As far back as 1997 the OECD suggested that:“Aligning central and sub-national government policies is critical to the successful implementation of reform programmes which are aimed at improving public sector efficiency, effectiveness and responsiveness.” What the OECD was highlighting was that both local and national government must now actively co-operate within an environment that is considerably more unstable due to international influences. The traditional institutional models of government, that suggest either greater centralization or greater decentralization, cannot equip public service policy making processes to meet the challenges of these international influences. Such thinking has never being so pertinent as in the current times.
Governance based upon the principle of a co-governing relationship between local and national policy-makers would, it seems to the OECD and others, provide the flexibility required to confront the many challenges a public service now has to face. It is from this perspective that, at the international level generally, the UN, EU Commission and, most notably, the Council of Europe in 2007 have sought to establish what it means to have an institutional framework that allows for policy development on an integrated basis. The Council for example suggested that:“Good governance is a requirement at all levels of public administration. At local level it is of fundamental importance because local government is closest to citizens and provides them with essential services and it is at this level that they can most readily feel ownership of public action.”
The above perspective from the Council of Europe underpins a European wide political outlook on good governance. The Council has set a strategy for itself that seeks to support the regeneration of democratic governance at local, regional and national level. In some respects this thinking had already been set out with the adoption of the Charter for Local Self Government. Most interestingly however, is that the Council now sees the local policy process as an integral part of governance generally. The Council has set out its twelve principles of good democratic governance. These principles are seen as critical to the reform of public management generally and are set to feature in the Council’s on-going role in developing democracy within its members and in the wider international arena.
These principles are as follows:
• Fair conduct of elections, Representation and Participation
• Responsiveness, to ensure the local authority meets the legitimate expectations and needs of citizens
• Efficiency and effectiveness, to ensure that objectives are met while making the best use of resources
• Openness and transparency, to ensure public access to information and facilitate understanding of how public affairs are conducted
• Rule of law, to ensure fairness, impartiality and predictability
• Ethical conduct, to ensure the public interest is put before private ones
• Competence and capacity to ensure that local representatives and officials are well able to carry out their duties
• Innovation and openness to change to ensure that benefit is derived from new solutions and good practices
• Sustainability and long-term orientation, to take the interests of future generations into account
• Sound financial management, to ensure prudent and productive use of public funds
• Human rights, cultural diversity and social cohesion, to ensure that all citizens are protected and respected and that no one is either discriminated against or excluded
• Accountability, to ensure that local representatives and officials take responsibility and are held responsible for their actions.
The Council is seeking to place the citizen at the centre of the democratic process by applying the above principles to institutional reforms across its members and thus building the process of governance upon a participatory framework that is collaborative in nature.
In order to facilitate the application of the principles at the local level the Council has created a template for local government reform, one which provides the policy maker with a check list that will, if applied, result in an open transparent regime of good local governance. This challenges the policy maker, particularly at the national level, to address existing institutional arrangements, a feature which arguably was largely missed in the move towards New Public Management. It also provides the foundation for increasing the capacity of the elected representative to act as a cornerstone to local governance and to take a central and leading role in the collaborative policy process.
The Programme for Government did hold out some hope that, perhaps for the first time, an incoming government clearly recognised the need for an overall comprehensive examination of the public service. International bodies, such as the OECD, and local commentators including the IPA, had long suggested this. Previous efforts to reform the public service were well meaning but largely ad hoc. The continued role out, over the past twenty years, of local administrative units under many departments along with the creation of arms length agencies suggested an unwillingness to confront the need for a substantial overhaul of public administration. Better to keep the department’s mandate within own control than think of having someone else do it for us might be one way of describing the corporate view. Whatever about the legitimacy of this view, the Programme for Government seemed to suggest a move towards an integrated public service.
In what was, at the time, a critical piece of thinking on the nature of policy development, even the then UK Government (hardly an example of autonomous government) in 2000 published a national strategy on the issue of joining up the local policy process and integrating it within the national framework. It was significant because it presented local government reform within a whole of government perspective on public service reform. A critical feature is that its civil service composers took the diversity of academic perspective on governance, the policy process and the experiences of New Public Management and placed the public management reform process in the United Kingdom within a dynamic environment which was, at once territorial and functional. It also centred upon participative and sustainability perspectives. Importantly, it included a set of guiding principles which would underpin a critical grasp of the central arguments of joined up government, i.e. participative governance, democracy and spatial dynamics. Such arguments would be usefully considered in any effort to reform public administration in Ireland. These include:
• Empowerment of the local voice in the policy process;
• Leadership and commitment to better governance through the local democratic institutions;
• Prevention is better than cure particularly in regard to disadvantaged or at risk communities;
• A radical change of culture is needed within the institutional framework of both local and national government;
• All levels of government, therefore, need to be involved in the policy process;
• Mainstream services are the key to addressing sustainability and community integration;
• Central government as a facilitator can work with the local stakeholders to deliver greater public service integration and quality.
Unsurprisingly such thinking runs in parallel to the thinking of the OECD in 1997 but surprisingly does, ironically given the background of the authors, complement the thinking of the Council of Europe in 2007. So strangely even public servants in the most centralised state in Europe recognised that: “…public sector silos cannot achieve a holistic approach simply by re-engineering how they interact with one another. Joining up is also about a new relationship between the public sector and the individuals and communities they serve”.
More significantly, from the perspective of understanding local-centre policy processes, the UK Report suggested that the principles and starting point for public management reform has to be the acceptance that: “Top level goals need to be cascaded down into compatible and mutually reinforcing objectives for regional and local bodies whose collaboration is required to achieve cross cutting policy goals……where outcome targets are set, local agencies should be free to determine the outputs needed to meet these. And where output targets are stipulated, central government should accept responsibility for unwanted outcomes or externalities”.
This understanding is now an accepted feature of public management internationally, the Programme for Government seems to be thinking along similar lines but if there is not very visible activity, say within six months, to translate modernisation intentions into reality along the lines set out by the OECD, the Council of Europe and even our near neighbours, one can assume the Programme for Government is highly unlikely to meet its own challenging objectives and that, unfortunately, would be extremely disappointing.
