Policy as an account of governing

This book focuses on how we account for the work of policy, recognizing that there is more than one type of account, and that different accounts may ‘make sense’ in different contexts. In this perspective, we need to recognize that ‘policy’ is itself an account of government, a construct mobilized, both by academic observers and by practitioners, to make sense of the activity of governing. It presents government as a process of instrumental decision making, in which actors called governments address problems and identify goals; the practice of governing is then explained by referring back to these decisions, seeing it as the ‘implementation’ of the choices made by governments. Dye described public policy ‘whatever government decides to do or not to do’ (Dye 1985). The basic assumptions underlying this description are seldom examined because it seems like ‘common sense,’ but this is precisely why we need to examine these (and other accounts): in how (and why) they ‘make sense’ of the process?

This account of government as a pattern of official problem solving is not the only version available. A much older interpretation (e.g., from Hobbes to Oakeshott) believes that government is concerned with order or the maintenance of stable relationships and practices as well as dealing with disturbances. The dominant paradigm in welfare economics considers government to be a mechanism that deals with market failure, while the processes of choice are simply devices that enforce calculated solutions to problems of collective action. A third interpretation sees government as a struggle for partisan benefit: ‘who gets what, when and how,’ as Lasswell (1936) described it. Linked to this, but also distinguished from it, is a perception of government as a competitive struggle for dominance among leaders, with statements about goals, choices or benefits being largely tokens in this continuing struggle. More recently, the term governance has been used to suggest that governing is the outcome of a complex interweaving of both official and non-official organizational forms, that often mobilizes different frameworks of meaning and rationales of action. All of these perspectives remain relevant, and they show that seeing government in terms of outcome-oriented instrumental choice is not the only available explanation.