Through the eye of clumsy policy-making: Poverty in a global environment
(This legal literature review was written in Spring 2014 for my undergraduate course “Public Management & Public Policy” at Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany. Copyright reserved. Warning: long article. Estimated reading time: ~13 mins)
Introduction
The rapidly developing and globalizing society is requiring more and more corporation and communication, both domestically and internationally, on dealing with complicated issues like climate change, financial crisis, and inequality. All of these issues have shared a common problem: as they cover a wide range of people and life aspects, it is hard to find a “perfect” solution which benefits all the organizations and individuals involved, so, a clumsy solution is preferred in these occasions, which means “policies that creatively combine all opposing perspectives on what the problems are and how they should be resolved” (Verweij et al, 2006).
In the paper “clumsy solutions for a complex world: the case of climate change”, the authors bring up cultural theory on four ways on organizing social relations on the distinction between the “grid-group” value: hierarchy, egalitarianism, individualism and fatalism with evaluation on each one of them to resolve the climate change problem. However, these ways all have some supporters but are not representative enough to cover the whole issue, and are complementary for a comprehensive solution. So, according to the authors, each one of the four approaches mentioned in culture theory derives some collective thinking and methods, but as they are all partial solutions for a big problem, it will be more balanced if they are combined. As a result, for policy-makers, based on the innovation of combining old ways of evaluating the society with the cultural theory to mediate social relations, they are “mandated to develop and implement policy on behalf of a democracy” (Verweij et al, 2006), which links “the effectiveness of attempts to tackle major social problems” and “the legitimacy of this process” (Verweij et al, 2006) together to reach the best turnout of a wicked problem. This paper will base on the theories in the mentioned paper and link to clumsy policy-making and the new public management, management, with some expansions into the case of poverty.
Clumsiness, public management, and democracy
The new public management, as being brought up as an exact concept by Hood (1991) which builds up on better management of government in corporation with some nongovernmental organizations, is a concept of combining different and creative ways of thinking, ideology and technology onto the administration of public affairs in order to better serve for “authority being spread out from a smaller to a larger number of actors” (Pollitt 2005), which is democracy, the foundation of the clumsy policy-making.
The idea of new public management is “correct for the irretrievable failures and even moral bankruptcy in the ‘old’ public management” (Keating 1989, Hood 1991), as it balances between the private sectors and public sectors. Also, by Hood’s definition, new public management is an “attraction of opposites”, because it challenges the traditional doctrines set up by the government by putting emphasis on public services and public factors. Though the ideology is based on social ills, it is already a relatively new approach to better operation of the government to fit into their required roles, better uses of power for wider outreach of democracy, and a remedy to better solve the social issues. As this new type of ideology aims to make the government function better, it is important to for the leaders to examine their positions on agenda setting and to carefully measure all the possible answers, because “the answers may not be self-evident and will require a collaborative process to make any kind of progress” (Grint 2008). In this case, the clumsy policy-making could be implemented into the actual uses under the structure of public management. By collecting information from interest groups, NGOs, individuals, entrepreneurship, the government could have a more comprehensive view on a specific problem and take more ideas into consideration; therefore it has more chances of coming out some clumsy solutions to tackle it to maximize the benefits for the widest majority.
There are scholars arguing that the new public management factor is already in decline because of the emerging transformation from the government to governance on a national level, as some of the pioneers are already starting to lead the trend of solving the twisted problems in an innovative way. In a global setting, governance — instead of government interventions — is gradually becoming the core of solving the wicked problems starting from some leading developed countries — for example, New Zealand and its public management reform — because it requires “civil and political leadership and responsibility” (Verweij et al, 2006) in the societal development, which is even more difficult for the countries which democracy is not even guaranteed. So, from this point of view, the spread of public management needs corporations between countries, from the developed ones which have both good economic situation and political systems, to the developing ones that lack support financially and politically. This has already become a megatrend of public management in which the intergovernmental corporation works “on top of the older tradition of individual country specialisms in public administration” (Hood 1991).
Then, what does clumsy policy-making mean? It is a fairly new concept, for which the authors are referring to a creative and flexible way of agenda-setting with consideration and correlation with different existing collective methods based on democracy. For a complicated issue like poverty, different individuals and organizations with different cultural values will have different, even complete opposite positions. So, this issue needs to be illustrated by the culture theory approach and try to be solved with clumsiness. Why is clumsy policy-making good and effective? It is because the process itself is “a form of action that focuses directly on fixing the problem itself, not a form of re-education or reskilling that fixes the people” (Grint 2008). In addition, as the solution needs to stand for as many possible methods as there exist, it requires “the clumsy solution for each rationality to be rational enough not to be withdrawn” (Hartmann, 2012), which needs the government — policymakers — to enhance its efficiency and opacity.
Public management is a theory, while clumsy policy-making is to put the theory into practice, which in a sense, is more detailed than public management. In comparison with public management, the clumsy policy-making requires more governance rather than direct control, more focus on the balance between the four approaches in cultural theory, and has higher requirement for a democratic base, even if public management has already been implemented to reach an “incorrupt” government. As a result, clumsy policy-making could be a more flexible and high demanding implementation of public management with more concrete executions. However, as for now, the new public management is still the main ideology of implementing governmental work, while more and more clumsy policy-making strategies are being applied.
Poverty: an example
One person out of three in this world lives in poverty. However, even if poverty is a global issue, it can be observed in different ways in different parts of the world, which leads to its definition defined by Giddens, can be divided into “absolute poverty” and “relative poverty”, with the former one referring to the maintenance of human beings on the subsistence, and the latter one depending on the cultural background of the society being measured without “a universal standard of deprivation” (Giddens, 2006). No matter what form it exists, as long as there is poverty, there is inequality in the society that needs to be solved.
Hierarchy is linked with welfare states on the topic of poverty, as the governments in each country set up the benefits for people that live in poverty or need life assistance. There are two ways to explain poverty, one is by the societal competition between the “winners” and the “losers”, with the latter one being in a disadvantage in the society and need governmental support out of natural or contrived reasons. Another approach draws people’s attention to the unequal conditions which made people feel hard to overcome. These are the main ways of the emergence of the welfare state: to help people change their unfavorable position in society. So, it can be seen as the way “to integrate society in an orderly way under the conditions of advanced industrialization” (Giddens, 2006) by making the redistribution of income more balanced and therefore shorten the gap between rich and poor in order to reduce poverty. However, the welfare state also depresses people’s desire for self-help and therefore cultivated the “dependency culture”, which could be an incentive of poverty.
Egalitarianism can be seen from the effort of the non-profit and charity organizations. This is very obvious from the increasing number of NGOs joining in the alliance of fighting against poverty globally, for example, the Oxfam International and Global Poverty Projects. For the NGOs like these, they are led by developed countries, which have enough funding and donations to support the developing countries, with long or short-term staff members equipped with professional skills that highly enhance the efficiency when implementing the projects in under-developed areas. So far, international NGOs are probably the best institutions and organizations for remedying the poverty issue. By campaigning, advertising, protesting and other ways to raise people’s awareness on poverty, many of the NGOs have already accumulate some social reputation which can be helpful in influencing governments’ agenda-setting procedure, which can also be linked to the individualism way on spreading the information to let people know the seriousness of poverty.
Individualism for poverty could come from the poor operation of the government. Also, for some parts of the world like Sub-Saharan Africa where the majority of population already lives in poor life, individualism also links with poor political regimes, abuse of power and bad control over the socioeconomic factors. For example, Zambia, a country in sub-Saharan Africa, and 47.4% of the total national income shared by the top 10% of the population and a GINI index of 57.5 (Source: World Bank Database. GINI index and income shared by the highest 10% in 2010, Zambia), with a government corruption rank of 83/177 (Source: Transparency International, Zambia 2013). Serious problems caused by individualism on governmental corruption and international trades, if no further supervision or corporation globally taking part, can only lead to more extreme situations of poverty. For the individualist interpretation of the poverty problem, the first task to come is to raise more people’s awareness of this issue. As a problem that exists everywhere, so close to people’s life as many people in Africa and South America are starving to death every day, but also so far from many people’s daily life, especially for the people that enjoy social democratic welfare and do not need to worry about maintaining a high life quality, poverty has caught some people’s attention, but the majority of people still don’t know how serious the problem is, because poverty “is not well understood, either by policymakers or the general public” (EAPN). Once people have an idea of how important the poverty issue is, they can have a better idea of how to be a part of solving it.
In contrast, while a lot of people work very hard but only get low income, there are people who just do nothing and wait for whatever comes, which is a symbol for fatalism in the current world. This type of people is called “discouraged worker”, which means they are unemployed, but not eagerly looking for a job out of personal reasons. Sarcastically, according to the BLS data, the discouragement takes the largest part in the discouraged workers, while the actual disabled people only take the smallest part (see appendix 1). Although some people may argue that the discouraged workers can somehow reduce the competition between the job hunters, too large numbers of them can deteriorate the country’s economy because of the shortage of labor in the long run. Fatalism condition lies behind concerning for every policy-making issue, as the policymakers have to preview that there will be some “parasites” that do not do anything but be dependent on the policies.
Of course, there should be some degrees of public control and management when taking actions on this issue, but only based on the policies made by the government is not enough to solve the problem of poverty. So, at this time, the clumsy policy-making ideology should be the best way: for the hierarchy approach which privileges social order and predictability, there should be an international corporative approach to a Universalist vision of welfare under the different operations in between the countries. There is not a standard for the setting up of welfare states around the globe for sure, but for the countries that do not have a well-rounded welfare state, they should try to perfect or reform the system; for the egalitarian which favors organizational help and equity, more NGOs like Oxfam are needed, and of course, more technical and personal support from the developed countries to their developing comrades; for individualism which focuses on economic factors and personal benefits, raise people’s awareness on the severe situation of world poverty, matching more investments and creative solutions on new strategies that fuel poverty solutions, for example, the higher efficiency of clean water reuse for absolute poverty and adjust the income distribution according to the infrastructure of manufacturing for relative poverty, are aspects that need to be considered. Though the clumsy way of making “all the ‘voices’ heard, and responded to by the others” (Verweij 2006, p822) can hurt some people’s profits on the unequal trades, this approach is the most beneficial one of all the methods because of its equity. Only from the three approaches on culture theory that many eye-catching issues inside poverty already emerge, it can be seen that how powerful a clumsy solution for poverty can be, once people come up with one.
On the other hand, despite that, while clumsy policy-making and the clumsy solutions to complicated problems are receiving more and more confidence in its viability and efficiency, there are also some shortcomings inasmuch as the societal limits or personal actions. Firstly, clumsy policy-making could be time-consuming. Although it is already faster than the “elegant” approaches mentioned by Grint as it does not have to be consensus on every aspect concerned, in order to reach what most people mutually agree on still takes time. On the same token, to make a good agenda is not easy, because it forces the policymakers to think about “their aims, ethos, and partnerships with the wider community” (Taylor, Hallgarden, 2014) — the more comprehensive a policy covers, the more aspects it has to take into account and more careful it should be on the distribution of focus between every issue. Secondly, which institution is going to carry out the clumsy policy-making process, and to what degree will countries implement the new policies, are still unsure. For example, the United Nations launched the “UN Millennium development goals and beyond 2015” on ending global poverty in 2010 with eight ambitious goals. There are think tanks and professional staff for further consultancy within countries or in the United Nations, and it is shown that there are worldwide decrease in many indicators like mortality and so on according to the World Bank database. However, it was not as fast as it could be, as for many countries poverty is not an essential part of the agenda. Thirdly, the existence of clumsy solution is unpredictable. According to Verweij (2006), for some issues, there could be some clumsy solutions; however, for some problems, no clumsy solution is available at least for now. At these times, the government and the policymakers should open the question to debate and organically combine different approaches together to form the best blueprint of solution.
Conclusion
Clumsy policy-making works together with public management to “minimize the ability of those in high office to sell or distort public decision” (Hood 1991) with the theoretical base of the culture theory; democracy demands clumsy policy-making, and clumsy policy-making, in response, promotes democracy. As a result, it can be seen clearly that the three aspects are tightly connected, and the clumsy solutions that come out of the “triangle” are of the best solutions to some complex problems. In the poverty case, it can be impossible to cut its root because of its complexity underlying in the society. However, continuous efforts, more global communication and corporations are essential to reach the “utopian” way of solving the problem. There are no fixed solutions for any of the complex issues, like poverty, without taking a partial way and reach the perfect result. Though not a global clumsiness is reached so far, more and more organizations and individuals are joining to make a change in domestic or international settings.
Ultimately, even if there are some disadvantages that somehow limit the development of clumsy policy-making, it is still a trend which has excellent prospects on dealing with global social issues that can reach the maximum positive outcome.
Selectively publishing some academic essays I wrote back in my undergraduate/graduate schools to look for inspirations on observing the world. Disciplined writing is the best writing! I welcome your feedback. Feel free to send me a message on Medium. Check out what I’ve been up to at my publication “The Everything Else Lab”.
Cheers, friends!
Yingzhao
