British policymaking: How can UK government become more effective?’, Parliamentary Affairs, https://lnkd.in/edXQadDY
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