From the Director's Desk
January was a busy month for the Centre for Public Policy as we hosted two conferences involving participants from Europe, South America and Asia as well as Australia and New Zealand. Our first event, the Public Policy Network conference brought together a range of Australasian academics involved in researching and teaching public policy. The conference programme included a diversity of policy areas and themes but participants shared focus was on how to design and implement sound public policy research to inform academic understanding and public policy debate. The link between research and policy was also reinforced by Dr Helen Szoke, Australia’s Race Discrimination Commissioner, in her keynote address exploring the idea of Australian identity in the 21st Century. Next the Centre hosted the International Political Science Association Research Committee on the Structure and Organization of Government conference. This international gathering of political scientists specialising in public administration explored the changing linkages between public policy and public administration in a context of global power shifts and challenges to established institutions.
Public policy, governance and management in ‘the Asian Century’
The highpoint of both conferences for me was the panel discussion focusing on the implications of ‘the Asian Century’ for public policy, public administration/management and public governance.
Coined in the late 1980s the term, ‘the Asian Century’ is now almost ubiquitous in public discussion of the future balance of global hard and soft power. In Australia ongoing public debate about ‘the Asian Century’ focuses principally on the content of future public policy. This is evident in the terms of reference of the federal government’s White Paper on ‘Australia in the Asian Century’, and is also reflected in much academic discussion. Both concentrate on the implications for Australia’s foreign and economic policies, along with the future role of regional institutions, and some examination of what ‘the Asian Century’ might mean for domestic cultural and (less often) education and social policy.
By contrast relatively little attention is paid to the implications of ‘the Asian Century’ on either the construct of public policy (what we think public policy is and consists of) or the conduct of public policy (how public policy is made and realised). This also applies to the construct and conduct of public administration or management, and consequently to the likely future dynamics between public policy, public administration/management and public governance.
The panel discussion aimed to address this absence and specifically to explore the proposition that increasing influence from Asia (particularly but not exclusively focused on China and India) will unsettle apparently stable concepts like ‘public policy’ and ‘public administration or management’, challenging dominant ideas and generating new ones about what public policy is and how it is made and managed. This could generate a major shift in the theory and practice of public governance and public management on a par with the impact of neo-liberalism and the New Public Management at the end of the 20th century.
The discussion was chaired by Professor Glyn Davis, Vice-Chancellor at the University of Melbourne and included contributions from international experts in public administration Professor Jon Pierre (Uni. Gothenburg) and Professor John Halligan (Uni. Canberra), Melbourne based experts in China and India, Dr Gao Jia (Asia Institute) and Dr Bina Fernandez (SSPS), and a practitioner perspective from The Hon John Brumby (past-premier of Victoria and Vice-Chancellor’s Professorial Fellow, Melbourne and Monash). Contributors could debate the proposition from whatever position they liked but were encouraged to reflect on a range of factors including: values, institutions, practices and politics.
The panel discussion raised three key points for me:
First, the importance of understanding the dynamics of any system of public policy or public administration/management. There are two issues here. The first concerns the development of systems over time and the influences, both internal and external, that have shaped those systems, revealing process of exchange and adaptation rather than simply transfer. The second concerns the role of economic power and how that shapes what it is possible for public policy and public administration/management to be.
Second, the potential for an ‘Asian Century’, where no single country will dominate, to generate a multiplicity of challenges to and innovations in how we conceive of, describe and operationalise public policy and public administration/management. These challenges and innovations will be contextually specific, though not necessarily contextually bound. They could provide a rich source of alternatives across a range of issues including how the state is understood (e.g. embedded with society or distinct from society), ideas about what is ‘public’ and ‘private’, and the respective roles of politicians, public servants and ‘publics’.
Third, the likely re-emergence and re-formulation of particular traditions as important influences on how public policy and administration/management is conceived and conducted. Daniel Bell’s analysis in his book ‘China’s New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society’ is instructive here, but there are examples from other countries and cultures of traditional practices of public administration sidelined in the face of New Public Management that may be restored.
The Centre for Public Policy will be continuing its exploration of public policy, governance and management in the ‘Asian Century’ building on this initial panel discussion. As usual if you have any comments or would like to get involved in this or any other aspect of the Centre’s work, do get in touch.
Helen Sullivan
February 2012