More than ever before, the public debate has been about topics previously discussed only in tight expert circles, such as policy coherence, the role of governmental silos, and evidence-based policy- making, all of which have played a significant role in most COVID-19 responses around the world. Numerous stories have been written about how and what type of scientific advice politicians have taken into consideration when making decisions on policies to tackle the pandemic, and whether different ministries and public agencies have coordinated their actions sufficiently in order to apply, for instance, rigid testing schemes.
In addition to the apparent responses to cope with the pandemic, governments have also taken an active role in economic policy. The role of the government in our societies is the biggest it has been in decades.
If we take a look into the 21st century, COVID-19, as tragic as it is, may be merely a practice round. Our century will most likely face multiple other crises such as pandemics, economic shocks, or geopolitical incidents. The most pressing of all is the climate crisis which requires significant transformation not only in production but in consumption and the key fundamentals of everyday life that industrial societies around the world have taken for granted during the period of economic growth driven by fossil capitalism in the past century.
Crises and the need for large-scale societal transformation will keep governments at the forefront. What has started with COVID-19 in regard to recognition of the role that governments play will unlikely diminish but will continue to grow.
Dealing with these growing demands require two things: transformational politics and governance capable of driving transformation.
I would argue that politicians are currently ahead in the game. Take a case study from Finland: the current government programme can be described as being transformational, and the goal is to become the world’s first carbon-neutral welfare state with a carbon neutrality target set for 2035. Such a goal can only be achieved through a systemic transformation of the Finnish society with a wide range of actors involved.
It’s not that we don’t know the solutions – most politicians are aware that reforms are needed to tackle the climate crisis or deal with the increasing inequality in our societies. Yet, when we start to implement wide-ranging societal reforms, we face unforeseen surprises. A single policy to increase taxation on fossil fuels can lead to societal turmoil. Our governments are not equipped to deal with the scope of transformations needed in the 21st century.
Governance in the limelight
One of the great questions of today is whether governments’ possess the required machinery of governance and are capable of implementing much needed reforms and also radical visions.
Currently, it is not. The machinery of governance in most governments is built on the concepts and models of the industrial era. Organisations built in vertical, rigid structures or, more recently, performance management measures put in place to ensure efficiency. While these all have been understandable based on the context in which our public administrations were designed and put together, the incapability to renew them has been stunning.
The most important challenge is foundational: in order to answer 21st century requirements, governments need 21st century machineries. This is why governments need to be able to challenge basic assumptions of governance. They need to be brave enough to change how the core of government works.
The premise of governance is derived from the notion of stability. In simplified terms, Western political philosophy is a process of thinking and experimentation in order to construct vehicles of public governance that best ensure stability in our societies. Stability, of course, is a very understandable goal and something that should be celebrated. The problem is that we live in a century in which driving transformation towards decarbonisation targets in a way that both is and is perceived fair is a more important goal and something electorates have also started to pursue. In other words, governments need more tools that help them steer societal transformations.
The blame is on us, the experts. We have only just realised that politicians are already willing to set transformative goals, but we don’t have all the pieces in place to pursue them. We are lacking not only in technical detail but also conceptually. We haven’t challenged the premises of public governance enough nor have we come up with a debate, for instance, on the role of legislation or steering more comprehensively. We need to start.
Century of experimentalist, visionary, and agile governance
There are a variety of functions, processes, and capabilities that are worth reviewing and reconsidering in governments. In this text, I will concentrate on three of them. First, experimentalist governance which refers to a governance approach which encourages and enables governments to admit that certain objectives (e.g., continuous learning across societies) are practically impossible to plan ahead. Instead, governments need to build them through processes of systematic experimentation. The second one to consider is visionary governance: many of our pressing problems require long-term attention but, at the same time, far too many current governance approaches are focused on giving attention to short-term issues. Thirdly, agile governance which refers to the ability to be nimble, resilient, and responsive to surprises – both positive and negative. Next, I will walk through a slightly more specific explanation of each approach.
1 EXPERIMENTALIST GOVERNANCE. The experimentalist approach to steering has two significant areas of potential.
Firstly, experimentalism provides an approach to break down broad policy goals into a process in which these goals can be both decentralised to relevant actors and broken down to meaningful experiments. The aim of experimentalism is to establish a process of enhancing trust and learning by doing. This approach has been studied and proposed, for instance, by professor Charles Sable at the Columbia University. Embedding experimentalism as a governance approach would enable governments around the world to face complex societal challenges such as the climate crisis that require multiple actors from different parts of the society to collaborate with rigour. Experimentalism would enable politicians to initiate significant reforms needed in our century.
The second benefit of experimentalism is the capability to explore radical policies that would never be implemented as national policies today. The importance of imagination in our societies has been well argued, for instance, by professor Geoff Mulgan at the University College London. Yet, there are few instruments in place in governments to encourage imagination from decision- makers. Embedding experimentalism in policy-making provides an approach through which a politician can explore and experiment with policy ideas that might be too radical or lacking in evidence in a systematic and controlled manner. An example of this was the national experiment on universal basic income in Finland from 2017 to 2018. While imperfect as an experiment, the fact that one of the most conservative governments in Finland since the Second World War launched the experiment illustrates the power of experimentation in exploring radically new policy ideas
2 VISION-DRIVEN GOVERNANCE (or long-term policy- making) is an umbrella term for initiatives that enable decision-makers to tackle societal challenges that extend beyond a single electoral term.
Long-term approaches can be broken down in approaches that increase knowledge of the future in governance through new roles and responsibilities, such as the Welsh commissioner for the future generations or the Finnish parliamentary committee for the futures. These institutions are placed to bring a future perspective into decision- making. In parallel, there are initiatives emerging in order to better understand the impact of policies and investments. The premise is that with better future-informed knowledge we can make better decisions that have desirable long-term impact.
The second stream of approaches on long-term policy making is structural. In its simplest form, an example of a structural approach would be a legislation on decarbonisation that commits the government to set climate targets. Yet, there are other examples. In our democracies, we have always separated parts of decision-making outside the electoral cycle. A recent example would be monetary policy that has been mandated on central banks since the late 80s. This de-democratisation was to negate the impact of so-called moral deficit by politicians in the field of monetary policy. Similar institutional arrangements could and should be put in place in regard to climate targets. Yet, this suggestion is not without danger. Separating a single long-term policy goal from the electoral cycle can decrease the legitimacy of the entire political system. The risk of increase of reactive populism is apparent.
There is an apparent way forward. In the past two decades, approaches on deliberative and participatory democracy have gained momentum through initiatives on local and national level. These initiatives range from citizen assemblies, such as the Grand Debate, to city-led experiments on participatory budgeting, such as the one in Madrid. The clear tension when implementing long-term policy goals in which there is often a need to structurally restrict representative democracy within a single parliamentary cycle set a context in which an increase of more direct deliberate and participatory approaches can be foundational for the legitimacy of the transformation. There is a window of opportunity to set a long-term policy-making process in which representative democracy is restricted, yet deliberative democracy is celebrated.
3 AGILE GOVERNANCE. Finally, no governance approach is enough if the machinery delivering that approach is not sufficiently equipped.
The capabilities of a government to implement policies come down to the functions of the government, how processes are conducted, and what the culture of the government makes possible. Agile approaches show most promise but require interpretation in the context of governance. In this context, agile should not be understood as an approach derived from production systems or software innovation but as an approach that enables the government to balance between the need for stability and transformation through systematic introduction of agility in key government structures and ways of working. The need for agile is even more apparent with COVID-19. Systemic introduction of the agile approach can be best illustrated by the work done by the Prime Minister’s Office of the United Arab Emirates.
From beacons of hope towards paradigmatic changes
Coming back to what our century will look like: we have already witnessed global crises from the great recession to the current pandemic. The biggest one will be how we deal with the climate crisis. Governments will be at the forefront. We need to ensure that we have the approaches on governance in place that are capable of delivering politics needed to be successful in the 21st century. Currently, we do not. But with intent and action, we can.
There is hope. Governments around the world have started to focus on rethinking governance. For instance, the government of Finland has utilised policy experimentation as an approach to explore transformational policies, Wales has appointed a commissioner for the future generations, and the United Arab Emirates has applied agile governance as a framework for renewing the national government. How governments steer societies through policy-making in completely new fashion is not only a talking point but something already in motion. We need to learn from these existing initiatives and do more.
Every government should be included in this process of redefining how governments of the 21st century can successfully ensure that the future is fair and sustainable. A future that citizens can trust to be better than the past.
This article is an extract taken from the Parliamentary Network publication ‘Just Transitions’. You can download a pdf version of the full document here.