These were questions explored by Professor Mark Bevir, Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, in a lecture delivered to staff and students of the Institute for Diplomacy and International Affairs at Loughborough University London. Professor Bevir, who was born in London and is currently a residential fellow at Loughborough University’s Institute for Advanced Studies, offered in what he called a ‘genealogy of governance’ a historical and deliberately critical account of why contemporary public administration looks the way it does.

From historicism to modernism

Bevir’s story bean in the nineteenth century, when social and political thought was dominated by what he terms ‘developmental historicism’, this being an idea, associated with thinkers such as Hegel and Mill, that societies develop along a common historical path towards rationality, representative democracy, and freedom.

This way of understanding the world collapsed, he argued, in the wake of the First World War. That bloodbath made it almost impossible to read history as a story of inevitable progress. In its place came ‘modernism’, not in the literary or architectural sense, but as a turn away from historical explanation towards formal, ahistorical models of rationality.

This came as economic modernism, rooted in neoclassical economics, which assumes that individuals act rationally to maximise self-interest, and sociological modernism, rooted in functionalist and institutionalist theories, which understands behaviour in terms of rules, norms, and the functional requirements of systems.

Two waves of reform

This intellectual shift is central to the shift from ‘government’ to ‘governance’, the move away from hierarchical bureaucracies towards markets, networks, and collaborative arrangements.

Bevir identified two waves of reform that followed. The first, associated with Thatcherism and neoliberalism from the late 1970s onwards, drew on economic modernism and rational choice theory. A key intellectual vehicle was ‘principal-agent theory’ by which bureaucrats, like corporate managers, pursue their own interests rather than those of the public they serve. Taken from the private sector it offered performance-related pay and market mechanisms as solutions to public policy problems, AKA ‘new public management.’

Bevir pointed to two New Zealand Treasury economists whose 1980s policy paper is widely regarded as the first systematic application of new public management principles to the state. The second wave, associated with New Labour and networks, partnerships, and ‘joined-up governance’, drew on ideas such as sociological modernism and new institutionalism.

The main intellectual ideas here was that of ‘wicked problems’, which are intractable policy challenges that cut across departmental silos and demand collaborative, whole-of-government responses. Bevir showed how the ideas could be tracked to specific academics and think-tanks, such as Gerry Stoker and Perry Six, and their influence on the 1997 Blair government’s Modernising Government initiative.

Why the reforms keep failing

But why have these waves of reforms failed or at best fallen short of the expectations placed on them by politicians, bureaucrats, public, and academics? He argued that both share the flaw that they try to apply abstract universal models without paying attention to the traditions, cultures, and identities of the people who must implement or live with them.

He demonstrated this with three examples. First, a senior civil servant who understood ‘joined-up governance’ as what his department had always done. Second, a police officer who endorsed collaborative teamwork but pointed pout he defaulted to command-and-control in practice, which Bevir noted was effectively all the time. Finally a patient who rejected the logic of healthcare marketisation because her relationship with her GP was more important to her than any idea of consumer choice.

As Bevir argued, in each case the reform was quietly absorbed into pre-existing habits, traditions, and ways of understanding the world without actually upending them.

A critical light

Bevir was careful to distinguish his genealogical method from debunking. His aim was not to dismiss governance reform as a mistake. Instead, it was to show that the intellectual foundations are historically contingent and philosophically contestable, or in other words are open to challenge.

Such reforms, like any proposed by governments, are not neutral technical solutions to obvious problems. They are, intellectually loaded’, and recognising this is the first step towards doing things differently.