| Review of: | Making Public Policy: Institutions, Actors, Strategies by Mark Considine |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | H.K. Colebatch |
| Reviewed in: | Australian Journal of Public Administration |
| Date accepted online: | 25/09/2006 |
| Published in print: | Volume 65, Issue 2, Pages 110-124 |
Book Reviews
Mark Considine has taken on an ambitious project: to write a short book about making public policy which will be relevant to both practitioners and academic researchers. It is likely that it will be viewed differently by different sorts of reader; this review will concern itself only with its utility for public policy academics.
Academics will find much to admire in the book. The text flows smoothly, and Considine tries to relate contemporary theorising about poststructuralism and governmentality to the traditional instrumentality of 'policy-making' discourse, and also draws in current thinking on transaction cost economics and 'new governance'. In this respect, it is something of an intellectual tour de force, and it would make an engaging discussion-focus at an academic conference.
But academics (most of us, anyway) also have to teach, and we have to ask 'Would this book help our students (and which ones) to understand public policy?'. And it is not clear what Considine means by 'public policy'. There is no opening definition; instead, there are characterisations of public policy, and references to 'the total system of policy-making actions, rules and values [which] contributes a key element to the overall "steering" mechanism of society as a whole' (p. 16). Considine uses three hypothetical examples through the book to illustrate points being made - a London homeowner trying to prevent property development in his street, a Mediterranean fisherman contemplating declining catches, and an Australian official running an IVF program - without clarifying in what way they are 'making public policy', and we have to ask whether 'public policy' has just become another way of talking about the governmental process (see Hale 1988). To paraphrase Aaron Wildavsky, if public policy is everything, maybe it's nothing.
The problem seems to be that Considine wants to have it both ways. He has taken on board the poststructuralist critique and recognized that governing is more about structured practice than about the execution of policy decisions. But he wants to see 'policy making' in terms of 'strategic interventions', and the task is to decide when to make these 'interventions'. The book talks about institutional complexity and interaction, but the default setting is still authoritative decision. In his closing pages, Considine says that '[w]e needadifferentconceptofstructureinorder to explain the ongoing patterns of human systems such as policy-making' (p. 239); this might have been a good place to start the enquiry.
Instead, the focus on institutional structures has been very traditional. There is a whole chapter on elections, executives and legislatures, which are described as 'the formal instruments we use to make policy decisions and then implement them' (p. 84), which begs more questions than you can shake a stick at. Who is 'we', for a start? What about countries where elections are infrequent, or always won by the government, and the legislature has only a marginal role in steering government (which make up most of the countries in the world) ? Do they not have 'policy-making'?
Considine has shown his mastery of a wide range of contemporary thinking, but has not set out a framework of his own for makingsenseoftheconceptofpublicpolicy, and using it as a basis for action. The closing pages hint at the way he might do this, but if he were to follow through on these hints, policy-making might look less like 'strategic intervention', let alone the Advanced Policy Design he offers to his Master's students.