Beyond Public Policy: A Public Action Languages Approach 2019930814, 9781788118750, 9781788118743

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Beyond Public Policy

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NEW HORIZONS IN PUBLIC POLICY Series Editor: Wayne Parsons, Professor of Public Policy, Wales Governance Centre, Cardiff University, UK This series aims to explore the major issues facing academics and practitioners working in the field of public policy at the dawn of a new millennium. It seeks to reflect on where public policy has been, in both theoretical and practical terms, and to prompt debate on where it is going. The series emphasizes the need to understand public policy in the context of international developments and global change. New Horizons in Public Policy publishes the latest research on the study of the policymaking process and public management, and presents original and critical thinking on the policy issues and problems facing modern and post-modern societies. Titles in the series include: Analysis and Public Policy Successes, Failures and Directions for Reform Stuart Shapiro Public Policy Transfer Micro-Dynamics and Macro-Effects Edited by Magdaléna Hadjiisky, Leslie A. Pal and Christopher Walker Policy Experiments, Failures and Innovations Beyond Accession in Central and Eastern Europe Edited by Agnes Batory, Andrew Cartwright and Diane Stone How Far to Nudge? Assessing Behavioural Public Policy Peter John Policy Problems and Policy Design B. Guy Peters Interrogating Public Policy Theory A Political Values Perspective Linda Courtenay Botterill and Alan Fenna Public Policy Circulation Arenas, Agents and Actions Tom Baker and Christopher Walker Beyond Public Policy A Public Action Languages Approach Peter Kevin Spink

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Beyond Public Policy A Public Action Languages Approach

Peter Kevin Spink Centre for Public Administration and Government Studies, Getulio Vargas Foundation, São Paulo, Brazil

NEW HORIZONS IN PUBLIC POLICY

Cheltenham, UK + Northampton, MA, USA

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© Peter Kevin Spink 2019 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited The Lypiatts 15 Lansdown Road Cheltenham Glos GL50 2JA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2019930814 This book is available electronically in the Social and Political Science subject collection DOI 10.4337/9781788118750

ISBN 978 1 78811 874 3 (cased) ISBN 978 1 78811 875 0 (eBook)

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Contents Acknowledgements

vi

1 Collective concerns: from policy studies to public action

1

2 From publics, parishes and philanthropy to resistance and self-help: the civic side of public action

31

3 Social languages and the performative turn

58

4 Some active governments and their action languages

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5 Public action languages seen from elsewhere: from the Treaty of Rome and public administration reform to the arrival of public policies in Brazil

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6 From noisy rights to hybrid forums: languages of mobilization

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7 Beyond public policy: public action languages and the negotiation of possibilities

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References Index

202 227

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Acknowledgements For many years now, one of Latin America’s leading social psychologists Mary Jane Paris Spink and I have shared the same office as we moved from house to house in the UK and Brazil. Along the way our bookshelves have merged into each other, we have debated how and where to put which different academic subjects on what shelves and have discussed each other’s ideas and research. There is no way that I can adequately say thank you to her for all her many contributions. Some years ago, we visited Fernando de Noronha, a Brazilian archipelago in the South Atlantic. At that time, it was a very simple place and the main activity at night was to attend the lectures given by the members of the Brazilian Government’s Marine Biology Station. In one lecture a chance question led to an explanation of why dolphins ‘play’ in the bow waves of ships. The answer was: they are not playing. Ships are a threat to dolphins and it is the role of the younger, more agile male dolphins to attract their attention in order to protect the school. The suggestion then followed that the next time members of the audience got excited about the dolphins ‘playing’ around the bows of the small fishing boats that took tourists around the archipelago, we should look left or right and we would probably see the whole school passing by. The following day, when we went out by boat to explore the island, that was exactly what happened. Two or three dolphins attracted our attention while many more passed by about 50 yards away. There are lots of other ways of introducing the discussion of public action languages, but the dolphins and the biologist who answered the question deserve pride of place in the acknowledgements. As the following pages will point out, we are at times so fascinated by the words under the bow of the ship, especially public policy, that we don’t see all the other terms, expressions and social languages passing by. I have always worked on the assumption that there is no such thing as a personal idea in the social and applied social sciences. If some everyday happening kick-starts a different line of thought, it is most probable that other people are also moving along similar lines. Knowledge, or preferably knowledges, are a collective concern. If there is any reason for our individual work it is to keep arguments moving on. Within vi

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Acknowledgements

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the limits of my bibliographical ability, I have tried to be as fair as possible to the many scholars that I would have preferred to talk to but had to judge their views from their texts. Some of these were translations, which are always complicated; others were written at different points in time, which is also complicated. In the hope of avoiding misinterpretations, I have tried always to relate key arguments not as short citations but as part of the text in which they appeared. Isolated phrases, as will be seen, can be part of the problem. I apologize in advance for any errors or misinterpretations. The ideas that guide the book were put together in many discussions in São Paulo and Barcelona in which Mario de Aquino Alves, Lupicínio Iñiguez-Rueda, Gabriela Toledo Silva and Mary Jane Paris Spink were leading figures. There were echoes in earlier discussions at the Tavistock Institute in the 1970s, when the policy question was coming over the horizon, especially with John Friend, Michael Norris and John Stringer. But the book itself wouldn’t have happened without the support of Hal Colebatch and Robert Hoppe who chaired the 2014 International Political Science Association panel on Making Sense in Policy Practice at which Gabriela Toledo Silva and I tried out this argument in an international setting. Their comments and encouragement were more important than perhaps they realized. Key also in the production of the book was long-time research colleague Robert H. Wilson of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, University of Texas–Austin, who co-organized a recent book on the LBJ period (2015) and shared his impressions about the way public affairs was ‘done’ at that time. I was fortunate to spend time researching in the archives at the LBJ Library in Austin, and here very special thanks are due to archivists Brian C. McNerney and Allen Fisher who taught me about the day to day of the Johnson period and with whom I tested a number of the ideas of a public action languages approach. These are not just institutional acknowledgements, but the thanks of one researcher to another. I would never have got on to the importance of speechwriting as a collective production without them and they taught me more about the backstage of the White House than they can possibly imagine. I am grateful to the Editor of Cadernos de Gestão Pública e Cidadania for permission to draw on a previous article outlining the public action languages approach. Thanks also are due to the Brazilian National Council for Scientific Research (CNPq grants 308318/2008-0 and 306927/2011-0); the São Paulo State Research Foundation (FAPESP); the Ford Foundation for the support of the Public Management and Citizenship Program and for the constant and stimulating presence of its Senior

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Program Officer, Michael Lipsky; the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency and Ingemar Gustafsson; the Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV) and my colleagues in the Centre for Public Administration and Government Studies at the São Paulo School of Business Administration of the Fundação Getulio Vargas, including Mario Aquino Alves, Eliane Barbosa da Conceição and Maria do Carmo Meirelles Cruz for help with cases in Chapter 5. Finally, but certainly not least, special thanks are due to the Editorial team of Edward Elgar for their help with the manuscript, and Harry Fabian who was key in turning an idea into a possibility and finding six anonymous reviewers of the original proposal whose comments and critiques were of great help in shaping the final version.

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1. Collective concerns: from policy studies to public action Edward by the Grace of God, King of England, Lord of Ireland, and Duke of Guyan, to all to whom these presents shall come, sends greeting: we have seen the charter of the Lord Henry our father, sometime King of England, concerning the Forest in these words. (…) Know ye, that we, unto the honour of Almighty God, and for the salvation of our soul and the souls of our ancestors and successors, to the advancement of Holy Church, and amendment of our realm, of our mere and free will have given and granted, to all archbishops, bishops, earls, barons and to all of this our realm, these liberties, following, to be kept in our kingdom of England forever. (…) Every freeman may agest his own wood within our forest at his pleasure, and shall take his pawnage. Also we do grant, that every freeman may drive his swine freely without impediment through our demesne woods, for to agest them in their own woods, or else where they will. And if the swine of any freeman lie one night within our forest, there shall be no occasion taken thereof, whereby he may lose anything of his own. (…) (The Charter of the Forest contains part of the 1215 Magna Carta and with minor revision was re-issued in 1225. Transcript from The National Archives, UK)

INTRODUCTION Why would somebody start a book entitled Beyond Public Policy with a quotation from an early Norman English statute? Could it be because the Charter of the Forest is often referred to, along with the Magna Carta, as one of the moments in institutional history when it is possible to get a sense of some kind of discussion about liberties? There are references to the free movement of pigs and, in other parts, to other activities that together suggest that forests, especially the royal forests covering large parts of England, were far more complex in their physical make-up and in their political, economic and social importance than the scaled-down versions of woods that are current today.1 However, even though it may 1

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be comforting to trace the discussion of rights or budgeting (in the case of the Magna Carta) to these earlier events and social processes, they are beyond current comprehension for most scholars, apart from those highly skilled medievalists for whom this is a lifetime’s work. Nonetheless, and despite this somewhat impenetrable distance, there clearly was some kind of issue, concern or dilemma to be resolved. How those who took part in the discussions talked about this and what terms they used is unavailable; because there are no meeting notes, recordings or scraps of private memoirs. But they certainly got on with it somehow. Most current societies are what they are because, over the years, people as families, tribes, villages, nations and other forms of collective life, have found it useful to regard certain happenings as mutually important and have sought ways of talking about and doing something about them. Which people were considered as legitimate to engage in the definition of questions, actions and the form of their presentation never was, and continues never to be, synonymous with the totality of those present. Over the years the social ideas about how these different bits and pieces should be linked together changed, sometimes dramatically, and will continue to do so.2 As the years passed, these different ways of thinking and talking about who, what, when and how began to be brought together under what is today called the discussion of government and governing. The Charter of the Forest was just one of many moments in which, because it was registered, it is possible to get a small glimpse of these social processes in action. There were many other moments before this that have left their traces in buildings, seals, drawings and other icons. There are glimpses in traditional verse, religious and early philosophical texts and, along with the introduction of printing, important analyses of the broader flow of intellectual ideas.3 But, until recently, it has been very difficult to get much sense of the more practical side and especially the discussions of the actions themselves. That is, to ask how people talked to one another, framed their concerns, decided who to listen to, where to seek guidance and what to do. Beyond Public Policy is concerned with part of this ongoing flux of ideas. Starting from the empirical recognition that public policy is currently ‘the’ articulating concept for talking about government in action, it wonders what happened to the many other forms of discussing and doing public affairs that were present before policy began to move to the centre of the stage, in the 1970s and 1980s. How did actions in the public arena happen in other moments, what did governments do when they didn’t have policy and what happened to the terms, expressions and meanings that they used? Did these different action languages bow down and rearrange themselves within the organizing characteristics of this

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new and clearly important concept? Did they become obsolete, or are they still around and what does this say about the dynamics of public affairs? How central in fact is public policy; is it ‘the’ synonym for the work of government? To answer these and other questions it is necessary to get beyond public policy and, as it were, look at it from the outside. To ask what was around before, what is still around today and what may be currently emerging. For the social scientist faced with the challenge of learning from history, even from recent history, it is easy to fall into the trap of reading history from the present to the past, or, as historians say, ‘reading history backwards’ and to assume that all earlier peoples had governments, forms of representation, public agendas, budgets, policies and such like.4 It may be helpful to organize material in certain of today’s categories as a way of indicating the type of question under study, but the danger comes when this is taken as a description of what was actually happening. Indeed, in many cases and until recently, nobody would have a clue about what is meant by most of the current terms in use for discussing governing or, if they were used, it would be in a very different manner. In addition, as Thompson pointed out in contrasting the complexity of the actions of the English crowd in the eighteenth century with the modern view of uncontrollable riots: ‘It is difficult to re-imagine the moral assumptions of another social configuration. It is not easy for us to conceive that there may have been a time, within a smaller and more integrated community, when it appeared “unnatural” that any man should profit from the necessity of others’ (1971, p. 131). Why, it may well be asked, such concern with public policy? After all, isn’t it obvious that there are policies? Today, if there was a panel to select the one contemporary expression most present when politicians, journalists, academics and international advisors talk about responsible public affairs and government in action, it is likely that this will be some variant of public policy. It seems so natural to talk about policy documents or policy advisors and there are many thousands of scholars, students, courses, conferences, books, politicians and public sector workers for whom the world of public policies is as real as night and day. Yet, as the different chapters will show, it is only one amongst many ways of talking and doing public affairs and, in its current form, dates from the end of the 1960s in the USA, the 1970s in the UK, the 1980s in France and Spain and the 1990s in Brazil, amongst others. Humankind is where it is because it never stopped tinkering with its basic rules, concerns and their resulting procedures and collective forms. In order for that to happen, people had to meet in talk and there is no reason to assume that such talk was consensual. Equally, the notion of

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government and the practice of governing brings certain assumptions about who does what for whom, which leads to other assumptions about how this takes place and the different social action languages in which this takes place. Government and public policy are only two of these, budgeting and planning are others, public administration is another, and while government has had a relatively long life as an expression, with public administration somewhat shorter, policy is a relative newcomer. Yet, in this short time, it has come to dominate the way people talk about doing public administration and government as a central component of the democratic order. Policy, then, seems a good idea; good ideas are almost by definition useful and the public sector has long been a source of, and a market for, good ideas. Indeed, as Beyond Public Policy will argue, there is no problem in public policy being just one more contribution to an expanding universe of social ideas that different parts of humanity create for themselves in order to do and describe certain relations and actions. Nor is it a question of being right or wrong. Lots of people use the notion. It seems to create bridges between different parts of society, connecting citizens to politicians, giving meaning to the activities of administrators, enabling political parties to vie for public attention, and it allows academics to comment on what to do about a wide range of issues. As long as there are themes, topics, issues and questions of public concern, there will also be ideas, arguments, concepts and techniques for actions in relation to these concerns. Public policy is a language for action that is shared by many people. It is a social language: part professional, part political and part everyday. As a concept, it may seem at times abstract, as also are themes like justice, but doing justice is as performative as making public policy. Social languages are comfortable for those who use them and policy, in this sense, is no different; it makes sense of a part of the world. However, there are problems. First, although it may be seen as central it is only one of a number of similar social languages, equally part professional, part political and part everyday, that can be found in and around government action. Take, for example, budgeting, finance, planning, diplomacy, rights, systems, directives, decisions and laws, as well as the many different versions of public administration or management, amongst others. They are rarely hierarchically or logically related, frequently have their own professional roots and can be found in different departments, ministries and branches of government. Some of them have been in place for a long time before policy, others are more recent or emerging. Some were seen as equally central in their times and others may be vying for centrality. They are also languages which are comfortable to be positioned within, from

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which to make sense of the world. Within each there will be different approaches and even different theories – just as in public policy. Second, there is the problem with centrality itself. Ideas will arise which help solve certain questions and offer frames for organizing affairs. In doing so they will create their own social languages but, in time, others will appear to offer better possibilities. Currently, in a number of areas it is governance that seems to be moving ahead, even though the rhetorical structure for this proposition has curious similarities to what has been said before. Here for example are the editors of a recent handbook on Governance: Concepts and approaches come and go in the social sciences. Some of them are more than passing moments and become steadily growing research areas that attract increasing scholarly attention. Some of the new research areas are stabilized and consolidated and gradually take the form of new paradigms that signal a scientific turn and give rise to a significant reorientation of the scholarly activities of researchers and the ideas and actions of practitioners. The research on governance has recently evolved into such a paradigm. Although the notion of governance can be traced far back into history, the interest in governance surged in the 1990s and has grown ever since. Today, governance is one of the most frequently used social science concepts in the world, as any internet search will readily confirm. A vast array of researchers, research centers, journals and conferences are devoted to the study of governance, and many new theories of governance have been promulgated over the last two decades. (Ansell and Torfing, 2016, p. 1)

Centrality might make normative sense as a device for organizing books and courses, but if government action, governing in the broader sense, is performed by a heterogeneity of different social languages, is there any practical sense in centrality; that is, of a specific social language that somehow holds everything together? Some of the languages may interact with each other on similar terms, but others may have their distinctive hierarchical views on which is more dominant. Others, again, may inhabit very different parts of the public landscape and go their own way. For example, the UK Secretary of State for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, by Command of Her Majesty, presented the National Planning Policy Framework to Parliament in July 2018 (Cm 9680). The document uses planning, policies, framework, law, development plan, decision, planning policies, international obligations, statutory requirements, ministerial statements, planning system, sustainable development, overarching objectives, presumptions, plan-making and decision-taking – all in the space of the opening three pages. All those who are active in the field of housing, communities and local government presumably understand what is being said and know how to

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position themselves within the text. But does it make sense to talk about an overriding and central ‘something’ that holds all this together? If these first two problems raise serious doubts about the idea of public policy, or anything, as the main articulator, or even synonym, of government in action, a third is far more crucial. Is collective life merely a question of government and the governed – even if both are ‘the people’? How do the parishes, the friends of the library, the local historical society, the neighbourhood babysitting circles and community associations fit in? What about the many charities, philanthropic bodies and micro-collective soup kitchens, street parties and animal rescue centres? What about the pressure groups and social movements, interfaith networks, community activists and street protests which also have their action languages, and which are just as social in their own ways? They are also heterogeneous, also comfortable to be within, and also are ways of making sense of parts of the world. Is governing just about representation or is it also about those who independently voice the concerns that they feel are present: the different publics and their problems (Dewey, 1927) or, in today’s terms, their issues and rights? The result, as the book will seek to show, is that it is necessary to go beyond public policy and recognize the many other social languages for public action present, not as auxiliaries but as equally active players in and around public affairs. Present in the not necessarily harmonious relationships between governments, representatives and the people they serve; and present in those areas of action where, for varying reasons, the public or public(s) prefer to get on and do it themselves. Understanding these differences and learning how to create and negotiate possibilities, rather than seeking to impose new centralities, is the challenge to be faced. As a final point, going beyond public policy means looking outside public policy at what is also happening in other social languages. Public policy as currently understood appeared gradually in different western democracies in the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. It follows therefore – rather than is a precursor of – many of the key developments of the modern welfare states. If it is not key in their formation, what then is its role and relationship? Why did it become so popular? The answer to this is beyond the scope of the book and would require a different form of study – but there are at least suggestions that can be made.

SOCIAL LANGUAGES AND PUBLIC ACTION Paying attention to the performative aspect of language has been a fairly constant theme in the social sciences since the late 1950s, stimulated to a

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large extent by the debate in philosophy on language and action. In different ways, some more radical than others, the result was a swing from the idea of an independently existing out-there reality to one that was performed through language. This swing, often described as the linguistic turn because of the 1967 volume edited by Rorty, also resulted in a number of different proposals and ideas, such as social construction, post-empiricism and postmodernism, as well as expressions such as enactment and structuration, that were concerned with the more specific performative aspects. Overall, it is much less a paradigm, school of thought or a specific theory; rather the move is to multiple ways of looking at the way words produce what takes place rather than just describe it. Furthermore, it assumes, in different ways, that people are conscious performers. They are very aware that the answer ‘I do’ to a question about who wants chocolate sauce on their ice cream is very different to the same ‘I do’ in a marriage ceremony. Austin introduced the idea of performatives in his 1962 text on how to do things with words and later Butler was to use the term in an important text on gender and feminist theory (1988). Amongst the different consequences of these ideas was a growing attention to discourse analysis and discursive practices and, more specifically for Beyond Public Policy, to the way that social meanings circulate in the day to day within scientific and professional communities – what have been called interpretive repertoires.5 In a similar vein, Bakhtin saw social language as ‘a discourse peculiar to a specific stratum of society (professional, age group, etc.) within a given social system at a given time’ (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 430). In his later essay on speech genres, Bakhtin provides a further definition when discussing the inseparable link between style and genre: ‘A particular function (scientific, technical, commentarial, business, every day) and the particular conditions of speech communication specific for each sphere give rise to particular genres, that is certain relatively stable thematic, compositional and stylistic types of utterances.’ (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 64). Hence, when people are described as public policy advisors, or there is talk about policy making, policy processes, policy documents or policy presentations, these terms will be found as part of repertoires that both make sense of policy and, in doing so, are policy themselves. Similarly, planning, budgeting and the many other public action practices are also performative social languages, or, to use an earlier expression of Fleck, thought collectives (1935). They are ways of enacting public affairs. To argue that there was a very effective public life before policy, that these different social languages are still very present and that they will continue, along with policy, to play their part if or when the next centre

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stage social language comes along, is not a straightforward task. To begin with, handbook after handbook seems to be able to extend the field of policy studies into new epistemological and critical dimensions.6 The impression is given that there is nothing that policy cannot do and no end to its elasticity. Also, the frequent mention of new paradigms coupled with the characteristics of many disciplinary social epistemologies,7 suggests that there is little need to look at what went before; knowledge is driven by the assumption that what is recent is what is important. However, the action languages of the English crowd of the eighteenth century didn’t disappear with the arrival of different forms of economic relationship, labour unions and new patterns of representation and pressure. Observers and chroniclers may have switched their attentions, but social languages remain social. A few may disappear without trace, others blend into new circumstances, new ones will appear, but some will keep on making sense of the world. They can be found in the corridors of public sector agencies, in the tumult of protest and campaigns, in speeches and documents or in the solidarity of community-based service provision. Being performative, they may cooperate or compete with one another for place and space, or at times just go their own way, living parallel lives. It is not a question of preferring one over the other, but of paying more attention to these different attempts to order collective life, including, most importantly, the assumption that collective lives can be reduced to what governments do. What is under discussion in Beyond Public Policy is not a change from one central articulating concept to another, but the very idea of the central concept itself. Paying more attention to the performative aspects of social languages means recognizing that they are socio-technical. They introduce ways of doing things, give new meanings to old objects, create new objects which in turn create new meanings and institutionalities, as well as suggesting different ways of seeing things; they can be soft technologies8 but produce a lot of hard bits and pieces. Discussion on traffic control may acquire the notion of calming or taming; from somewhere will come the idea of putting raised bumps on the roads in key areas; speed bumps become known as sleeping policemen in certain parts of the world, giving a different social twist on a very solid object. But these new microinstitutions are by no means inevitable and are also open to challenge. Ahmed Kathadra devoted his life from an early age to the South African freedom struggle and was sentenced to life imprisonment along with Nelson Mandela at the 1963 Rivonia Trial. In his memoirs, he reflected on getting used to life after being released in 1989:

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As for language use, efficiency aids and jargon, I recall how activists in the 1940s and 1950s managed to organize the Passive Resistance Campaign and the Defiance Campaign, the boycotts of potatoes, tobacco and buses, and the Congress of the People without the benefit of consultants, events organisers, brainstorming sessions, strategic workshops, think tanks, key note addresses, organograms and so on. I still have not fully adjusted to these, and I suspect my comrades are exasperated whenever I question the necessity for these so-called aids. (Kathadra, 2004, p. 348)

Passive resistance campaigns, boycotts and congresses are just as much a part of public affairs and collective life as are votes, plans, budgets and policies; and they too have their social languages and repertoires, key meanings that circulate and make sense of activities. It is difficult, when thinking about collective life, in the west not to be influenced by a common theme in Judaism, Islam and Christianity: concern with the unknown other. There are similar elements in the east, the north and the south; indeed, if there weren’t it would probably have been impossible to arrive at the idea of universal human rights and its underpinning notions of dignity and humanity in the 1940s. Faith-based organizations, at least in western public sector literature, are rarely talked about when the subject of social policy and non-governmental organizations comes up. Yet, as service providers and first responders in times of crisis they are a ubiquitous presence in thousands of communities. Parish halls, synagogues and mosques are the meeting places of associations, playgroups, debating societies all throughout the west, and their members and leaders are often at the forefront of a number of key public issues, especially those linked to inequality. Indeed, the many different ways of ordering collective life go on even further, beyond the spheres of government and religion to include other notions of community such as neighbourhood associations, assembly halls, meeting rooms, clubs and societies which, with the technologies of printing and writing, enabled people to produce minutes, pass out pamphlets and register events. Civil society, as it is called today and somewhat different to Ferguson’s earlier conception of the dedication to civil concerns (1767), should never be taken as a synonym of collective cooperation with government. Long before the current arrangements of relatively stable political parties, general franchise, transparency and accountability, the different social languages of protest played and continue to play their part. All of this, and more, is collective life. Here, Rosanvallon’s approach to the political and its history provides another important starting point: As I understand it, ‘the political’ is at once a field and a project. As a field it designates the site where the multiple threads of the lives of men and women

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Beyond public policy come together, what allows all of their activities and discourses to be understood in an overall framework. It exists in virtue of the fact that there exists a ‘society’ acknowledged by its members as a whole that affords meaningfulness to its constituent parts. As a project, the political means the process whereby a human collectivity, which is never to be understood as a simple ‘population’, progressively takes on the face of an actual community. It is, rather, constituted by an always contentious process whereby the explicit or implicit rules of what they can share and accomplish in common – rules which give a form to the life of the polity – are elaborated. (Rosanvallon, 2006, p. 34)

This is where the second part of the book’s title requires an introduction. The notion of public action has been around in a civic vein for a number of years as, for example in Hirschman’s (1982) discussion of public and private interests: ‘Public action, action in the public interest, striving for the public happiness – these all refer to action in the political realm, to involvement of the citizen in civic or community affairs’ (p.6). At around the same time, it began to assume a more precise definition that has carried it through much of the last 30 years, especially in French pragmatic sociology. Sometimes, in translation, there is a tendency to switch action publique into policy, but there is a subtle and at the same time quite radical distinction between the two that is followed by a majority of authors.9 In an earlier key text on the discussion of development and hunger, Dreze and Sen (1989) used public action to mean: ‘not merely the activities of the state, but also social actions taken by members of the public – both “collaborative” (through civic cooperation) and “adversarial” (through social criticism and political opposition)’ (p. vii). Thoenig (1997) will make the same distinction in pointing out that the state does not have the monopoly over the public nor have the public given up their control over what they see as public or of their own autonomy for action. The same line can be found in the introduction to Laborier and Trom’s (2003) collection of readings on historical and sociological aspects of public action: Public action is understood, in the broad sense, to cover the activities of the public powers and more widely all activity articulated in a public space and in reference to a common good. This extensive definition brings together in the same area of activity, those actions directly as a result of public authority and those that come from the ordinary activities of citizens as they show their concerns about collective life (p. 11).10

It is not uncommon to find reference to ‘action by the public’ in discussions of public affairs. However, often this is reduced to either pressuring for change, for example through civil society organizations, or

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as a reference to the fact that most public services depend on public collaboration to be effective. Beyond Public Policy goes beyond this ‘add-on’ approach to public affairs and takes the ordinary actions of citizens, for and from themselves, as equally important as those of government and as creating distinctive arenas of public action. As will be seen as the book progresses, at many times in the past and the present, actions take place not because ‘government isn’t doing something, therefore …’ but because of a collective and independent sense that ‘we must do something about …’. Putting the two parts of the title together, the field of public action suggests an ever-changing and complex arena which is formed by these very different social or action languages. There is no presumption that there is a logical relationship and, despite professional or disciplinary pressures, much less a hierarchical ordering. Policy is in there somewhere, but that is all. For all practical purposes, it is only one in a line of new kids on the block when seen from some parts of the governing side of affairs and totally ignored in many other areas of public action.11

GETTING THINGS DONE WITH OTHER WORDS – THE EXAMPLE OF DIRECTIVES At this point it is useful to bring in an example of just one of these many other terms. Article 288 of the Treaty of Lisbon (2007) on the functioning of the European Union (EU) establishes five ways in which the EU can exercise its competence. These are: regulations, directives, decisions, recommendations and opinions. Directives are ‘binding, as to the result to be achieved, upon each Member State to which it is addressed, but shall leave to the national authorities the choice of form and methods’. In the aftermath of the Second World War the same term, directives, with the same operational meaning, was to play a key role in the recuperation of daily life in Germany. There, the Allied military leaders faced not only the questions of demobilization and security, but the problems and traumas of different peoples in shock, without food, work and often without shelter. Germany had been divided into four occupied zones (one for each of the Allies) and, while there was also an overall Allied Control Council, each zone was more or less independent in the early stage. A recent study by Knowles (2014) has traced part of the story of reconstruction in the British zone. The situation being faced was catastrophic:

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Beyond public policy In May 1945 Germany was in chaos. Observers reported that the destruction in some of the larger cities had to be seen to be believed with, for example, 66% of the houses in Cologne destroyed, and in Düsseldorf 93% uninhabitable. The economy was at a standstill and no central government remained to implement instructions issued by the Allies. Millions of people were homeless, or attempting to return to homes that no longer existed (…) Field-Marshall Montgomery, appointed Commander-in-Chief and Military Governor of the British zone of occupation on 22 May 1945, later recalled the immediate problems they faced: what to do with 1.5 million German POWs, a further million wounded German soldiers, similar numbers of civilian German refugees and Displaced Persons of many different nationalities, no working transport or communication services, industry and agriculture at a standstill, a scarcity of food and the risk of starvation and epidemics of disease. He added that: ‘I was a soldier and had not been trained to handle anything of this nature …’. (Knowles, 2014, p. 2)

The language they used to talk about what was necessary was the same language of directives that can be found in the Treaty of Lisbon in 2007. Directives say what is to be achieved but leave open the choice of how. Directives were, and continue to be, a long-standing part of military language, something which all military leaders at that time had been actively using for the previous seven years. In the words of Montgomery’s Deputy, General Brian Robertson, written in January 1946: The directives were not many and much was left to the initiative of individuals … the (military) detachments entered into a land of desolation and bewilderment. Government above the level of the parish council had ceased. Everything was in disorder; people were stunned and helpless … ‘First things first’ was the motto when the Military Government first raised its sign in Germany. (Cited in Knowles, 2014, p. 3)

The directives focused on rebuilding economic and political life. In Knowles’ description: As early as July 1945, less than three months after the end of the war, he (Montgomery) issued a new draft directive to British army commanders and Control Commission heads of division, finalised on 10 September 1945. Unlike earlier wartime directives, the new directive identified steps to be taken to reconstruct German economic and political life, address shortages of food, fuel and housing, improve transport facilities, re-open schools, permit freedom of assembly, licence political parties and prepare for future elections. Con O’Neill a senior Foreign Office official and leading authority on Germany, minuted that the directive ‘gives me, in general, the impression that British Military Govt. has now embarked on a policy of Full Speed Ahead for German rehabilitation’. (Knowles, 2014, p. 3)

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The results were by and large successful in many areas, much more so than the desperate consequences of the First World War (one of which will play a part in the next chapter), and, despite problems with housing and food supply, they were able to provide an important period of stability. Directives are a social action language like many others. They identify goals and responsibilities, but like in the Treaty of Lisbon, do not go into the methods. They were also part of an action language that was familiar to those involved, even though the themes and issues were totally new. Different to current notions of policy, there is no mention of implementation; it is assumed that the directives are viable and that those involved are able to find a way through. As Knowles reports, the results were considerably more effective than could have been imagined. Policy was ‘full speed ahead’ an expression of a stance, posture or position, as will be discussed in the following section and whose variants, such as ‘let’s get on with it’, will also be found in Chapter 4. While article 288 of the EU does not use policy, the word can certainly be found when the concern is with different issue areas, such as the common agricultural policy (CAP): The common agricultural policy (CAP) is aimed at helping European farmers meet the need to feed more than 500 million Europeans. Its main objectives are to provide a stable, sustainably produced supply of safe food at affordable prices for consumers, while also ensuring a decent standard of living for 22 million farmers and agricultural workers. (EU Common Agricultural Policy, Agriculture and Rural Development, overview, June 2016)

The CAP has hundreds of different actions in different areas, and half an hour wandering around the CAP section of the EU website will be enough to identify all sorts of different ways of talking about the different ongoing actions. As the example suggests and the book proposes, no one expression is correct nor is there a specific definition for each term that enables them to be placed in order on a conceptual bookshelf. Rather, it is to take all of them seriously and look at the realities they enact and perform.

POLICY BEFORE THE POLICY SCIENCES If public policy and public policies are newcomers to talking about action in public affairs – less so in some countries and action arenas, more so in others – the same is not the case with the word policy itself. Some of its different threads of meaning are continuous and others discontinuous,

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and as with the emergence of ideas and notions in other areas and fields, it is certainly not a question of asking where, when and much less why. It appears, as police, in relation to order or local government in various versions in different languages, and some kind of generic notion of policy – as a course of action or position in relation to action that is adopted as advantageous or expedient – can already be found in the English language when the new technology for printing books helped stimulate the standardization of the language in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.12 Here are two much-used examples: honestie the best policie (1599) or thys was the crafty polycye of the clergye (1544).13 Another thread of meaning can be found in the materialism that arrives along with notions of risk, insurance and, later, Lloyd’s of London: policy as a written promise. Who does not have an insurance policy kept safely somewhere from the days before digital transactions. Adding in other bits and pieces related to the polis, police, polity, even government itself, it is not too difficult to imagine the gradual social, organizational and inter-organizational sensemaking (Weick, 1995) that will lead to a ‘posture towards action’, or of the importance of some kind of declaration about how a person, community or society can be expected to act in certain circumstances, including in the public arena. Without falling into the trap of suggesting a magical starting point, certainly one of the early areas of government in which this seems to happen is that of foreign affairs – see, for example, the foreign affairs speeches collected by Jones (1914), a member of the UK parliament, in his book on British oratory. Here is the Earl of Chatham, otherwise William Pitt the Elder, addressing the House of Lords in London on 22 January 1770 on the topic of the defence of weaker states: My Lords, I cannot agree with the noble duke, that nothing less than an immediate attack upon the honour or interest of this nation can authorize us to interpose in defence of weaker states, and in stopping the enterprises of an ambitious neighbour. Whenever that narrow, selfish policy has prevailed in our councils, we have constantly experienced the fatal effects of it. By suffering our natural enemies to oppress the Powers less able than we are to make a resistance, we have permitted them to increase their strength; we have lost the more favourable opportunities of opposing them with success; and found ourselves at last obliged to run every hazard, in making that cause our own, in which we were not wise enough to take part while the expense and danger might have been supported by others. (Jones, 1914/2004, p. 7)

Pitt used the term policy very much as posture or position, but with a focus: the action of governments to other governments. As there is no information on how Jones made the selection, it can only be assumed that

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they were at least a partial cross-section of parliamentary themes and addresses. In his collection, policy appears in the text of many speeches on foreign affairs (for example George Canning, Foreign Secretary, addressing the House of Commons on negotiations relative to Spain, 30 April 1823), but it would only be much later that it appears in the titles of speeches themselves. (For example, the speech of John Bright on ‘Principles of Foreign Policy’ delivered in Birmingham, 1858, or of Gladstone on the ‘Right Principles of Foreign Policy’ in West Calder, Midlothian in 1879). This idea of policy as posture or position, with its fairly long history of usage, can be considered almost as vernacular, part of the everyday horizon of rhetorical possibilities of at least that part of the population that shared a more general dialect or were able to read similar texts. It can be found in other fields than that of foreign affairs but it is certainly in the sphere of relations between countries that it was most present in public life. Indeed, it could be argued that, as the western world very slowly settled down to the idea of nations, the idea of knowing how countries stood on certain issues became an important tool for governments and leaders. To take a stance on issues or problems requires recognizing some set of affairs or questions as problematic. It also implies that there will be topics on which, for a variety of reasons, there might be no positions to be held; a theme that will appear in later chapters. In 1867, journalist Walter Bagehot published a collection of essays with the title The English Constitution. The following citation is from the introduction: No one can approach to an understanding of the English Institutions, or of others which being the growth of many centuries exercise a wide sway over mixed populations, unless he divide them into two classes. In such constitutions there are two parts (not indeed separable with microscopic accuracy, for the genius of great affairs abhors nicety of division): first, those which excite and preserve the reverence of the population, – the dignified parts, if I may so call them; and next, the efficient parts, – those by which, it in fact, works and rules. There are two great objects which every constitution must attain to be successful, which every old and celebrated one must have wonderfully achieved: – every constitution must first gain authority, and then use authority; it must first win the loyalty and confidence of mankind, and then employ that homage in the work of government. (Bagehot, 1867, p. 4–5)

In describing a host of different traditional customs and practices and publishing them together under a single title, Bagehot, as Burke and Pallares-Burke comment (2016), could be said to have invented the

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British constitution. It was certainly something that he and his fellow Victorians were fond of discussing. The mix of acts of parliament, court judgements, conventions and charters was never coded and keeps getting added to, but this does not stop the British from feeling a sense of constitutionality nor of his book being studied, even today, by ministers and monarchs. Bagehot’s text is an early account of how the different institutions of politics happen in the day to day. His delicate demolition of the belief in the legal separation of institutions, through his analysis of monarchical powers and the executive power of Cabinet, is an early warning not to assume normative definitions as actual descriptions and has much to contribute to the current discussion on ‘policy work’. Perhaps the best indication of his influence is that, even today, the journal which he helped transform into the world’s leading economic weekly (The Economist) continues to publish a regular commentary on British life and politics under his name. The few times that Bagehot used the word policy were, as could have been expected given previous comments, as: foreign, international or national policy, or as the policy of parliament, government, department (the English word for ministry), monarch or presidents and assemblies in the case of comparisons with other countries; in all cases, policy as posture, position, or as an approach to be taken. In the USA, influential texts were beginning to be produced on a related question, that of the separation of politics from administration. Woodrow Wilson will talk about the legislative and policy making functions of government but, as he puts it, this does not mean that the administrator is a passive instrument: ‘the distinction is between general plans and special means’ (1887, p. 212). Shortly after in Politics and Administration, Goodnow (1900/2012) will talk about the two functions of government: politics and administration. He makes this distinction through the idea of operations necessary to the expression of the will of the state or in operations necessary to the execution of that will. ‘Politics has to do with policies or expressions of the state will. Administration has to do with the execution of these policies’ (p.18). Here, even though the language appears familiar, general plans, special means and expressions of state will are still much more linked to the notion of major areas of posture or approach than to our present-day expressions. Moving from individual examples to a more archival approach, an important source for reference is the network of official deposit libraries where publishers are required to deposit copies of their publications (a practice that began in France in 1537). In the case of the UK deposit libraries, concern is specifically with British publications, but there are also other English language exchanges. Despite restrictions, and

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assuming that giving titles to books is a social process that happens in conversations, the results can be taken as at least indicative. The Cambridge University library archives provide support for the view that this early usage of policy as ‘position or stance on some important concern’ was the lead contender for meaning up until the period shortly before the Second World War. In 1826 Joseph Priestley published his Lectures on History and General Policy: To Which is Prefixed an Essay on a Course of Liberal Education for Civil and Active Life and a year later William Phelan published in Dublin a History of the Policy of the Church of Rome in Ireland. Later, in 1905, J.L. Le Breton Hammond wrote Towards a Social Policy: Or Suggestions for Constructive Reform about the early reform movements, and there were histories of British Colonial Policy in 1905 (H.E. Egerton), the Cambridge History of British Foreign Policy in 1922 (A.W. Ward and G.P. Gooch) and of French Colonial Policy (S.H. Roberts) in 1929. Economic policy makes an appearance in 1923 with J.S. Reyes’ text on the Legislative History of America’s Economic Policy towards the Philippines in 1923 and education in 1931 with Nicholas Hans’ History of Russian Educational Policy. A very similar pattern emerges from the British Library catalogue where there are 4,110 different printed items with policy in or near the title from 1600–1950. Of these, most of the earlier uses are religious and it is only in the nineteenth century that foreign affairs (diplomacy, war and the colonies) start to take over. There are as many items in the 35 years from 1901 as there were in the whole century before (approximately 1,200) and a similar number in the 15 years from 1936. This increase in usage has to be offset in part by the growth of the book and printing industry as a whole, but the range of titles points to the changes taking place. In the first part of the twentieth century, foreign policy has been joined by commercial policy, later economic policy and the policy of specific political parties (for example, liberal policy). Between 1936– 1950 this has been added to again with transportation policy, workers’ nutrition and social policy, educational policy in India, but still variants of foreign affairs are very much around. As to public policy, there are only 67 items in the period 1936–1950, mostly from the USA. These are mainly items on economics, a few on secondary education and a collection of classroom materials for discussing current issues of public policy in schools and colleges by the American Political Science Association (Beard and Smith, 1936). Elsewhere, as with Roosevelt’s Social Security Bill of 1935 and even the wartime meetings chaired by Beveridge in 1942 mentioned in Chapter 4, there is very little if any mention of policy in the way that it

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is understood today – especially when it acquired the extension ‘public policy’. Even in the few places that policy appears in Lasswell’s classical text Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (1936), it remains in the vernacular. It is not in the index nor in the contents and, when it appears, it is either as national policy or public relations policy and certainly has no similarity to his later arguments. Those who seek to place the definition and paternity of public policy in this book are mistaken. To finish, here is policy very much as it has appeared in these different texts and citations, reflected in Webster’s second edition of the New International Dictionary of the English Language, published in Springfield, MA, in 1934: 1. Civil or ecclesiastical polity; government; the science of government; also a government or state. Now Rare. 2. Prudence or wisdom in the management of public and private affairs; wisdom; sagacity; shrewdness; wit; as, the policy of such a course is doubtful. 3. A wise scheme or device; a contrivance, esp. a cunning contrivance; a stratagem; trick. Now Rare. 4. Management, administration, or procedure based primarily on temporal or material interest, rather than on higher principles; hence more or less disparagingly, worldly wisdom; as, he allowed policy to outweigh honor. 5. A settled or definite course or method adopted and followed by a government, institution, body or individual. Honesty is the best policy. Old Saying.

WHY ARE POLICY SCIENCES DIFFERENT? If there is to be one key distinction introduced in The Policy Sciences (Lerner and Lasswell, 1951) it is not in the application of sciences to aid government action; although concern with the contributions of social research, its methods and the role of social scientists in relation to research policy was part of the book. Nor is it in Charles Easton Rothwell’s preface to the book on behalf of the Hoover Institute, which provides a very workable and matter-of-fact definition of policy as it was at the time; no longer the policy of foreign affairs but not yet the fully-fledged policy of the 1970s. Rather, it lies in the first of Lasswell’s two-part policy orientation: ‘A policy orientation has been developed that cuts across the existing specializations. The orientation is twofold. In part, it is directed to the policy process, and in part toward the intelligent needs of policy’ (1951, p. 3). He went on to describe: ‘In the realm of policy, more attention has been given to planning, and to improving the information on which staff and operational decisions are based. We have

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become more aware of the policy process as a suitable study in its own right …’ (p.3). Technical and scientific knowledge, albeit in a less organized way, had already been at the service of governments in the previous century (as, for example, in the case of Pasteur) and academic counsel even longer (deLeon, 1989); Policy Sciences would certainly make this relationship clearer. However, the big change lay in the proposal to study the policy process itself, for in doing so it helped to turn policy from a vernacular expression, freely used and readily understood, into a self-conscious discipline. The proposal to study a process presumes, within the broad neo-empiricist framework of the time, that this process exists, independently of the observer. Lasswell was very clear about the novelty of the proposal: ‘The expression “policy sciences” is not in general use in the United States, although it is occurring more frequently now than before. Perhaps it should be pointed out that the term is not to be taken as a synonym for any expression now in current use among scholars’ (Lasswell, 1951, p. 4). Given that the 1951 book and Lasswell’s chapter is the most commonly cited starting point of policy studies, it is worth repeating some key parts to be clear about where Lasswell was both going to and coming from. The word ‘policy’ is commonly used to designate the most important choices made in organized or in private life. We speak of ‘government policy’, ‘business policy’ or ‘my own policy’ regarding investments and other matters. Hence policy ‘is free of many of the undesirable connotations clustered about the word political, which is often believed to imply ‘partisanship’ or ‘corruption’ (…) The movement is not only towards a policy orientation, with a resulting growth in the policy sciences, but more specifically toward the policy sciences of democracy. (p.5) The policy-science approach not only puts the emphasis upon basic problems and complex models, but also calls forth a very considerable clarification of the value goals involved in policy. After all, in what sense is a problem ‘basic’? (p.9) We can think of the policy sciences as the disciplines concerned with explaining the policy-making and policy-executing process, and with locating data and providing interpretations which are relevant to the policy problems of a given period. The policy approach does not imply that energy is to be dissipated on a miscellany of merely topical issues, but rather that fundamental and often neglected problems which arise in the adjustment of man in society are to be dealt with. (p.14)

Easton Rothwell’s description in the preface follows similar lines. He had had significant administrative experience during the war and after, where

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he had been the Executive Secretary to the preliminary United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco and then Secretary General of the USA delegation to the United Nations itself. Planning suggests a systematic attempt to shape the future. When such planning becomes a prelude to action, it is policy-making. For policy, broadly speaking, is a body of principle to guide action. The application of policy is a calculated choice – a decision to pursue specific goals by doing specified things. The formulation and execution of policy usually consists of four steps: 1) a clarification of goals, 2) an exhaustive evaluation of the situation to be met, 3) the selection of a course of action by weighing the probable consequences of various alternatives, and 4) the determination of optimum means for carrying out the action decided upon. Since the situation to be met is normally not static but involves a complex of moving forces, policy and action are, in effect, a design to shape the future by exerting influence upon trends that flow from the past into the present. (Rothwell, 1951, p.xi)

Lasswell’s later 1971 text has many of the themes of the earlier text and, while it is usual to find citations of the phrase ‘knowledge of and in’, there is less attention paid to the wider text within which this is a part and, for that reason, is reproduced below. As a working definition, we say that the policy sciences are concerned with knowledge of and in the decision process of the public and civic order (…) The emphasis on decision process underlines the difference between policy sciences and other forms of intellectual activity. By focusing on the making and execution of policy, one identifies a relatively unique frame of reference, and utilizes many traditional contributions to political science, jurisprudence and related disciplines. However, these public order decisions do not exhaust the field of policy. In complex societies, the agencies of official decision do not account for many of the most important choices that affect men’s lives. In the interest of realism, therefore, it is essential to give full deference to the study of semiofficial and nonofficial processes. The dividing line between public and civic is more a zone than a line, and in totalitarian states the civic order is almost entirely swallowed up by the public order. The separation is most visible in bodies politic where the activities assigned to the formal agencies of government are relatively few and where the collective activities of businesses, churches and other active participants in society are independent of detailed direction from government. (1971, p. 1)

Both Lasswell and Rothwell were concerned with major questions of shaping the future and about the most important choices; what today might be called the big issues to be faced. Whether Lasswell (1902– 1978), who finished his PhD at the University of Chicago in 1926, would have been happy about the way that future generations would fill in the dots that these comments laid out is beyond conjecture; he had many

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themes to work on and made so many contributions in so many areas, including being considered the founding father of political psychology. Important here is to show that, at least at this time, in the 1950s and 1960s, there is a transition in progress. The older notion of policy as posture or stance on major issues, still remained, but is now acquiring the idea that knowledge has much to contribute to solving these greater concerns: both in the processes that help decisions along the way and in the understanding of the issues themselves. Over the next 40 years, policy and public policy would continue to grow and spread from place to place, country to country and from theory to theory. It would acquire both a centrality and a certain mystical air of importance, as this citation from the introduction to a widely used book of readings published in 1995 shows. In recent years there has been a substantial transformation in the way public policy is studied. The student of policy is faced not only with a diversity of theoretical approaches but also, at times, with rival vocabularies and specialist terminologies. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the definitions of public policy. Such discussions frequently use a specialized language, indeed often jargon, which often confuses and muddles an understanding of public policy. The one thing, however, that all authors on public policy do agree on is that public policy deeply affects the daily lives of every individual in society. (Theodoulou, 1995, p. 1)

IS THERE REALLY A NEED FOR A CHANGE? The June 2018 issue of the member’s journal of the British Psychological Society carried on its cover a drawing of a very large seated elephant with a circus type of mantle on its back inscribed with the word ‘policy’. In a Lilliputian reference, it was being held up by a host of tiny figures and the cover bore the words ‘Can psychologists shift public policy?’. The article to which the cover referred was a critique of the way psychologists produce an imaginary rational version of policy, policy makers and the policy process, along with an equally rational view of their (the psychologists’) capacity to influence affairs; instead of recognizing that what exists ‘is a dauntingly complex and ideologically riven mess of relations, where the evidence of psychologists exists as one, not especially compelling, presence in a range of actors, agents, networks and pressure groups’ (Walker et al., 2018, p. 40). What perhaps is more important for Beyond Public Policy is the size of the elephant in relationship to the psychologists; the fact that it was an elephant that was chosen to represent policy; and the one little figure who stands in front of

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the elephant, raising her arms as if to say, ‘Listen to me’. Has policy outgrown its conceptual space and contribution? Has it stopped being useful and become something very different? Does it need to shrink back to normal size? Similar arguments have been made by Orren and Skowronek (2017) about the way in which policy has taken over the public sphere in the USA, creating what they have called ‘The Policy State’: … policy has expanded its role in American government and society by eroding the boundaries and dissolving the distinctions that once constrained policy’s reach. As we show, greater reliance on policy has the consequence of rendering all aspects of state authority more homogeneous and making each more difficult to pin down. A protracted history of collective problem solving has in this way created a set of problems for American government that more policy is unlikely to remedy. Our proposition is that policy has not filled a void in governance; rather, it has dislodged governance previously in place. Examining the matter that way points to the impact of policy’s expansion on the fundament of rights and on formal structures of decision making. Rights and structure, we contend, grow more attenuated and uncertain as policy proliferates and assumes dominance. When we call this troubled accretion a “policy state”, we are referring to the effects on elements and modes of government that in earlier times bore little resemblance to policy, indeed represented an opposite set of governing principles. (Orren and Skowronek, 2017, p. 6)

Over the last 60 years, edging its way to the centre of a stage already fairly full of different ways of talking about and doing public affairs, policy gradually came to assume the role of the official articulator of public life in western democracies and to represent the broad idea of government in action. Evidence that ‘policy’ is serious and important comes from the many courses, journals, conferences, policy professionals and advisors, as well as different theories about policy processes and about how policy happens. Very present in these different arenas is the view of policy as the result of authoritative figures, in the institutional and hierarchical sense, making technically informed choices from which practices are introduced, implemented and evaluated. Colebatch and colleagues critically refer to this as the narrative of authoritative instrumentalism and in a number of texts have shown that this official account bears very little resemblance to policy work itself, when seen in the day to day of those who are practically involved (Colebatch, 2006, 2010; Colebatch et al., 2010). There are conflicting views and versions around and, as they argue, somehow it is necessary to work with them. This is a position also shared in part by those involved in various approaches to critical, deliberative or interpretative policy analysis (Fischer, 2003; Hajer

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and Wagenaar, 2003) and also in earlier texts on argumentation and policy (Majone, 1989). However, even here and despite the broadening out of analysis and the questions posed, the language of policy remains active, suggesting that it serves some purpose or purposes. The variety of definitions and approaches that Theodoulou mentions was, it appears, an early feature of the policy arena. In 1978, Edwards and Sharkansky were to say: There is no single definition of public policy. It is what governments say and do, or do not do. It is the goals or purposes of government programs, for example the elimination of ignorance and poverty. Policy is also the important ingredient of programs, like the requirement that all elementary school teachers be college graduates, or the compulsory division of funds earmarked for education between vocational and liberal arts programs. Policy further includes the implementation of intentions and rules. Policy may either be stated explicitly – in laws or in the speeches of leading officials, or implied in programs and actions. Implicit policy may be apparent only to those who are intimately familiar with the details of programs and able to discern patterns in the sum total of what is being done. Indeed, some policies consist in a lack of action and may be especially hard to discern if officials wish to conceal their real purpose; the decision by local authorities to evade a high court mandating racial integration constitutes such a policy-through-inaction. A change in policy may be proposed or debated in public with the full participation of interest groups and the mass media, or policy may change covertly, as when a chief executive decides to embark on a new venture under a cloak of secrecy or with a contrived explanation designed to mislead the public. (p. 2)

A critic might ask, what is the public policy they are talking about? And an answer might be that very similar difficulties to define what ‘it’ is, are common in all social ideas. The joint production of meaning both as description and action can make the answer ‘you know it when you see it’ not as illogical as it may seem. Others might suggest that public policy is no longer able to give an adequate account of public affairs and that there are other contenders for the centre stage, newer kids on the block, edging their way forward. Governance is already being pushed forward as a better replacement for the articulating role, with very much the same type of argument as has been used from time to time with public policy. The discussion of self-organizing, inter-organizational networks within a governance framework,14 for example, may leave little space for authoritative instrumentalism of the orthodox kind but also raises many questions around modes of rationality15 and governmentality,16 which suggests that much more is involved than a simple broadening out of perspectives and actors.

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Beyond public policy While talk and exchange of arguments are a key part of it, the whirl of organisational routines, practical judgements, subjective voices, personal histories and improvisational practices are equally important. For the countless administrators, elected officials, street-level bureaucrats, professionals, activists and ordinary citizens who are involved in struggling with collective problems, governance is above all about ‘intervening’ in practice. We have barely begun to fathom what an interventionist approach to politics, governance and public policy might look like. (Griggs et al., 2014, location 365, Kindle edition)

The Public Policy and Administration Research Committee of the International Political Science Association (IPSA) in its session information for the 2018 IPSA Conference, seems to be recognizing that agendas are moving, by commenting that while the early focus of the committee was on ‘policy analysis, over time this has broadened to take in the full range of practices aimed at “steering” public activity’ (RC 32, 2018). Steering and governance, it should be noted, share the same roots, and the image of ‘steering’ and ‘rowing’ has been much evoked in the discussion of public management – both positively and negatively. Beyond Public Policy shares these doubts but moves the focus away from the discussion about new paradigms and successors. There is no doubt that policy has made an important contribution, but what about all the other social languages for enacting governing and collective life, some of which as mentioned were involved in talking into place the different versions of the western welfare state17 well before what has been called public policy’s high modern period.18 What happened to those other performative languages, those ways of doing things with words? Here it is important to acknowledge an earlier analysis of some of these issues by Hale (1988), who pointed out how textbooks in public administration in the early 1980s moved effortlessly towards policy. As he put it: ‘The old paradigm is dead; the new paradigm is the “administrative policy making paradigm” in which administrators are not simply “enmeshed” or “involved” in politics – but have become full-fledged policymakers’ (p. 428). In a similar manner to public administration, political science texts on American politics and government became texts on policy making in America and, in doing so, focused on the short-term process of the policy itself rather than the institutional, social and organizational history of the issues and actors involved. As Hale remarks: ‘politics has been replaced by process: nobody ever does anything; things just happen.’ (p.442). Closing the circle, he argued, administration moves away from the execution of laws and bills to a new sphere of action ‘implementation’, that is activities directed to putting a programme into effect.

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Which way forward? The answer, as the evidence suggests and the book proposes, lies in adopting a broader and somewhat chaotic approach to public affairs, based on a diversity of social languages that may cooperate, enter into conflict or act independently of one another, taking seriously Rosanvallon’s proposal of a contentious process. Young (2000) introduced the idea of a decentred and ‘agonistic’ approach to deliberative democracy, in which: ‘Disorderly, disruptive, annoying or distracting means of communication are often necessary or effective elements in such efforts to engage others in debate over issues and outcomes’ (p. 50). This suggests the importance of considering, with equal intensity, not only the different ways of performing those actions that are normally associated with government but also those that come from the public(s) themselves. This orientation provides the structure for the book.

STRUCTURE Beyond Public Policy is not about a simple addendum to government in action which might be referred to in some contextual way as civil society, the civic arena or just society. On the contrary, it argues that there are at least as many different social action languages present when people(s) act to pressure government or when they get on with solving problems themselves, as there are to be found in the offices of ministries, departments and public service agencies. That is, that there is no single social language for government in action nor for society in action; there are just lots of heterogeneous social languages, lots of bits and pieces of soft and hard technologies. Some of these are newer versions of previous notions of practice, others may be hybrid mixtures and others still will be edging their way forward. Some see themselves as central to public affairs, others are just about getting on with making things happen. They move in and out of each other, sometimes in conflict, sometimes in cooperation, or, often, just going their own way. The structure of the book reflects this position. There are two chapters that look at public action languages from within the arena of governing and two chapters that look from within various forms of social and community-based action. None is completely separate and they draw on different historical moments, including the present, to provide examples of emerging social languages and the way that certain themes were discussed. These four more empirical chapters are complemented by a chapter on the idea of social languages from a theoretical standpoint and a final chapter that draws some of the threads

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together and takes a somewhat critical look at the limits of the negotiation of possibilities. Chapter 1 has introduced the general argument and provided some glimpses of themes that will be returned to in subsequent chapters. The choice of a structure which moves backwards and forwards between different themes and examples reflects a conscious attempt to show a little of the amazingly curious way in which ideas move around and to make more visible the density of the public action scene. Chapter 2 begins with a discussion of public(s) and the way that public issues and problems are formed. The focus, however, is not on how governments deal with these, but how people themselves got on with and continue to get on with solving what they saw as problematic. Resistance is one of these, shown in examples of reaction to slavery in Brazil and the USA; alternatives are others, as in the Jesuit missions in Latin America. Resistance and alternatives come together in the Paris Commune and in the early days of the Rochdale cooperative store. A second line of analysis looks at civil society, philanthropy and parishes, focusing on some of the different social languages that emerge when people take care of each other in the everyday. This will lead, in turn, to another broad area of public action: the creation of new kinds of institutions such as orphanages and international associations which in different ways laid the basis for current discussions of public concerns. Chapter 3 starts with some examples of words in action and social organization during the late medieval and Renaissance periods: the Crusades, the Hanseatic League and the Treaty of Westphalia. The three set the tone for the theoretical part of the chapter for they show the intersection of expressions and actions, point to social and administrative skills and illustrate the role that language(s) played in forming and shaping one of the early ‘professions’ on the public affairs scene, that of diplomacy. The chapter goes on through a brief mention of the history of ideas and language to focus on the main theoretical theme that is present in the book, that of the performative approach to language as social action and social languages themselves as forming a very heterogeneous landscape of ways of doing things with words. It finishes with another, this time recent, public sector profession that, like diplomacy, has words at the centre of its attention in a very particular way: the speechwriter. Chapter 4 concentrates on three periods of intense governmental activity which, in their different ways, were crucial in crafting some of the bits and pieces of democratic welfare states and influencing others. Milestone changes were introduced and urgent social and development issues were tackled, without much of a policy in sight. In the first two, where there is much material already published, the focus will be on specific themes: the Roosevelt period and specifically the Tennessee

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Valley Authority and public planning; the 1945 Labour Government led by Attlee in the UK with a comment on the Beveridge Report, seen as key for social policy, and the introduction of the National Health Service. On the third, the domestic part of the Johnson Administration in the USA, the interest is broader, for it is often cited as the period when public policy came of age but where a closer look at internal documents suggests a different conclusion. The chapter finishes with the UK’s Fulton Report which marked the ‘formal’ introduction of a new version of policy within the civil service and the arrival of the policy advisor. Chapter 5 starts with an overview of the way that policy would continue to spread out both in terms of use by governments and scholars in discussing public affairs and in its application to new themes, such as implementation. It then goes on to look at a number of different places and areas in which policy might be found along with other action languages, such as the EU and the Treaty of Rome, the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO’s) work on cultural policy in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the government reform movements in the following periods, especially in the countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). It then traces through the various reform movements in Latin America which demonstrate the dedication to public management and administrative improvement but also raise questions about the relative delay in adopting public policy as a way of looking at public affairs. Here the case chosen is that of Brazil where studies of bibliographies, newspapers and academic publications are complemented by a case study in the area of HIV/AIDS. Rights as an action language have been very present in the developing world as a mobilizing agenda and, as elsewhere, were present well before policy reached the centre stage. Now, in both the developed world and developing worlds, they are serving to challenge policy and suggest other forms of taking the democratic experience forward. Chapter 6 takes this as a starting point to return to some of the events and debates around the introduction of rights within the United Nations, especially around the very idea of rights itself. From this it picks up the theme of the intersection of social languages with a reworking of the idea of civic engagement in different ways, including the languages of civil disobedience. It goes on to look at the languages of mobilization and community organization as well as those of social movements, crowds and protests. It closes by looking at ways in which some of these social languages are also joining with public sector social languages in creating new mechanisms of decision – for example in the area of participative budgeting

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and what have been called hybrid arenas, as well as civic-based cooperation in service provision. In Chapter 7, these different themes and examples from different sides of the public affairs arena are brought together in response to the three points raised in the introduction: the heterogeneity of social languages in the public affairs arena; the problems with centrality; and the fact that there are just as many social languages for being and doing ‘public’ outside the generally assumed circles of governing as there are inside. It begins with an example of a setting in which there is very little contact between these different social languages and shows how this can have a major impact on a recurrent theme in the public affairs arena in both the developed and developing world – social, material and institutional vulnerability. It then goes on to look at whether public policy will survive and in what form, and what the promises are for governance, in part through the way the expressions are being incorporated in different national and international arenas. It concludes by arguing that the public action languages approach – as an approach and not a theory – offers a stimulus to look for and recognize the multiplicity of the many different social languages present and a more promising basis on which to take on the challenge of building links between repertories and of negotiating possibilities.

A BRIEF NOTE ON METHODS The author is a social and organizational psychologist who has had the opportunity of working in interdisciplinary settings for most of his research life, during which time he has been involved in applied social research in various areas of public administration and government in the developed and developing world. Like most applied researchers, he has learned to have a high respect for the work of others in their specialist disciplinary fields, while also recognizing that despite epistemological differences, methods have more to do with ‘how it’s done’ than ‘how it should be done’. To begin with it is necessary to emphasize that this is not a history of ideas but, as can be seen from this introduction, going beyond policy requires moving outside policy and this implies looking before, during and, even, after. Inevitably, there are many ideas in circulation and while there is no intention of redoing the work of historians, their contributions have been important, as have many of those in the different applied social sciences who have described the emergence of their own professions or questioned the centrality of certain approaches from different disciplinary

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standpoints. From discourse analysis – as well as learning how to seek out the nuances in texts and the importance of public domain documents as themselves products of talk in action – has come the practice of avoiding short citations. Single words are never uttered as single words; as talk flows it forms chunks of meanings in the same way that written texts form sentences and paragraphs. Archival material, public domain documents, case studies and many conversations are also part of the book. The choices made about which events to make more visible are both academic and also literary, for this is also a collection of stories about some of the ideas and the languages that perform public affairs, and curiosity always has a part to play. Without doubt, readers will be able to point to other examples and key moments when other ideas for public action emerged and, if this happens, the purpose of the book has been fulfilled. In many cases, it has been possible to go back to original texts in administration and policy, official documents, or cross-check with different accounts of what was discussed. Biographies of some key figures have also proved very helpful as well as a number of historical analyses of earlier and relatively current events. The main empirical focus has been towards the USA, the UK and Latin America. In the case of the first two, this is because there seems to be agreement in the field that they played a key role in the emergence of the public policy narrative. Latin America has been a very interesting site from which to follow the gradual spread of administrative terms and practices, including the arrival of policy; helped also by some familiarity with language. Theoretically the reach has been wider within the European democracies and especially, in relation to the public action languages approach, France. However, this is simply a reference to the physical and linguistic location of scholars and not a suggestion of a school of thought. There is no more a French approach to public action as there is a USA approach to public policy. Many other versions of each of the chapters could be written and there are many more stories to be told; especially by scholars coming from other linguistic backgrounds who can follow the way in which terms are taken from one language to another in other linguistic spaces and places. Indeed, there is much work to be done.

NOTES 1. Young (1979), also Cox (1905). 2. Finer (1997). 3. For example, Skinner’s Liberty Before Liberalism (1998). 4. Burke (1992) and Ashford (1991).

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30 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

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Beyond public policy Gilbert and Mulkay (1984), see also M.J.P. Spink (1999) for a discussion in the area of health. Fischer et al. (2015). Fuller (1988). Friedmann (2011). See the academic dictionary article by Commaille (2014). Translations from the French, Portuguese and Spanish citations have been made by the author and colleagues. Alexander (1981) suggested that the lack of impact of Wildavsky’s (1973) ‘If Planning is Everything, Maybe it’s Nothing’ amongst planners may have been due to its being published in a journal (Policy Sciences) that planners didn’t read. Blake (1996). The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles, Vols I and II (1973). Rhodes (1996). Hoppe (2002). Burchell et al. (1991) and Enroth (2013). Garland (2016). Goodin et al. (2006).

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2. From publics, parishes and philanthropy to resistance and self-help: the civic side of public action In 1968 New Society, a British weekly that was an important focus for applied social science debate especially in areas linked to the welfare state, published a number of linked articles on the origins of the social services. The following quotation is the beginning of two articles on slums and public intervention into housing in the UK and is introduced for two reasons. First, the nineteenth century was a period in which many different social and societal themes, that are today taken for granted as obvious and concrete empirical objects for government concern, were gradually put together, piece by piece and, with them, various notions of what to do, who should do it and what this ‘doing’ should be called. The reasons for getting involved were varied, some were results of early analyses of labour relations and the industrial economy,1 some were linked to early formulations of urban poverty, but others were far from philanthropic. In the mid- to late nineteenth century, concern with housing was also a consequence of early discussions on public health and that had, at times, much more to do with the fear of diseases being spread into other areas of society than to the specific conditions of poverty itself. Second, the area of housing is one which later, in Chapter 6, will serve as one of a number of examples of what can be called rights approaches to public affairs. Discussion on the right to the city and to adequate housing is a very present theme in international conferences and conventions, but is also an arena in which the conflicts, competition and sometimes cooperation of and between different action languages is visible and explicit – especially in the developing countries. Government nowadays is directly concerned with housing in ways that involve millions of pounds and millions of people. That was not so for most of the 19th century, when the housing of the working classes was regarded almost entirely as a private matter and not as a subject for national, political concern. It was not indeed until 1915 that the government accepted a 31

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Beyond public policy responsibility for the control of rents and not till the heroes came home that it saw any need to subsidise the building of working class houses on any scale. By 1919 it had become politically acceptable to tax one section of the community in order to provide cheap house-room for another. This was a crucial and lasting change. (Dyos, 1968, p. 192)

As concerns become social and different fragments get put together into problems which acquire names and identities so, as Dewey (1927) pointed out, are publics formed. In other words, problems do not come magically out of the air nor grow from the ground as empirical and self-named facts. They are talked into existence, as will be discussed in Chapter 3, through a mix of empirical happenings, moral concerns, fears, attempts at understanding and views on how to act. Nor do they stay still, as Hacking (2007) has pointed out. In his (1999) analysis of women refugees, Hacking argues that: Ideas do not exist in a vacuum. They inhabit a social setting. Let us call that the matrix within which an idea, a concept of kind is formed (…) The matrix in which the idea of the woman refugee is formed is a complex of institutions, advocates, newspaper articles, lawyers, court decisions, immigration proceedings. Not to mention the material infrastructure, barriers, passports, uniforms, counters at airports, detention centers, courthouses, holiday camps for refugee children. You may want to call them social because their meanings are what matter to us, but they are material and, in their sheer materiality make substantial differences to people. Conversely, ideas about women refugees make a difference to the material environment (women refugees are not violent, so there is no need for guns, but there is a great need for paper, paper, paper (…) And ideas, thus understood do matter. It can really matter to someone to be classified as a woman refugee; if she is not thus classified, she may be deported, or go into hiding, or marry to gain citizenship. The matrix can affect an individual woman. She needs to become a woman refugee in order to stay in Canada; she learns what characteristics to establish, knows how to live her life. By living that life she evolves, becomes a certain kind of person (a woman refugee). (Hacking, 1999, pp. 10–11)

The many different bits, pieces, things and peoples, humans and nonhumans actively present in the continual formatting and reformatting of the ‘woman refugee’ call attention to the very active part that materiality plays in the formation of ideas. Latour described the various bits of materiality and sociality as actantes,2 drawing from semiotic theory.3 In this case they are gathered around notions of government action in the most basic version of modernity’s territorially defined nation state: who gets to stay in and who doesn’t. Pressure groups, human rights advocates, churches and humanitarian organizations are present, as are many different social organizations that intermediate issues and, of course,

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governments, both locally, nationally and internationally. Some may see themselves, in their own words, as part of civil society, others as having a civic duty. Present, in general, although not a defining principle, is some kind of disposition to cooperate and discuss. Since about the middle of the twentieth century we have got used to describing them as organizations, but they will often use other terms and expressions. Chapter 6 on noisy rights, crowds, protests and the languages of mobilization, will pick up some of these themes in a different way, but even in the most conflicting of circumstances there is some, even faint, hope of a connection. However, the alternative can and does happen. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees currently estimates, worldwide, over 23 million refugees – of which 50 per cent are under 18 years of age – and, in addition, some 10 million or more stateless people who are denied a nationality.4 There is no dividing line between cooperation, discussion and confrontation, and as will be seen from chapter to chapter there are overlaps, discontinuities, connections made and lost. But there is no comfortable whole; no easy multiple entry table into which the different social action languages can be separated and organized. This is one of the book’s proposals, and as commented in the introduction it is reflected in the structure. In a similar manner, there is no attempt to move along a time line; some earlier events are dealt with earlier but others will come in later in the book.

WHAT MAKES A PUBLIC? In The Public and its Problems, Dewey’s main concern was to position the state as a consequence of the public and its officials as part of this consequence. There may be points of disagreement with this overall position, but his localism and community-based approach to social life still finds an echo over a century later. Here is the starting point in his argument. We must in any case start from acts which are performed, not from hypothetical causes for those acts, and consider their consequences. We must also introduce intelligence, or the observation of consequences as consequences, that is in connection with the acts from which they proceed. Since we must introduce it, it is better to do so knowingly than it is to smuggle it in in a way which deceives not only the customs officer – the reader – but ourselves as well. We take then our point of departure from the objective fact that human acts have consequences upon others, that some of these consequences are perceived, and that their perception leads to subsequent effort to control action so as to secure some consequences and avoid others. Following

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Beyond public policy this clew, we are led to remark that the consequences are of two kinds, those which affect the persons directly engaged in a transaction, and those which affect others beyond those immediately concerned. In this distinction we find the germ of the distinction between the private and the public. (Dewey, 1927, location 889, Kindle edition)

From this, Dewey will go on to distinguish those consequences of consequences which affect others beyond those immediately concerned and which, in doing so and being recognized as consequences, will in turn produce publics and problems. ‘The public consists of all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for’ (1927, location 919) or, later, ‘… the perception of consequences which are projected in important ways beyond the persons and associations directly concerned in them is the source of a public; and that its organization into a state is effected by establishing special agencies to care for and regulate these consequences’ (1927, location 1163). Important is the first part of the argument that links the awareness of consequences of consequences to the production of publics. The plural, however, is never mentioned as such by Dewey, but if the many different consequences of different consequences are considered there seems no doubt that many a different ‘public’(s) are produced along with their problems.5 Today, Dewey’s work is not only relevant to the growing debate on different publics and issues,6 but also to the general focus of the current chapter. Dewey was looking at the relation between a public and the state at the beginning of the twentieth century when some concerns were already on the table for governmental action but were only a part of those that would appear in the later welfare state(s). At the same time, he provides a window on another transition that is taking place: As we saw in our earlier consideration of the theme of the public, the question of what transactions should be left as far as possible to voluntary initiative and agreement and what should come under the regulations of the public is a question of time, place and concrete conditions that can be known only by careful observation and reflective investigation. (1927, location 2773)

Taking Dewey’s argumentative lead, in the discursive sense, brings up the question of voluntary action. Is voluntary action action in the private sphere or is it action in the public sphere?7 Is it public because in some way it is sanctioned as such or is it public because those involved consider it so?

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As this is a book which has as its focus contemporary public action languages, the parts of the past that are of more direct relevance are those in which elements of an agenda for public affairs are emerging, prior to the configuration of the current and different welfare states. As these have to be talked into existence, they become reminders of the many social languages that were around before policy and, in some cases, before public administration as it is currently conceived. It is easier to pick these themes up in the nineteenth century where a number of publics and problems are more visible and, possibly, comprehensible. But, to avoid any interpretation that such happenings or the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were special, it is useful to remember other moments in which new forms of social action were developed – even though their results may have been in some cases less continuous. Some have left buildings, others have left shadows and others are very much around. Bonded slavery into the New World dates from around 1510 and while the Portuguese were very involved in the commercial aspects of buying and selling from the beginning, the first slaves only arrived in Brazil in the 1530s. It would not be long before, as in other countries, there would be reports of slaves escaping to set up small communities in out of the way places, in some cases helped by original peoples. Some of these grew in size, some created patterns of relationships with neighbours, others, especially in Brazil because of its size, took a long time to be discovered, and there were also many conflicts. One of the results is that 20 November is remembered nationally in Brazil as Black Awareness Day and is a formal holiday in many municipalities. It was chosen, symbolically, to mark the death of Zumbi, the leader of one of the larger quilombos, as they were called, which was destroyed in 1694 after some 150 years of existence. Palmares – hence the name Zumbi dos Palmares – was formed in a mountainous area of a coastal forest region with many palm trees, spanning the current border between the states of Alagoas and Pernambuco. At its peak, it consisted of a number of different settlements, of which the largest had some 1,500 houses (Anderson, 1996). There were many attempts to take it over and there were also periods of peace during which trade relations took place. ‘In the internecine peace, Palmarinos traded with their Portuguese neighbours, exchanging foodstuffs and crafts for arms, munitions and salt’ (1996, p. 552). Some colonials favoured establishing peace with the quilombo and others, perhaps wishing to remove an attraction for other slaves, did not. Palmares was only one of a number of events in Brazilian history in which large communities were set up outside the reach of the state only to be defeated in battle.8 Unfortunately, as also is the case of Palmares, there are more descriptions of the battles than there are about the

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organization of everyday life. However, and important for this chapter, the echoes of the event and of the figure of Zumbi have served as a focal point for discussion about the continued presence of these, certainly much smaller, communities. The Brazilian Ministry of Culture’s Palmares Foundation reported some 3,524 remaining quilombos in a 2008 study and estimated that the final figure could be around 5,000. Here the concern is not just to register traditions; much more is at stake. The transitional arrangements of the 1988 Constitution determined that: ‘Final ownership shall be recognized for the remaining members of the ancient runaway slave communities who are occupying their lands and the State shall grant them the respective title deeds’ (Article 68 of the Temporary Constitutional Provisions Act, 1988). During the 1970s and 1980s, Bolivia had a very centralized government with a top-down regional administration and almost no responsibility for the towns. In 1994, the government introduced legislation on decentralization, municipalization and popular participation, creating 311 municipalities with contiguous territorial limits covering the whole country. Of its then population of seven and a half million, over 60 per cent were Aymara, Quechua or Guarani and another 30 per cent were of mixed descent. There are some 36 different ethnic language groups. In an innovative approach to representation, council oversight committees (vigilance committees) were created to complement the more traditional role of elected councillors and oversee the use of government transfer funds. The oversight committees were to be formed from representatives of what were termed Territorial Base Organizations. These were organizations that had a specific relationship to a zone, community or neighbourhood. In order to prevent a whole new crop of artificial organizations being created, proposing and voting on committee members was restricted to those that could show they had been in existence for some years before the legislation was published. The last time in Bolivian history that community and neighbourhood organizations had been allowed to formally and officially exist was during the few years of democracy brought in by the 1952 Bolivian Revolution. By the time the elections took place in 1995, some 13,000 informally existing community, indigenous and neighbourhood groupings had come forward to be registered.9 The persistence of social organization despite adverse conditions in countries where there is some semblance of a state and government is also the persistence of ways of talking about social identity and being that identity in action. There are also many examples of moments when, without the presence of an effective state, people have been able to get

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themselves together to organize public affairs or, under adversity, maintain the public hope. This can lead to attempts at creating alternatives; proposals about other ways of being together, as in the Jesuit missions in Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina from 1606 until 1767, when the Jesuits were exiled back to Rome by the command of King Carlos III of Spain. By this time there were 30 different missions in which, for protection, the largely Guarani population had been persuaded to come closer together and invest in agriculture and cattle. At the centre of the missions were the many arguments and debates that had taken place in the sixteenth century about whether the ‘Indians’ were rational beings with souls and therefore could not be placed in slavery.10 An idea of the size and importance of the missions is given by the report made by the administrator appointed by the Spanish authorities to take over the mission at San Ignacio Mini in Paraguay (16 August 1768). It included: 33,400 cows; 1,409 horses; 3,571 mules; 7,356 sheep etc. (Armani, 1982). As an observation, the expression mission comes from the Latin/French missio/mission which refers to the act of being sent to do something. Possibly because in the seventeenth century most of those people being sent were being sent for religious reasons, it quickly acquired a religious tonality. There would be missionaries, mission bells and mission schools. But soon there would also be diplomatic missions and now there are missions to space and mission control centres and lots of bits and pieces, people and technologies.

EARLY LANGUAGES OF RESISTANCE In a different time and place, many unknown women and men across the USA connected in different ways to one another against slavery, without ever knowing much beyond one or two connections, and never knowing the extent of what became known in the 1840s as the ‘underground railroad’. For the ‘Underground Railroad’ was no actual railroad of steel and steam. It was a network of paths through the woods and fields, river crossings, boats and ships, trains and wagons, all haunted by the specter of recapture. Its stations were the houses and the churches of men and women – agents of the railroad – who refused to believe that human slavery and human decency could exist together in the same land. The scholar Edwin Wolf II captured the essence of my ancestors’ experience when he wrote that the Underground Railroad is filled ‘with tales of crated escapees, murdered agents, soft knocks on side doors, and a network as clandestine and complicated as anything

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Beyond public policy dreamed up by James Bond’. As a historian attempting to research the Underground Railroad, I have found, with a mixture of admiration and chagrin, that this atmosphere of secrecy endures. So much is uncertain. Even the origin of the term ‘Underground Railroad’ is obscure. Nobody knows how many fled from bondage along its invisible tracks. (Blockson, 1984, pp. 3, 9)

Amongst these, as Blockson (whose own great-grandfather had fled along the railroad) comments, was Harriet Tubman who went north to freedom in 1849 and returned south at least 15 times to conduct some 300 fugitives along its tracks. (The price on her head by the time she stopped had reached USD 40,000.) There are estimates of over 100,000 slaves escaping north between 1810 and 1860. All sorts of people were involved, both freethinkers and members of every religious faith of the time, many of whom, to return to Dewey, would be ‘the public’ of the end of slavery. This was a time when the railroads were making their impact on society and those involved used a ‘railway code’ of stations, depots, forwarding and other terms as a way of talking to one another.11 While most of these experiences point to publics that form within some kind of bounded notion of state or relations to government, there are also those for which a state is seen as an ‘unnecessary’ evil – or, at least, as something in relation to which it is better not to expect very much. The focus of the book is on the different ways of talking about public action in what are currently known as countries with governments and which together are understood as states. It is important to register that there is also an important literature – both empirical and political – about societies without states which amplifies even more the arguments made about the variety of ways of talking public action. While there are arguments for or against that can be made on political grounds, the events of the Paris Commune and of the urban and rural collectivizations in Catalonia and Valencia during the early days of the Spanish Civil War12 provide enough evidence that the organization of public affairs is something that publics can, if they need to or want to, sort things out for themselves, by themselves. The Paris Commune (18 March–28 May 1871) will appear again in a later chapter, not for what it was but for what it wasn’t. That is, to the impact that the creation of an image of ‘wild mobs’ and ‘crazed women with petrol bombs’ was to have on the discussion of the psychology of a crowd. On the contrary, the vast majority of women who were engaged in L’Union des femmes pour la défense de Paris et les soin aux blessés were certainly working class and largely socialist but had other issues that they wished to discuss about the general condition of women and the equality of the sexes. Most of them were not even arrested nor killed

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in the bloody days following the end of the Commune, because they didn’t correspond to the stereotypes of the communards held by the Versailles soldiers and police. As Schulkind (1985) comments after a very detailed archival study: ‘It is as if the courts and arresting agents were victims of their own prejudices in so far as they were unable to conceive of any Communard women as serious, intelligent and organizationally sophisticated’ (p.130). Discussing the founding meeting of the Union: Unlike the tendency among popular groupings at the time, this founding meeting of the Union was more than a talking session: it set up committees in most of the arrondisements to serve as recruiting centres for volunteers for nursing and canteen work as well as for the construction and defence of barricades should the need arise. It established procedural statutes and membership rules, and elected a provisional central committee to be replaced eventually by one composed of the delegates from committees created in each arrondisement. It also sent a proposal to the Executive Commission of the Commune soliciting material aid in setting up facilities in each arrondisement town hall. (Schulkind, 1985, p. 139)

As well as providing welfare support for orphanages and hostels, amongst other welfare institutions, recruiting nursing and cooking auxiliaries, organizing meetings, staffing aid and information centres, the Union also got on with discussing how to bring about changes in the organization of production. Meetings were called to form cooperatives and group them in associations. To cite a wall poster: ‘It is hoped that the various women’s occupations, such as needle trades, feather processing, artificial flowers, laundry, etc., will form unions and send delegates to the committee meeting.’13 There is a tendency to typify the present as a global informational environment but, as Burke (2000) has commented, by the seventeenth century knowledge flowed all around Europe, from ports to capitals, with returning missionaries, news of people arriving from far-off lands and just plain meeting places in the print shops that were being set up. Discussion of cooperatives had been around in some form since the beginning of the nineteenth century and there had been previous experiences in France in 1848. It would be largely the French and British workers’ movements which would be behind the first meeting of the International Working Men’s Association in 1864, at which many different left-wing movements were present, from moderate trade unionist, utopian socialists, through to anarchists and revolutionaries of different tendencies. (In 1865 women were allowed to be members, but it remained a mainly male affair.)

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In 1844, in a different and not so dramatic setting, a small group of out of work weavers in Rochdale, Lancashire, found themselves facing a number of unpleasant survival choices, including emigration or appealing to the Poor Law. The result was the Rochdale ‘store’, which would go on to make a major contribution to the cooperative movement around the world. It started with 12 people and an individual subscription of two pence a week. By 1857, just over 12 years later, the over the counter sales had reached some 76,000 pounds a year14 and the cooperative movement was on the way to being a way of life for many people. It also became a public that had brought a new notion of public to public affairs – that of self-help – and an action language that was to challenge the economic organization of society through the idea of associations that were not for profit. The organizational language itself drew heavily on the earlier Friendly Societies which had been around in different forms for many years. Ross (1976), for example, mentions Defoe talking about them in an essay in 1697. In the English part of his historical review, he found the use of ‘voluntary association’ already beginning to be established by the end of the eighteenth century and also found suggestions of some 32,000 Friendly Societies in England in 1874 which, as he comments, ‘would make it a major social institution then’ (p. 246). The idea of the structure of work itself, and not just the economic relation of work in society, would live on in the cooperative movements, resulting in various forms of broader social partnerships. It would still be going strong when Joyce Rothschild-Witt (1979) described what she referred to as collectivist organizations, both theoretically and empirically, in her study of a free medical clinic, a legal collective, a food cooperative, a free school and an alternative newspaper in California. While very different between themselves in a number of ways, they had a number of similarities. Amongst these were: a more consensual and horizontal approach to decisions and authority, minimal rules, social controls of a more moral kind, the absence of hierarchy and career, generalization of jobs and minimal division of labour, with normative and solidarity-based incentives. Work is clearly action and activity and the ways of talking about it and doing it go together, and create and give continuity to social and material forms and values. The range of values could be quite wide, some more political than others and some more directly community based but, in the middle, was clearly a notion of working in the public good. Not because those involved in the different organizations had been asked to do so by some official body, but because in some alternative way, and with all the trouble that meant both socially and materially, it mattered.

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CIVIL SOCIETY, PHILANTHROPY AND PARISHES: TAKING CARE OF EACH OTHER Since whenever – a popular expression that is useful to refer to the many different ways in which the past branches forward – people have been taking care of each other because it mattered. Not all people for all people, but at least some people for some people, known and unknown and in ways that change. Amongst the many ways in which ‘each other’ has changed can be found questions such as: who then is a person; what is dignity; who has the right to respect or dignity; what is help; and what are the limits of the moral community (of those to whom we are concerned to be fair, Crosby and Lubin, 1990)? The results are the many different languages of solidarity found not only in alternative types of organization as studied by Rothschild-Witt, but in other forms of collective action, voluntary action, charity and philanthropy, as well as, more recently, the complex heterogeneity of the broad and constantly expanding non-profit sector. The meaning of all this, including the idea of a non-profit sector, varies depending on the identity and intentions of the user (Hall, 2006).15 As he pointed out in his historical review of philanthropy, volunteering and non-profit activities in the USA, the terms non-profit sector and non-profit organization are talked into use between 1960–1970s, largely for tax and regulatory purposes, with some initiatives from Congress and major initiatives from the philanthropic foundations themselves. Most broadly construed, the terms refer to the larger universe of formal and informal voluntary organizations, non-stock corporations, mutual benefit organizations, religious bodies, charitable trusts and other nonpropriety entities (…) None of the contemporary definitions does justice to the complex historical development of these entities and activities. Every aspect of nonprofits that we consider distinctive – the existence of a domain of private organizational activity, the capacity to donate or bequeath property for charitable purposes, the distinction between joint stock and non-stock corporations, tax exemption – was the outcome of unrelated historical processes that converged and assumed significance to one another only at later points in time. Processes of development and change are continuous and ongoing. The institutional and organizational realities we attempt to capture in creating such synoptic terms as nonprofit sector are, at best, of only temporary usefulness. (Hall, 2006, p. 32)

Legislative concern about the new wider-focused philanthropic institutions had started much earlier with the arrival of the Carnegie Corporation of New York (1911) and later the Ford Foundation (1936). One

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thing was to have charities focused in specific ways for specific purposes, another was to have foundations with a broad brief for human and social development. This was seen by Congress as getting involved in politics. After all who talks for the well-being – another term in ascension – of society?16 Sometimes this early advocacy work, as it would be called today, did very clearly step across the invisible line that divides issues from parties and their candidates. Many of the early generations of philanthropists, including the Fords, had been brought up in the very non-contested ‘do what I say’ world of industrial expansion and were used to having strong opinions. But Congress itself was facing challenges from other sectors of society, as well as the philanthropic arena; social dreaming was becoming open territory and no longer the private property of government. On 28 August 1963 Martin Luther King Jr spoke to over 250,000 civil rights workers and activists on the March for Jobs and Freedom in Washington DC, in support of President John F. Kennedy’s proposal of civil rights legislation. He was speaking on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial when, prompted by gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, he put aside his written text and a somewhat staid lecturer style of address and started talking, using the rhetorical preaching style of repeated phrases, about his dream. One of the people who had worked on the text with King, and had commented later that the ‘dream’ wasn’t in it, although it had been used elsewhere, turned to the person at his side and said of the 250,000 people present, ‘those people don’t know it, but they’re about to go to church’. Nobody remembers the formal speech, but everybody remembers the dream.17 Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal.’ I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.

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Martin Luther King Jr was a Baptist pastor and President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an umbrella organization for civil rights. Citing from his Nobel Prize biography: ‘The ideals for this organization he took from Christianity; its operational techniques from Gandhi. In the eleven-year period between 1957 and April 4th 1968, when he was assassinated, King travelled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action … .’18 He wrote a lot of speeches along with his colleagues but was also able to combine his talks with the capacity to develop new threads of argument and influence. Speechwriting can be the art of the speaker her- or himself, but by the middle of the twentieth century it was increasingly the art of an invisible member of a public figure’s staff and, still today, being a speechwriter is a rarely talked about profession in the academic study of government in action (as will be seen in later chapters). The previous reference to missions, the reference in the next chapter to crusades, and in this section to parishes, serves as a reminder that much of the local structure of civic life, and indeed local government, in many parts of the world has been built up on top of forms of religious organization; in the case of the west, until recently, largely Christian. But the same will apply to other religions in the Middle East and in the east, to original peoples all over the world and probably to wherever humanity finds itself. They provide not only values but forms of organization and action, all of which happen in speech and conversations. Today these different forms of being together can be found sharing their community-based resources in new forms of ecumenical and interfaith organization that may act collectively on public issues. London Citizens, described in Chapter 6, is an alliance of over 230 civil society organizations, including schools, synagogues, churches, mosques, charities, youth clubs and other groups that work for the common good and whose efforts have included campaigning for ‘living wages’, creating safe havens for young people in danger and ending the detention of children for immigration purposes.19 In a much more mundane manner, there are probably at this moment hundreds of thousands of micro-events, including playgroups, yoga sessions, book readings, alternative therapy sessions, debates on human rights, discussions of local government proposals amongst many others, that are taking place in the meeting rooms of parishes, congregations, mosques and synagogues as well as the YMCA, Rotary and the local community library (often built by popular subscription). Community is not an abstract expression, to be in common requires being in common. In certain parts of the world a big broad tree can create the shade for being in common, in others more robust forms of

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shelter are required. In Hall’s (2006) account of non-profits, he mentions the important contribution by one of Roosevelt’s New Deal agencies (The Public Works Administration (PWA)) in constructing many buildings that provided venues for the activities and meetings of all types of non-profit groups, from the boy and girl scouts, through drama clubs to local sports teams, in places such as civic centres, municipal auditoriums, museums and libraries, amongst others. In pre-revolutionary France, the lowest level of administration was that of the parish (paroisse) of which there were some 60,000 and in which the village priest would keep the records of births, marriages and deaths. Some had responsibilities for poverty, but mainly it was the local feudal lords or other landed, powerful figures who ruled over what issues were public. Following the Revolution, already in 1789, the National Assembly created the Commune as the lowest level of administration and incorporated the village parishes as communes. There was some adjustment, but from 60,000 parishes the result, following fusions in larger towns, was still some 41,000, of which many are exactly the same in territorial terms today. In 1792 the mayors took over the civil role of the priests in terms of births, deaths and a new secular marriage ceremony, but the local identity remained. Today nearly 37,000 communes still form the basis of French political life. While not administrative and not political, parishes remain the basis of territorial organization in the Catholic Church even today. In many developing countries, especially in Latin America, they became crucial in supporting a number of different social movements and community-based organizations during the period of liberation theology from the late 1960s to the 1980s.20 In the UK, the switch from papal to royal control of the Christian churches had many consequences but had little effect on the parishes, which continued to be the way of organizing and identifying souls. Mosques and synagogues are just as important as meeting places, as later would be the different forms of congregational Christian worship, however they respond more strongly to specific internal religious orientations and have more flexible relationships to physical territory.21 Even though people may not choose to worship in their parish, or even go to church, for a long time it was the Anglican parish, as an ecclesiastical district with a priest and a church, that provided territorial details and a source for earlier statistics. Towards the end of the nineteenth century in the UK, the religious parishes began to lose their civil responsibilities (for example with the changes in the Poor Laws), and from 1895 civil parishes took over with a council elected by public vote, serving as the first level of local government beneath the district councils. Currently more than a third of the population of England has a town or parish

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council and there are currently moves to stimulate local communities to create more.22 In the case of the USA,23 the strength of the congregations as individual church organizations and community-based meeting points was certainly a strong point in New England and continues to be so today. However, as this citation from Hall’s history of the reforming people suggests, this served more as an important source of training and practice in performing public affairs – rather than as a basis for institutional design. The governance of towns, and, to an even greater extent, the governance of local congregations, was deeply participatory. So was civil society as a whole, for the colonists brought with them a cluster of assumptions and practices that abetted popular involvement in everyday politics: an appetite for news, a confidence in sharing their opinions with local leaders, a facility for writing and reading, the custom of distributing handwritten texts to influence political decision-making, the experience of resisting (usually by ignoring) the rules of the Church of England, and the habit of using petitions to complain of grievances. (Hall, 2012, p. 53, Kindle edition)

Institutional design, in all but two of the states, followed the idea of counties and townships. Louisiana, with its French and Spanish legacy, still has parishes today and Alaska has boroughs. Perhaps more distinctive for the theme of this chapter were the multiple experiences of independent school districts. In 1932 the local government structure of the USA had 3,062 counties, 16,442 municipalities, 19,978 towns and townships, 128,548 school districts and 14,572 special districts – in total, some 182,602 instances of local government. In 2007, the number of counties was very similar (3,033), municipalities had risen to 19,492, town and townships had dropped to 16,519 (almost the same as the rise of municipalities), school districts had fallen to 13,051 (only 10 per cent of the earlier amount) and the overall total had declined to 89,476.24 School districts, often known as independent school districts, are something very different in democratic theory and practice. They are single-theme jurisdictions which collect taxes from everybody in the district, independent of whether or not they are users of school services. In addition (no taxation without representation) they are run by councils or boards that are democratically elected. All residents of the district are responsible for the decisions and investment loans and all can run in the school district elections. Over time, many of the school districts became absorbed into town and county structures, while retaining the practice of being close to their communities. The origins were very pragmatic; settlers were families,

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families had children, and as education began to be seen as increasingly important children needed to be in school. In the same way that churches were built, schools were also built, and a teacher was hired by collective effort and local subscription. A number of these early one-room schools can still be found in historical sites. Here is one, in Stonewall, Texas, that will play its part in Chapter 4. The first one-room schoolhouse on the Pedernales River was actually a tent in the Christadelphian campgrounds one mile east of the present day Junction School. In 1882, the tent was replaced by the community with a small frame building that served both as a school and church. On September 27, 1910 John Pehl sold to the school district 2 3/4 acres of land on the north side of the Pedernales River to build a new school (…) The Junction School was a typical one-room school. A wood stove sat in a sand box in the center of the school and was the only source of heat. Two kerosene lamps suspended from the ceiling at opposite ends of the room provided light. The teacher’s desk and a chair were in front of the classroom. A small brass bell on the teacher’s desk summoned the students. Students sat at double desks which had wooden tops with holes for the glass inkwells. The desks were arranged in rows facing the teacher’s desk; the boys in one row and the girls in another. One of the students at the Junction School was a 4-year old boy by the name of Lyndon Baines Johnson (…) Since Lyndon could hear the children outside before school and at recess, he would run down to the school house to play with them. His mother – constantly worried he would get lost – talked to the teacher, Miss Katie Deadrich, about enrolling him early into school (…) In 1924, he graduated from high school in Johnson City and later attended Southwest Texas Teachers’ College in San Marcos where he received his teaching degree. Johnson taught school for a while in Houston, Cotulla, and Pearsall, Texas. (The Junction School House is now part of the Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park in Stonewall, Texas.)25

As Cnaan (2002) pointed out in the introduction to his study of present-day congregations in the USA, ‘… most social scientists shy away from faith-based organizations in general and congregations in particular’. Yet there are, he estimated, probably some 350,000 in existence today in that country, which represent a constant flow of what can be considered micro- and community-level social actions. Congregations and parishes are indeed largely invisible when most discussion of public policy takes place, for their actions are voluntary and collective. In today’s largely secular institutional environment, governments can’t require them to help those in need. Equally, they themselves do not have the extension and capacity to hold social service provision together. They did so partially in the nineteenth century, but not in the way that the twentieth-century welfare state would require. Indeed, as will be seen in the case of the UK in Chapter 4, the welfare state saw itself as a much

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better and far more skilled replacement and initially dispensed the need for such actions (Prochaska, 2006).26 However, they are still around, not only as the more visible faith-based charities and development organizations that they stimulated and encouraged, but as themselves, with their own action languages. In 2001, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development produced a major report on ‘Faith Based Organizations in Community Development’.27 Its executive summary began: ‘In recent years, policymakers have begun looking to churches, synagogues, mosques, and other faith-based organizations to play a greater role in strengthening communities. Yet little research exists on the role of faith-based organizations in community development.’ The report found that, while faith-based organizations were less active in community development, more than half of all congregations and many other faith-based organizations provided some form of human services. This was more so amongst larger communities located in low-income areas, especially those that were theologically liberal and African American. As Cnaan also found: ‘Congregations cannot assume the role that government plays in social services provision and in caring for needy people. They can, however, be the quiet partner that constitutes part of the first line of help’ (2002, p. 9). Congregations and parishes, then, provide yet another reason for the broad public action languages approach that the book is proposing. They are not part of government, they do not follow government requirements, but that does not stop them being a public for the public. Equally there is no simple dividing line between congregations and parishes carrying out activities that they themselves see as important, and the more hybrid type of service-providing faith-based organizations that may well be working in some kind of direct relationship with local authorities.28

ORPHANAGES, CHARITIES AND THE RIGHTS OF THE CHILD No unaccompanied adults, no dogs, no glass bottles (Plaque on the gateway to Coram’s Fields in London, UK, once the site of the Foundling Hospital)

There is no path from Adam Ferguson’s 1767 An Essay on the History of Civil Society, written in Enlightenment Scotland, that will lead to Alexis de Tocqueville’s reflections on his trip to early nineteenth-century New England, but placed side by side with Dahrendorf’s contemporary definition they make it clear that at least a good part of middle and late

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modernity shares the view that government does not have the monopoly on public affairs. If the public good be the principal object with individuals, it is likewise true, that the happiness of individuals is the great end of civil society: for in what sense can a public enjoy any good, if its members, considered apart, be unhappy? (Ferguson, 1767/1995, p. 59) Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions, constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons and schools. If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association. (de Tocqueville, 1840/1990, Book 2, p. 106) Civil society describes the associations in which we conduct our lives and which owe their existence to our needs and initiative rather than to the state. Some of these associations are highly deliberative and sometimes short lived, like sports clubs or political parties. Others are founded in history and have very long life, like churches or universities. Still others are the place in which we work and live – enterprises, local communities. The family is an element of civil society. The criss-crossing network of such associations – their creative chaos as one might be tempted to say – make up the reality of civil society. It is a precious reality, far from universal, itself the result of a long civilizing process; yet it is often threatened by authoritarian rulers or by the forces of globalization. (Dahrendorf, 1996, p. 237)

In 1774, two years before Ferguson’s book, Johann Basedow founded a school in Dessau, now Germany, for the education of children on topics such as philanthropy and natural religion. His students were called philantropines and already at this time the expression was used to refer to people who loved humanity and practised benevolence to their brothers on earth. Orphanages and hostels for babies and children who could not be maintained by their mothers had been around even longer. The famous Ospedale dela Pietâ, the orphanage in Venice where Vivaldi would later teach and conduct, was founded between 1336–1346.29 Thomas Coram, a successful shipwright and sailor retired home to England from the New World at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Impacted by the sights of children discarded and dying on the streets of London, he campaigned for 17 years to establish a Foundling Hospital

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which was granted by Royal decree in 1739. Amongst its supporters was the painter William Hogarth, who donated works to be put on show and persuaded fellow artists to do the same, thus unknowingly creating the UK’s first public art gallery. The result was to become, for the London elite, a very fashionable charity and place in which to be seen. George Friedrich Handel also joined in and gave a highly successful benefit concert in 1749, returning the following year to conduct the recently written Messiah in a second over-subscribed benefit concert. The concert was repeated, Handel was made a governor and he continued to perform the Messiah in the annual benefit concert until his death, having donated the complete score to the hospital. The hospital moved out of London in 1926 and stopped only in 1954, when the institutional model of child care ended, partly as a result of the disruptions of wartime, but also because of the growing understanding of the consequences of family break-ups and the 1946 Curtis Report on children deprived of a normal life. In 1948 the Children’s Act transferred the responsibility of caring for homeless children and those in need to the local authorities, who had to set up a children’s committee and appoint a Children’s Officer. Charities had to take their place within this new structure and report to the Home Office. Little by little the orphanages changed their roles as fostering, family support and smaller care units began to take over. The Foundling became the Thomas Coram Foundation for Children (The Coram), a leading research and advocacy centre for research on child and family vulnerability and best practice in care. Part of the old grounds became, with charitable support and public subscription, a much-needed space for inner London children to play – Coram’s Fields (1936). Children were also the focus of other early social activists, this time in the area of education. The Ragged School movement (named after the quality of the clothes that children wore) had started almost spontaneously in different parts of the UK in the 1820s to offer education to those who could not pay. One of these local movements was led by John Pounds, a Portsmouth shoemaker, who in 1818 taught up to 40 children at a time to read and write in his workshop. It became a union in 1844 and, importantly, many of its teachers were women. There are estimates of more than 1,600 voluntary teachers in 1851 and by 1867 the Union reported 226 Sunday schools, 204 day schools and 207 night schools, with a total of 26,000 children. In 1866, the Irish doctor T.J. Barnardo arrived in London for training as a missionary. He ended up joining the movement, and on finding that many of the children in his school lived on the streets he opened a shelter in 1870. One evening he had to turn 11-year-old John Somers away because the shelter was full. ‘Carrots’ as

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he was known was later found dead from malnutrition and exposure. From that day on a sign was put on the shelter door: ‘No destitute child ever refused permission.’ By the end of his life, in 1905, Barnardo had opened a further 95 shelters and homes. The organization he founded went on to run many more homes all over the UK until gradually running down its residential care work in the 1950s and early 1960s. Under the name of Barnardo’s it continues as one of the UK’s leading charities for children, with an activist and advocacy agenda in children’s rights. It was not only in the ragged schools that women like Mary Carpenter (educated in a school run by her father, a Unitarian minister), who opened a school for girls with her mother and sisters in 1829 and was another founder of the movement, were taking an active part. Increasingly present in other areas of the growing charitable arena of social action, but denied access to higher education until the latter part of the century and then only in some universities, they were to appear not just as volunteers but as employees and leaders of a number of initiatives. It is estimated that by the 1890s some 20,000 women were actively employed in a wide variety of charity organizations and more than 500,000 in some kind of voluntary or semi-professional role (somewhat contrary to Queen Victoria’s views about the role of women). Prochaska (2006) grouped his study of church-based activities and the early social services into four broad themes: schooling, visiting, mothering and nursing. Of these perhaps the one least mentioned today is visiting. Of all forms of charitable activity established in Britain, none was more important than district, or household, visiting. It is little remembered today, except as the forerunner of social casework. But from the late eighteenth century until well into the twentieth it represented the most significant contribution made by organized religion to relieving the ills of society. (location 751, Kindle edition)

Often organized by parish, visitors would be assigned to specific streets and households which they would visit weekly or more often with the ‘tools of their trade – Bibles, tracts, clothes, blankets, food and coal tickets, domestic advice, medical assistance, friendship and love’ (location 751, Kindle edition). Some visiting societies were set up by the poor themselves, some were pioneers on special issues such as those who worked with the blind and visitors came from the Church of England, the Catholic Church as well as the many different chapels and meeting halls. Prochaska provides data for the Church of England, which in its first census counted 47,112 district visitors, mostly female in 12,000 of the 15,000 parishes in England and Wales. The figure was

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74,009 by 1910, 85,000 a few years later – of which 75,000 were women. Estimates from across the religious spectrum suggest that overall the tally was 200,000. Another of these early activists was Eglantyne Jebb, born in 1876 into an upper-middle-class family with social concerns. In the turmoil of the aftermath of the First World War, she was imprisoned for handing out leaflets in Trafalgar Square London with photos of starving Austrian children, in protest against the effects of the post-war economic blockade. She was fined £5 (£500 at today’s value) and, as a sign of the times, the public prosecutor stepped forward and asked permission to pay the fine on her behalf. A few days later, along with her sister and friends, including Margaret, the sister of the economist John Maynard Keynes, she raised £10,000 (close to £1 million today), which was delivered as aid within ten days in Vienna (Mulley, 2009). One amongst many women who were assuming new roles in society, Jebb, as an Anglican, sought support from the Archbishop of Canterbury who backed away because of the political implications. As a travelled member of intellectual society, she had no difficulty in finding her way to Rome where, after a long conversation, Pope Benedict XV not only made a substantial contribution from his own funds but promised the support of all the catholic parishes on a ‘save the children day’. On Holy Innocents’ Day, Christian churches all around the world joined together in an ecumenical act of support and the Save the Children Fund was created. The organizational format of Save the Children, a network of national associations, was similar to that developed some 50 years before by a businessman, Jean Henri Dunant, who had by chance witnessed the terrible aftermaths of the Battle of Solferino in 1859. He wrote a book about the sufferings of wounded soldiers and, together with others, organized a meeting to discuss his concerns in 1863 in Calvin’s city, Geneva. The result of the meeting was the International Committee of the Red Cross, followed by the first Geneva Convention of August 1864. It was in the same mountains above Calvin’s city that Jebb would sit down in 1922 to pen one of the first proposals of a declaration of children’s rights. Clearly, she had been talking about this for some time and her love of Geneva was in part a result of a daughter’s obligation to accompany her invalid mother on the different cures for water and air. Like most people who today grab a moment in an airport lounge or coffee shop to format an argument, the place becomes symbolic in a post facto manner; that is sensemaking. But it’s still a nice story. The result was the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child, adopted by the League of Nations on 26 September 1924.

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Beyond public policy By the present Declaration of the Rights of the Child, commonly known as ‘Declaration of Geneva’, men and women of all nations, recognizing that mankind owes to the Child the best that it has to give, declare and accept it as their duty that beyond and above all consideration of race, nationality or creed: (1) The child must be given the means requisite for its normal development, both materially and spiritually; (2) The child that is hungry must be fed; the child that is sick must be nursed; the child that is backward must be helped; the delinquent child must be reclaimed; and the orphan and the waif must be sheltered and succored; (3) The child must be the first to receive relief in times of distress; (4) The child must be put in a position to earn a livelihood, and must be protected against every form of exploitation; (5) The child must be brought up in the consciousness that its talents must be devoted to the service of fellow men.

Declarations and Bills of Rights were already appearing in the wider social and institutional imaginary30 but here was a moment in which they were being used as a precise and definable tool, a language for social action. Written almost 100 years ago it would put to shame many current programmatic and policy documents on child welfare. Its language is emphatic and certainly not related to budget approval. It is written, just like the writer when she penned the first version, on the high ground – only in this case a very clear and non-political moral high ground. It is very difficult to ‘if’ and ‘but’. It is said that the Pope was running behind schedule when he fitted her in for a quick talk, but that he stayed listening for two hours. Going forward in time, it is unlikely without the Dunants and Jebbs of this world and other similar cross-national arrangements that the United Nations Organization would have included in its article 71 of its 1945 Charter that: ‘The Economic and Social Council may make suitable arrangements for consultation with non-governmental organizations which are concerned with matters within its competence. Such arrangements may be made with international organizations and, where appropriate, with national organizations after consultation with the Member of the United Nations concerned.’ Without them, and many others, it is possible that what today we call NGOs (non-governmental organizations) may not have been called NGOs and may be still wrapped up as philanthropic or non-profit or some other different descriptor. Save the Children continues, as does the Red Cross, to work in conflict zones but can also be found around the corner. For example, in Spain in 2012 the Red Cross was supporting

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more than a million-and-a-half people in different parts of the country with food parcels because they did not have enough to eat. Many others, including the author, stopped by a Red Cross/Red Crescent booth on 8 May to donate funds to support them. Those who stepped into these issues, or talked them into being, were probably not interested in creating non-governmental organizations, rather they were very much concerned with problems that in some way they felt responsible for doing something about.

RECUPERATING CIVIC ENGAGEMENT In an earlier publication of his Italian study, Putnam (1988) set his discussion in the arena of civic culture (rather than social capital), using both de Tocqueville on ‘mores’, an earlier kind of civic disposition, and Almond and Verba’s (1963) classic comparative study of civic culture in five countries. Almond and Verba’s starting concern was with the development of political cultures consistent with the democratic form of participatory political systems in the new generation of post-Second World War nations: If the democratic model of the participatory state is to develop in these new nations, it will require more than the formal institutions of democracy – universal suffrage, the political party, the elective legislature. These in fact are also part of the totalitarian participation pattern, in a formal if not functional sense. (Almond and Verba, 1963, p. 5)

Key to their arguments was the importance of what they termed ‘civic culture’ as a mixed modernizing-traditional culture that was a product of tense encounters over time between modernizing forces and traditionalism ‘sharp enough to effect significant change but not so sharp or so concentrated in time as to create disintegration or polarization’ (p.7). Their focus was on Britain, where they saw the story of the civic culture writ large, but they would also recognize that America, the Scandinavian countries, Holland and Switzerland appeared to have worked out their own version ‘of a political culture and a practice of accommodation and compromise’. Of Britain they would say: What emerged was a third culture, neither traditional nor modern but partaking of both; a pluralistic culture based on communication and persuasion, a culture of consensus and diversity, a culture that permitted change but moderated it. This was the civic culture. With this civic culture already consolidated, the working classes could enter into politics and, in the process

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Beyond public policy of trial and error, find the language in which to couch their demands and the means to make them effective. (Almond and Verba, 1963, p. 8)

Looked at in hindsight, as Ehrenberg (1999) has commented, Almond and Verba’s arguments show considerable aversion to conflict and their view of British history was considerably pastoral. There is no place for the Chartists, the Levellers, Cromwell, strikes and massacres amongst their observations on consensus and compromise. ‘Like many social scientists of the period, Almond and Verba shared Truman’s worries that high levels of political activity might be politically destabilizing. This is why their composite “civic culture” combined participation with enough parochial and subject orientations to keep it within safe boundaries’ (Ehrenberg, 1999, p. 205). Indeed, as Almond and Verba were to conclude: The civic culture is a mixed political culture. In it many individuals are active in politics, but there are many who take the more passive role of subject. More important, even among those performing the active political role of the citizen, the roles of the subject and the parochial have not been displaced. The participant role has been added to the subject and parochial roles. This means that the active citizen maintains his traditional nonpolitical ties, as well as his more passive role as a subject. (1963, p. 474)

There is no doubt that seen from this perspective the adoption of ‘civic culture’ by Almond and Verba is both liberal and orthodox, if not to say conservative, suggesting that politics needs to be kept in its place and that somehow the norms and values of the interpersonal and the social environments provide a background of general trust and confidence. Their implicit civil society is much more like that of Ferguson than it is of Gramsci (1971), yet at the same time they came close to an important observation, albeit in a very different direction than their understandable, for the time period, pro-westernized intentions. That is, the importance in everyday life of a minimum acceptance of and responsibility to the other, a point much better dealt with in the discussion surrounding the moral commonwealth (Selznick, 1992) and the collectivist critique of Rawls (Sandel, 1998). However, possibly it was their understanding of European history that let them down. The guilds, communes and early city movements of the middle and late medieval periods had already established a variety of practical versions of the principle of mutual responsibility, argued in different ways but present in such terms as comunitas, universitas, civilitas and recognized as an acceptance of the bonum comune or common good (Black, 1984). The suggestion by Almond and Verba that

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civic culture, as symbolized by the UK and northern continental countries, was something that should be spread to help democracy was wide of the mark and probably helped the expression to quietly fall into disuse. The Latin corona civica was a garland of oak leaves bestowed on somebody who saved the life of a fellow citizen in war. In the medieval period it had become firmly attached to the associative responsibilities of city membership, and by the time of the French Revolution it had become, as the serment civique, the oath of allegiance to the new order of things. The teaching of civics was the early teaching of the science of civil government, and Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary described it thus: ‘Civick – relating to civil honors or practices; not military’. There is a lot of evidence that there are basic requirements for civility once people have found themselves occupying the same space, or in order to do things together. It may not be called civic responsibility but something like it does seem to play a key role in building societies. Perhaps the mistake that Almond and Verba made was to assume that it came in a particular size and shape and from a particular part of the world – a mistake that early anthropologists also made in associating culture with the more visible institutional structure rather than with the subtle assumptions of lived-in social processes (Bloch, 1977). Today, civic engagement may seem somewhat old-fashioned as a term and can bring the dangers of localism,31 but it has not gone out of use as, for example, in serving as a rallying point for the discussion of the role of the university in relation to the community or communities of which it is a part.32 Civil society, as Friedmann (2011) points out, is neither good nor bad: ‘civil society must under no circumstances be read as a homogeneous sphere. Deep divisions run through it, creating an internal dynamic that is based on social class, gender, religion, ethnicity, so-called race, access to household resources and other social markers’ (p.116). Seen from the perspective of planning, itself a field with many action languages, the importance of the revival of civil society in the 1980s was: ‘less the term itself, but the varied forms of discourse linked to it, such as discursive democracy, citizenship (especially citizen rights and obligations), civic spaces, social justice, voluntary organizations, and social movements’ (pp.109–110). Government officials and agencies may look from their offices and imagine a spreading network of policy, inter-agency coordination, implementation and action moving outwards towards their fellow citizens and service users. But at the same time, their fellow citizens – wondering how they will get through to the end of the day, week or month – are more likely to see a world of questions, organizations and actions, some of which are private affairs, some of which are handled by different

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government agencies such as the state or region, the city, the county, the municipal government, the water board, the police and the fire department, and some of which are somehow resolved by all sorts of mixtures of church, friends and relations, neighbours, clubs, associations and philanthropic bodies. In a number of cases the question of ‘who does what?’ will be in dispute; either because this or that level, branch or agency of government doesn’t do ‘its bit’ or because ‘it is getting in the way’. Information will be more or less easy to find, including the very question of where to find it. The result can be a generally deepening democracy (Habermas, 1998), but it can also get blocked in the uneasy co-existence of assorted agencies, citizens, households and community-based groups who find themselves pushing and shoving in the same arena. Increasingly, these tensions are marked by the complexity of dealing with broader issues of living in moral communities. It is towards this multiplicity of action languages that the book now turns, first in theoretical terms and then through a series of examples of governments and of publics in action.

NOTES 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

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See the classical texts by Engels ‘On the Housing Question’, first published in 1872 and 1873. ‘… both people able to talk and things unable to talk have spokesmen. I propose to call whoever and whatever is represented actant’ (Latour, 1987, pp. 83–84). Actantes in narrative theory refer to the key roles in the story, without which the story wouldn’t happen. ‘The term actante (literally “that which accomplishes or undergoes the action”) refers, in semiotics, to the great functions or roles occupied by the various characters of a narrative, be they humans, animals or simple objects’ (Vandendorpe, 1993, p. 505). Accessed 15 March 2018 at UNHCR (2018). This is confirmed in the introduction by Melvin Rogers to the 2012 edition: ‘Revisiting The Public and its Problems’. Marres (2007), Cefaï (2016). Habermas (1962/1999), Cohen and Arato (1994). For example, the well-documented war against Canudos in the interior of the State of Bahia, Brazil, between October 1896 and October 1897 in which a semi-religious community of some 30,000 people from different parts of the north east of the country held out against an army of over 9,000. Spink (1997). In part through the constant effort of the Dominican Bartolomé de las Casas in describing the conditions on the Spanish plantations in the New World which largely contributed to Pope Paul III issuing his Sublimus Dei in 1537, discussed later in the chapter. For a review of the impact of the missions see Adelha (1999). Tubman (undated). See Balcells’ recent review (2017) of collectivization in Catalonia and Valencia; also Alba (2001) for an insider’s view and Thomas (1961/1977). Cited in Schulkind (1985, p. 150).

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14. Cited in Holyoake (1857/1907). 15. See also Billis (2010) on heterogeneity and hybrid forms, Smith and Lipsky (1993) on issues of policy making and independence, Salamon and Anheier (1998) for a crossnational perspective, and also Zunz (2012) on philanthropy. 16. Bache and Reardon (2016). 17. King Jr (1963). 18. King Jr (undated). 19. See www.citizensuk.org.uk 20. Mackin (2013). 21. Daniel Elazar has suggested that this may in part have to do with questions of physical geography and the difference between lands with rivers and streams that suggest clearer physical boundaries and lands with wells and deserts. http:/www.jcpa.org/dje/articles2/ jewreorg.htm (accessed in March 2018 but no longer available). 22. This is a bottom-up process, see UK Parish Councils (undated). 23. The history of local arrangements for public life can vary considerably from one democratic country to another and each would require its own chapter to do it justice. The focus on the USA and the UK has to do with the wider focus of the book, for it is largely in these countries that the idea of ‘public policy’ was put together from 1950–1975. They are therefore key places to look for other social action languages that were in use and to ask what happened to them. Was public policy, as the textbooks seem to say, so powerful as an articulating concept that it swept away the other ways of being and talking public affairs? 24. Wilson (2012, p. 78). 25. Johnson (undated). 26. This may explain part of the reason why social scientists tend to leave them on one side. Rochester and Torry (2010), in their own contribution (‘Faith-Based Organizations and Hybridity’) to Billis’ edited volume on Hybrid Organizations and the Third Sector, comment that there is no equivalent in the UK literature to Cnaan’s detailed study of 251 US congregations and also report that even a study carried out for the Church of England itself admitted a very fragile base of information (p.121). 27. HUD (2001). 28. See Rochester and Torry (2010), Smith and Lipsky (1993). 29. The expression ‘Ospidale’, in English ‘hospital’, dates from the very early practice of providing protection and shelter (hospitality) to pilgrims and grew in use following the crusades, changing meaning as shelter was provided for the sick as well. 30. ‘The imaginary of which I am speaking is not an image of. It is the unceasing and essentially undetermined (social historical and psychical) creation of figures/forms/images, on the basis of which alone there can ever be a question of “something”. What we call “reality” and “rationality” are its works’ (Castoriadis, 2006, p. 5). 31. Mohan and Stokke (2000). 32. Goddard et al. (2016).

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3. Social languages and the performative turn Preach, my dear sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the laws for educating the common people. (Thomas Jefferson writing from Paris to George Wythe, one of the seven Virginian signatories to the Declaration of Independence, 1786)1

In the eleventh century, Pope Urban II received a request from the then Byzantine Emperor to help with the fight against westward moving Sejuk Turks who had taken most of Asia minor including Jerusalem. He went on to make a speech at the Council of Clermont in 1095 where he called for those present and others to recover and guarantee access to the Holy Land. In part of the speech, registered by members of his audience, he gave the following instruction: Whoever, therefore, shall determine upon this holy pilgrimage and shall make his vow to God to that effect and shall offer himself to Him as a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, shall wear the sign of the cross of the Lord on his forehead or on his breast. When ‘truly’, having fulfilled his vow he wishes to return, let him place the cross on his back between his shoulders. Such, indeed, by the twofold action will fulfill the precept of the Lord, as He commands in the Gospel, ‘He that taketh not his cross and followeth after me, is not worthy of me.’ (Munro, 1895)2

WORDS AND EVENTS: SOCIAL ACTION AS CIRCULATING MEANINGS There is probably nobody who has grown up or gone to school in Europe or the Americas who has not come across images of tall and noble knights in armour with long white over-cloths marked by the sign of the cross in red, or vice versa, who are taking part in the crusades. The crusaders, unfortunately, would never know that they were crusaders, or that they were on crusades. The word that Urban II used was the word that was available – pilgrimage (perigrinato) – and many of those involved may have just called it an iter or journey. The idea that 58

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Jerusalem had been recently seized is also strange as the city had been in Muslim hands for many centuries, but the following two centuries of struggles after the Council of Clermont would leave a legacy of expressions and practical forms of organization.3 The term itself would require gradual tweaking and turning by the time of the third ‘crusade’ with the latin crucesignatus (signed by the cross) and the later French term croisade (approximately ‘the way of the cross’) before early historians began to write about the crusades. This earlier vision of the crusades as morally justifiable ventures can be found in the Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (OED) documentation of its use in 1786 as ‘an aggressive movement of enterprise against some public evil’. Jefferson, it can be assumed, was using a softer notion of the word, as would the US pastor and evangelist Billy Graham who carried out over 400 crusades, later changed to missions, in 185 countries from 1947 to 2005. A common thread, however, is the implicit moral high ground which can also be found in the use of ‘wars’ on poverty and on want.4 The different chapters of Beyond Public Policy deal with many ideas that seem natural and obvious in describing different aspects of the broad arena of public affairs. This is in part because of the tendency to see academic ideas as somehow detached and independent of the everyday and certainly not as social products. If they are widely used, then there must be good academic reasons for using them, and if they are used by many, they must be accurate descriptions of what is taking place. But, if, on the other hand, ideas are social products, then the form and substance of what is said and the social situation in which it is said are linked. Thus, looking at other periods and times – when time indeed was different and ideas changed more slowly – helps to be a bit more suspicious of the ‘naturalness’ with which current concepts and ideas are treated. The example of the crusades shows how actions and terms interconnect, are altered, used, reinvented and borrowed for a variety of reasons in a variety of ways. Those external armed pilgrimages to the eastern Mediterranean lands would not only help to produce the ‘Holy’ Land, but also contribute to serve as a way of dealing with movements in Europe itself that could also be positioned as heretics or challengers to the dominant religious order. Such was the case of what is referred to today as the Albigensian Crusade in the thirteenth century, led by armed soldiers (knights) from north and central France against the Cathars in the south west near Albi in the Pyrenees. The Cathars5 were a nonmaterialist Christian movement that directly challenged papal authority and whose members were slaughtered in their thousands. It is said that when one of the crusaders said, ‘We don’t know which are Cathars and

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which are Christians’, the papal legate Abbot Arnaud Amalric replied ‘Kill them all. The Lord knows those who are his.’ While there is no certainty that this was actually said – it was attributed to the Abbot some ten years later – it no less served as a reflection on a growing position. This internal campaign within Christian territory sparked off other actions against dissident movements and in turn would lead to the Inquisition with, it might be said, a similar approach to possible mistakes of judgement. It would take a very long time for the current belief in the presumption of innocence to become established as a core value for justice. Part of this core value is often associated with the role ascribed to the modern sovereign state in guaranteeing citizenship and rights which, like the Policy Sciences in 1951 (Lerner and Lasswell, 1951), is often given a symbolic starting time and location. In this case it was to be the Treaty of Westphalia made up of two treaties signed on the same day in Münster in 1648. It has been described as the portal that leads from the Old World into the New World, from the middle ages to modernity. Croxton, whose historical analysis points in a very different direction, characterizes this current ‘version’ as suggesting that ‘On one side, diplomacy is hemmed in by religion and confused by overlapping jurisdictions that make it difficult even to identify the main actors; on the other side, it is conducted by sovereign states in pursuit of security through balance of power’ (Croxton, 2013, p. 3). It was certainly an event that had many consequences, although some of the parties continued fighting each other afterwards, but as Croxton argues it had much more to do with the different Catholic and Protestant powers (these included Lutherans and Calvinists) agreeing to accept each other. It was, in other words, a peace that tried to deal with the conflicts that were present, rather than a treaty that was turned towards a new institutional design. Münster and Osnabrück were small provincial towns, picked not because of their centrality but because they served as a compromise between the distances that delegations were travelling from Madrid, Stockholm, Rome, Paris and Vienna. There had to be two towns because the French and Swedes would not accept either one having precedence over the other. There were Protestants who disagreed with Catholics, the Holy Roman Empire that didn’t see eye to eye with France, princes against emperors, France also against Spain, Swedes, Danes, Poles, Russians, the Dutch and the Swiss – plus all sorts of commercial interests. But it was agreed that there would be communication and that eventually the two signings would take place on the same day. Putting all this together was an immense jungle of different tasks with huge contingents of princes, ambassadors, servants and cooks on all

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sides. Estimates put this as representatives of some 194 states, large and small, 179 plenipotentiaries and ambassadors (who were already in action in early Europe) with moderators from the Pope and from Venice. Croxton’s descriptions of the day to day of the four years in which the Congress was in action illustrate the skills that must have been involved, including dealing with the languages in which demands were presented (Latin, French, Spanish, Italian and German). ‘The inability of the participants to settle on a single language at the Congress of Westphalia was symbolic of the transition through which diplomacy was passing; on the one side the medieval period with its universal use of Latin; on the other side, the modern period in which national languages are preferred’ (2013, p. 164). In the informal negotiations with most delegates understanding some of the other languages (for example, those who had gone to university had Latin as a working language), most delegates preferred to talk in their own tongues. One would talk in French and the other in Italian. Dutch and Swedish were known to few outside their delegations and Spanish was also limited. Documents were going backwards and forwards all over Europe and lawyers were involved with many of the specific settlements. This was Europe of the seventeenth century and, as Spruyt (1994) has pointed out, over the previous centuries there were many alternatives around for territorial political organization. Something of this can be found in the lines of the treaty itself. There are references (in the English translation) to ‘Vassals, Subjects, Citizens and Inhabitants who will be restored to the possession of their Goods’ and the very ‘Places, Citys, Towns, Boroughs, Villages, Castles, Fortresses and Forts that have been possessed’.6 The variety of expressions and forms of relation between economic activity and early urban institutions – such as guilds, universitas and Gemeinde or communities especially in smaller towns – has been frequently described, and by 1300 central and northern Italy was dotted with guild republics (Black, 1984). Italy would also provide city leagues and city states, and in the north the Hanseatic League would gradually emerge as a confederation of towns which as its peak covered an area from parts of present-day France, Brussels, Holland up through Sweden to the Baltic. Beginning with relationships between merchants it moved on gradually to be a set of relationships between the towns themselves (more than 200), capable not only of trading but fielding armies and even deposing kings and participating in international treaties. It was a very viable way of organizing political and economic activity without a central authority. The towns would be called to meet or send delegates to the Hansetag which met every few years on the principle of one town one

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vote. It lasted from the thirteenth through to the sixteenth centuries and slowly stopped during the seventeenth century, with the last assembly being held in 1669 at which only Lübeck, Bremen and Hamburg were present.7 The Hanseatic League was more than just an arrangement; these were commercial and political activities, and for commerce there is a need for warehouses and storage as well as skills and knowledge about the great trade routes. Today it is possible to walk through many a town in northern Europe, including the English town of King’s Lynn, and still see the physical presence of the league. There are now tourist routes through Hanseatic territory and, not surprisingly, there are new cooperation agreements between the Hanse towns8: socialities and materialities have a curious way of conversing over time. Many of these earlier expressions for human settlements, in Latin or vernacular French, German and Italian, still appear on today’s descriptive territorial landscape. Others were adapted, translated or put aside, in the same way that the territorial landscape of human settlements has also changed. Most European towns will have an ‘old quarter’, and it is a useful exercise to stand at some narrow crossing and remember that this was the town and it probably stayed like that for a long time. In contrast, that which is surrounding it has another time frame, one that changes constantly. In order to deal with this contrast and potential conflict, many local governments will have departments dedicated to preservation and, along the corridor, departments dedicated to planning. It is difficult to be in two ‘times’ at the same place.

CONCEPTS, SOCIAL LANGUAGES AND SPEECH GENRES The notion of the simultaneous presence of different concepts, terms and, often conflicting, forms of reason and ideas, as well as the discussion of their implications and consequences, can be found throughout the humanities and the social sciences.9 Different times are not only present, as it were, in the past but are also in the present; and the future also makes its presence felt through expectations that exist because they too have effects.10 Concepts, ideas, terms, theories and practices which form social languages are the main focus of the book, and one in particular – policy – provides its initial attraction. But these do not happen in the air. The work of Koselleck (1979/2004) on the history of concepts (Begriffsgeschichte) and of historians of ideas in general help to understand both the connections and disconnections, the breaks and continuities, the gradual changes and the reinventions that can take place around

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social and political theses, ideas and concepts. One of Koselleck’s leading themes is the intersection of experience and expectation: The highly developed forms of association among the Stände in the Late Middle Ages led, but only after some delay, to the easily remembered expression Bund. This expression was first formed (outside of Latin terminology) only when the shifting forms of association had found temporally limited but repeatable success. What was at first only sworn verbally, that is, the individual agreements which for a specific period mutually bound, obliged, or associated the parties, was, as the outcome of its successful institutionalization, brought under the one concept, Bund. An individual Bündnis still had the sense of an active concept operating in the present, Bund, on the other hand, referred to an institutionalized condition. This is apparent, for example, in the displacement of the parties, when the ‘Bund of cities’ became the ‘cities of the Bund.’ The real agent is hidden in the genitive. While a ‘Bund of cities’ still placed emphasis on the individual partners, the ‘cities of the Bund’ were ordered to an overall agency, the Bund. In this way, the various activities of Bündnisse became retrospectively consolidated in a collective singular. Der Bund incorporated experience that had already been made and brought them under one concept. This is, therefore, what might be called a concept for the registration of experience. It is full of past reality which can, in the course of political action, be transferred into the future and projected onward. (2004, p. 271)

But there are also concepts that had basically been forgotten until they were found in some musty attic of the collective mind or social imaginary, dusted down and given a totally different usage. As for example with ‘civil society’ after the events in Poland and then Hungary in the 1980s that redefined the political map of Europe and the experiences in different parts of the developing world of new forms of social movement. Within this wider text, civil society became a key articulating term for thinking about democracy and development, added a new concept ‘solidarity’ (the abbreviated name of the Polish trade union movement founded in 1980) and recovered a forgotten author (Gramsci).11 In both cases, whether slow adaptation or recovery for other uses, it is possible to say that it happened, but the rest is a question of interpretation. But, as Richter (1996) remarked in the introduction to a seminar held to discuss the twenty-five-year study led by Koselleck to document past uses of some 120 German political and social concepts: ‘By understanding the history of the concepts available to us, we may better perceive how they push us to think along certain lines, thus enabling us to conceive of how to act on alternative and less constraining definitions of our situation’ (p.10).

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In a similar way, the social histories of the languages themselves provide insights into the many different ways that people found themselves together in talk and, within them, the many different varieties of dialects that defied attempts to teach people the proper way. In the town of Rochdale, site of the cooperative shop of Chapter 2, people were seen as being blunt and abrupt, surnames were replaced by other forms of identification and it was reported that strangers would find it impossible to understand the broad, unadulterated provincialisms of the natives (Joyce, 1991). Languages are indeed very social affairs.12 Latin, for example, held on in diplomacy for a long time before being replaced by the vernacular French. After all it was a language which had no ‘owner’, so no one person was subservient to the other. Treaties continued to be written in Latin in the eighteenth century, and in those countries where it was not expected that visitors would have any vernacular skills Latin came in handy and there are reports of its use by travellers well into the mid-nineteenth century. Indeed, it was probably those who were most dedicated to the preservation of its classical standards, not those for whom it was a practical way of getting around (what Burke (1991) called pragmatic Latin), who most contributed to it being seen eventually as a ‘dead language’. Bakhtin’s view of language may start from somebody talking to somebody else (including themselves) in a particular dialogue at a particular time and in a particular place but this does not mean that the two are separate and that talk passes from one to the other through an uncluttered space. On the contrary and similar in part to Mead,13 it is the conversation that produces the people and in carrying it out the complexity of language is continued, for any conversation is the continuation of many other conversations and will in turn take part in many others. Humankind lives in words and languages like fish live in water, they are inseparable and part of each other. Holquist, who has been largely responsible along with Emerson for making Bakhtin’s texts available in English, continues this line in his introduction to the 1981 volume: The two will like everyone else, have been born into an environment in which the air is already aswarm with names. Their development as individuals – and in this Bakhtin’s thought parallels in suggestive ways that of Vygotsky in Russia (…) and Lacan in France (…) – will have been prosecuted as a gradual appropriation of a specific mix of discourses that are capable of best mediating their own intentions, rather than those which sleep in the words they use before they use them. Thus each will seek, by means of intonation, pronunciation, lexical choice, gesture, and so on, to send out a message to the other with a minimum of interference from the otherness constituted by pre-existing meanings (inhering in dictionaries or ideologies) and the

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otherness of the intention present in the other person in the dialogue. Implicit in all this is the notion that all transcription systems – including the speaking voice in a living utterance – are inadequate to the multiplicity of the meanings they seek to convey. My voice gives the illusion of unity to what I say; I am, in fact, constantly expressing a plenitude of meanings, some intended, others of which I am unaware. (Holquist, 1981, p.xx)

Bakhtin brought in the distinction between national language and social language in his study on speech genres. The former are the traditional linguistic unities such as English, Russian and French. The second, as mentioned in the introduction are those discourses, or discursive practices, that are peculiar to a specific part of a society within a given social system at a given time (Bakhtin, 1981). These, social, languages can be seen as genres, with relatively stable forms of thematic, compositional and stylistic types of utterance (Bakhtin, 1986). Bakhtin placed a special emphasis on the extreme heterogeneity of both oral and written speech genres which, as he repeatedly wrote, should never be minimized: In fact, the category of speech genres should include short rejoinders of daily dialogue (and these are extremely varied depending on the subject matter, situation and participants), everyday narration, writing (in all its various forms), the brief standard military command, the elaborate and detailed order, the fairly variegated repertoire of business documents (for the most part standard) and the diverse world of commentary (in the broad sense of the word: social, political). And we must include here the diverse forms of scientific statements and all literary genres (from the proverb to the multivolume novel). (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 61)

The heterogeneity to which Bakhtin refers also includes the manner in which different genres can merge with one another, as for example the different literary traditions that criss-cross with many equally different traditions in the social sciences, or the different ways in which professional languages develop.14 They are ideas in social and material contexts, but that does not mean that the context is homogeneous text. Discussing current approaches to the historical analysis of languages of political theory, Pagden will say: The discursive practices discussed here were, certainly, the product of long processes of linguistic change. But we believe that those changes were brought about by agents who clearly intended to say some things and not others, and who employed the discourses which they had, in part at least, inherited. This is not, of course, to deny that the ‘prison house of language’ is a real one. For there clearly is a part of every author’s text which can be shown to be derived, in some sense of which the author may seem aware,

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Amongst these different genres is one that is a constant presence directly or indirectly in much of public administration – in plans, decisions, programmes, policies, budgets, discussions on governance, amongst others – yet is hardly ever discussed in general textbooks on public administration and government: law.15 As most academic production takes place within and in relation to one specific country, usually that of the author(s), the legal system tends to be taken as a given, as part of the background nation state, also taken for granted instead of being recognized as only one mode of social institution.16 As a result, it is often assumed that all sorts of other concepts, such as public–private partnerships, new public management, transparency and accountability, can be discussed in international meetings often only with reference to very broad aspects of institutional design (parliamentary, unitary, federalist etc.). Yet in day-to-day practice, there is very little that takes place without the usually indirect, but sometimes direct, involvement of different kinds of legal professionals in some part or other of the chain of action. The form this involvement takes can vary considerably, in part depending on the legal traditions and institutional practices of different countries. Scholars who work with comparative law will constantly debate the number and basis of legal families in the world, but they will agree on one aspect: that there are different families and the distinctions are complex. For example, it is quite possible that a system is to be put in one family for private law purposes, and in another for purposes of constitutional law. Thus German private law unquestionably belongs in the German legal family, but one might well put German constitutional law in a group which included the United States and Italy and excluded England and France, depending on the weight one attributes to the presence or absence of judicial review of constitutionality as being the hallmark of a constitutional system. But even if one concentrates on private law, a similar difficulty may arise. Thus the Arabian countries unquestionably belong to Islamic law as far as family and inheritance law is concerned, just as India belongs to Hindu law, but the economic law of these countries (including commercial law and the law of contract and tort) is heavily impressed by legal thinking of the colonial and mandatary powers – the Common Law in the case of India, French law in the case of most Arab states. So in the theory of legal families much depends on the area of law one has in mind. (Zweigert and Kötz, 1987, p. 66)

Zweigert and Kötz (1987) propose using the idea of style rather than family and, as they point out in a comment that has much to do with the

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identification of differences between public action languages, ‘it is easier to discover the stylistically distinctive elements in a foreign system than in one’s own’ (p.69). For style they understand the historical background and development, the predominant and characteristic mode of thought in legal matters, especially distinctive institutions, the legal sources acknowledged, how they are handled and its ideology. The French Civil Code, brought in by Napoleon through a process in which a variety of different legal practices and laws were combined together, had a great impact on Spain, Portugal and, through them, Latin America. The Anglophone countries were much influenced by the Common Law tradition but, even then, there are differences. All of these have consequences for administrative practice, the organization of institutions, control procedures and personnel practice. But they also have more subtle implications for the way in which action takes place: The tradition of the English Common Law has been one of gradual development from decision to decision; historically speaking it is case-law, not enacted law. On the Continent, the development since the reception of Roman law has been quite different, from the interpretation of JUSTINIAN’s Corpus Iuris to the codification, nation by nation of abstract rules. So Common Law comes from the Court, Continental law from the study; the great jurists of England were judges, on the Continent professors. (Zweigert and Kötz, 1987, p. 70)

While the two styles are acquiring something of each other and remembering that the authors were writing in the 1980s, they do suggest that in the Common Law tradition there is more emphasis on moving empirically through decisions while, in the Continental tradition, making plans, advanced regulation, drawing up and systematizing rules play a much stronger role.17 In both cases the examples are from countries which are well up the rankings for human development and which are established democracies with a fairly solid base of rights, so it is not a question of which way is better. But it is interesting to reflect on what many apparently similar ‘international’ terms actually mean in the day to day of government and social practice within the environments of distinctive legal styles.

THE MOVE TO PERFORMATIVES Social languages are present in processes of socialization and define in different ways the possibilities for communication and the production of meaning. They are, like language itself, performative, and have

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implications for identity and for positioning the self and others. John L. Austin introduced the expression ‘performative’ in a series of lectures at Harvard in 1955, which were later written up from his notes under the apt title of How to Do Things with Words, as introduced in Chapter 1. His concern was with those utterances which are not statements that describe or report, nor are true or false (which he referred to as constative) but which can’t be left aside as just saying something. These are utterances in which the sentence is, or is part of, the doing of an action. Amongst the examples he gave were the marriage ceremony (‘Do you take … I do’) and the naming of a ship (uttered as the bottle of champagne is smashed open on the stem – ‘I name this ship …’). Associated with the ‘happy functioning’ of the performative were a set of conditions. – There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances, and further – The particular persons and circumstances in a given case must be appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked. – The procedure must be executed by all participants both correctly and completely. – Whereas often the procedure is designed for use by persons having certain thoughts or feelings, or for the inauguration of certain consequential conduct on the part of any participant, then a person participating in and so invoking the procedure must in fact have those thoughts or feelings, and the participants must intend so to conduct themselves, and further – Must actually so conduct themselves subsequently. (Austin, 1975, pp. 14–15)

By the time he reached the end of the lectures (published posthumously), Austin had delicately dismounted the constative/performative distinction and was focusing a general theory of speech acts in which attention had switched to the illocutionary force of the utterance. These ranged on the one side from ‘veredictives’ that deliver a finding and have ‘obvious connections with truth and falsity, soundness and unsoundness and fairness and unfairness’ (p.153), through to ‘expositives’, ‘used in acts of exposition involving the expounding of views, the conducting of arguments, and the clarifying of usages and of references’ (p.161). In between were speech acts which assert influence or the exercise of power, assume obligations or declare intentions and adopt attitudes; all again done though words including policy, plans, decisions, directives, contracts and many others.

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Austin, as Patterson (2009) comments in a later set of lectures, was concerned with verbs and not with abstract nouns. As she points out, one marriage is very different from another marriage; an abstract noun that refers to many centuries of being married, including state regulations and what happens after the ‘I do’. The abstract noun, she argues, is the form of speech that does the most work in the English language. Abstract nouns I shall try to show, are the power words in our society today, the key words, the megawords. How this happened – that is to say, by doing historical semantics – will be part of my story. Why we should care – a question that involves both moral philosophy and politics – will emerge primarily in the second lecture, when I will deal with abstract nouns that have emerged as megawords in American culture, among them marriage, success and democracy. (Patterson, 2009, p. 160)18

In the English language, the scholar often referred to when discussing those terms most present in collective vocabularies is Williams and his text Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976). In describing the origins of what later became a book, Williams takes the very common expression ‘we just don’t speak the same language’ to point out to the way in which, despite using the same native language, different intermediate values linked to strong feelings or important ideas can produce significantly different uses. Nobody is right or wrong, although dominant groups might try to suggest so. What is really happening through these critical encounters, which may be very conscious or may be felt only as a certain strangeness and unease, is a process quite central in the development of a language when, in certain words, tones and rhythms, meanings are offered, felt for, tested, confirmed, asserted, qualified, changed. In some situations this is a very slow process indeed; it needs the passage of centuries to show itself actively, by results, at anything like its full weight. In other situations the process can be rapid, especially in certain key areas. (Williams, 1976, p.xxiv)

Habermas’ theory of communicative action, which will play an important role in the discussion of deliberative democracy, also assumes the performativity of speech acts. He brings together three types of action: teleological (oriented to means and ends), normatively regulated (oriented to common values), and dramaturgical (that of the participants as a public for each other). Communicative action – which draws on both Mead (Strauss, 1956) and on Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology (1967) – refers to the three together: awareness of what it is possible to talk about as true, what is considered valid or appropriate to talk about and how, and the truthfulness of the exchange.

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MEANINGS AND CLASSIFICATIONS What the ‘performative turn’ helps to draw attention to are the different ways that key words, nouns, verbs and adjectives combine to form the different social languages that can be found in and around public affairs and are actively part of the affairs themselves. Take, for example, a public meeting to discuss a new road, or a zoning law, or whether to have a library or a health centre. The event may be described as democratic governance, or public consultation, or participatory budgeting but it will also be like the naming of a ship or a marriage ceremony. There will be procedures and words, lots of words, but they won’t be random. Those present are very aware of what constitutes the ‘happy functioning’ of the event. Equally, they are very aware of what is inadequate functioning. Active membership was an important part of Giddens’ structuration theory (1979). Structure, simplifying, is not a barrier to action but is essentially involved in its production which, when performed, may be seen as solid. But there is always the option of not proceeding. It is an essential emphasis of the ideas developed here that institutions do not just work ‘behind the backs’ of the social actors who produce and reproduce them. Every competent member of every society knows a great deal about the institutions of that society: such knowledge is not incidental to the operation of society, but is necessarily involved in it. (1979, p. 71)

Institutions are not solid and permanent affairs but are dynamic and discursive processes by which certain sets of practices and bits and pieces of organization become infused with value beyond the technical requirements of the task at hand, to use the organizational definition of Selznick (1992).19 For example, in the way that people and communities invest in their churches, their schools, little league baseball, voluntary associations and other enterprises. However, as he went on: ‘Infusion with value’ can be misleading, however, if it is thought of in psychological terms alone. It takes place in other ways as well: for example by selective recruiting of members or personnel; by establishing strong ties or alliances; by creating a special language; and by the many commitments to persons and groups made in the course of implementing a policy or protecting a going concern. From a moral point of view, institutionalization may be positive or negative. Much depends on what is institutionalized. (Selznick, 1992, p. 234)

In technical fields, social languages can also carry disciplinary implications and, despite attempts to claim the interdisciplinary character of public life, many of the different professional languages present are

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distinctively disciplinary. In Fuller’s (1988) discussion of social epistemology, he argued that any knowledge-based discipline is bounded by its procedure for adjudicating knowledge claims. Under what conditions is something seen as a contribution to knowledge. Amongst these are the argumentative format; word usage; borrowings that are permitted from other disciplines; the appropriate contexts of justification or discovery (for example reason alone, ordinary perception, technically aided perception) and their ceteris paribus clauses (that is their base lines for other things being equal or held constant). This is not merely a question of paradigms, although these are also present, but about ways of thinking – what Fleck discussed in 1935 as a thought collective. In the organizational field, very specific social languages can give quite different social meanings and make different forms of ‘sense’. Weick (1995) referred to this as sensemaking: the ongoing retrospective development of plausible images that rationalize what people are doing. Ways of performing are ways of producing and reproducing. In their classic text, Berger and Luckmann (1961) would point to the way that the way we are doing something can become the way we are doing something again, and eventually the way we do things around here. As Searle later remarked (1995), in making a more specific distinction of social reality, ‘there are portions of the real world, objective facts in the world, that are only facts by human agreement. I am thinking of things like money, property, governments and marriages’ (p.1). There was a difference between these ‘institutional facts’ and what he called ‘brute’ facts which need to be described but are, like Mount Everest, independent of us.20 Here is his opening example: I go into a café in Paris and sit in a chair at a table. The waiter comes and I utter a fragment of a French sentence. I say, ‘un demi, Munich, à pression s’il vous plait ’. The waiter brings the beer and I drink it. I leave some money on the table and leave. An innocent scene, but its metaphysical complexity is truly staggering, and its complexity would have taken Kant’s breath away if he had ever bothered to think about such things. Notice that we cannot capture the features of the description I have just given in the language of physics and chemistry. There is no physical-chemical description adequate to define ‘restaurant’, ‘waiter’, ‘sentence of French’, ‘money’ or even ‘chair’ and ‘table’, even though all restaurants, waiters, sentences of French, money, and chairs and tables are physical phenomena. Notice, furthermore, that the scene as described has a huge, invisible ontology: the waiter did not actually own the beer he gave me, but he is employed by the restaurant, which owned it. The restaurant is required to post a list of the price of all the boissons, and even if I never see such a list, I am required to pay only the listed price. The owner of the restaurant is licensed by the French government to operate it. As such he is subject to a thousand rules and regulations I know nothing about. I

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While few would probably disagree about the benefits of having a beer in Paris, or of the usefulness of money – which is increasingly virtual – there are many other social facts which are equally performed and about which there is much to discuss. Judith Butler evoked Simone de Beauvoir’s expression ‘one is not born, but rather, becomes a woman’ in her 1988 text on ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution’. In this sense, gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time – an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts. Further, gender is instituted through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self. This formulation moves the conception of gender off the ground of a substantial model of identity to one that requires a conception of a constituted social temporality. Significantly, if gender is instituted through acts which are internally discontinuous, then the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief. (Butler, 1988, pp. 519–520)

If people can become women, or men, or other notions of gender, so can they also become other parts of the social world. This is the focus of Hacking’s work on the classification of people (2007) and on the way that new scientific classifications, for example in health, bring into being new kinds of person, that is of ways of experiencing being a person, and the way that classifications interact with those classified. Classifications also require specialists who can legitimate knowledge, they require institutions, they require professionals who can help those classified, and then there are the classified themselves who tend not to stay still but also interact and position themselves (including creating their own associations). All of these connect to each other in various ways providing apparent stability to issues and fields. They are also part of the social action languages, for if there aren’t any issues there can’t be plans, decisions, programmes, and if there are no different peoples it becomes difficult to have participation, or focus groups, or service users. Here it is worth mentioning studies in the anthropology of public policy about the way policies can be part of the process of creating new categories (as can plans and budgets) and the various discussions on the implications of the terms that describe those seen as clients, consumers,

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customers, patients, users and citizens as well as mega-terms and expressions such as ‘the people’.21

SOCIAL LANGUAGES AND INTERPRETIVE REPERTOIRES A key point for the analyses in the following chapters is the way in which these different social languages and their notions and terms – of all types – move around, or, rather, are moved around in everyday talk and discourse (Iñiguez-Rueda, 1997). As M.J.P. Spink (1999) points out in her study on making sense of illness experiences, all utterances are dialogical, they are links in chains of communication that may take place in local and situated contexts, even the scientific, but also as social languages and speech genres they are shaped by the cultural historical context. Originating in studies of scientific discourse and the way in which scientists draw on very different vocabularies at different points of time,22 the notion of interpretive repertoires as ‘systematically related sets of terms, often used with stylistic and grammatical coherence and often organized around one or more central metaphors’ has wider applicability (Potter, 1996, p. 116). These clusters of terms, descriptions and figures of language both mark the possibilities of discursive constructions23 and may indeed be at the basis of Williams’ impression of ‘another language’ as almost hermetic and closed worlds. They can also be very powerful, as the empiricist repertoire of Gilbert and Mulkay’s scientists showed (1984). However, because there is a common background language and there will be questions and requirements to ‘say things in simple words for the viewers’, bits and pieces of different interpretive repertoires tend to move around. Cross-nationally, similar processes apply. Expressions are squeezed into other formats through translation, sometimes just used in the original, or even localized by being pronounced and written as if the expression was vernacular. Diplomats usually get around the potential traps that this creates for meaning by being skilled linguists. Even so, in the toing and froing of terms, concepts and professions in public affairs there is a tendency to assume that meaning somehow is a magically held constant and, rather like an implanted electronic chip, an integral part of the word, expression, phrase or concept – even to professions themselves. This is especially the case with what have been called magic concepts (Pollitt and Hupe, 2011): those notions that are broad, have normative appeal, are not binary, have implications of consensus and are globally fashionable and, if there is no easy translation, they are adopted as they are.

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For example, after many attempts at finding alternative ways of expressing the term ‘accountability’ in Portuguese, at a time when it was very important to talk about certain issues, most Brazilian scholars in the field of public affairs ended up either by adopting the English term directly, without any attempts at turning it local, or switched to talking about transparency and social control (in the sense of social accountability). But, given the different legal families involved and the history of the different terms, it is doubtful whether the meanings were ever completely in agreement. Nash (1993) makes the movements of terms and expressions the focus of his study of jargon on the move, or ‘jargoning’. As an academic study: ‘jargon is for lexicographers, whereas jargoning, being jargon on the move or jargon in action, is for students of style – or rather, styles: literary styles, journalistic styles, official styles, commercial styles, social styles, professional styles – varieties of language, written or spoken, in diverse functions, with diverse pretensions’ (p.ix). He begins with the jargons of profession, how those in the same field describe what they do to one another and perform their profession; what he calls ‘shop talk’. Shop talk is often necessary for technical reasons as people go about discussing their work and it often forms a communicative shorthand for talking and working at the same time, guaranteeing the cohesion of social groups and networks. It can be baffling to outsiders when they find themselves in the middle of a mono-professional conversation; but it is very similar to highly dedicated sports fans talking about baseball or football. To someone for whom baseball appears to be one person throwing a ball as fast as they can at another person waving a stick, a discussion about the World Series is as unfathomable as, in the reverse case, the UEFA Champions League to someone for whom football is a lot of people running backwards and forwards, also as fast as they can, with a ball arbitrarily moving itself around somewhere in the middle. Jargoning is what happens when these different expressions move around: Some word or phrase in regular occupational service is used by the practitioner with reference to objects or activities outside the sphere of working life. In this way it becomes a form of slang, or even a sub-species of metaphor. By and by it is taken up, often for the sake of show-talking by members of the general public, who conspire to neglect the specific source of the term, using it ever more loosely, until at length it becomes so well established as standard idiom that its original sense is lost. (Nash, 1993, p. 7)

Show talk refers to jargons of pretension, which over the centuries have played a major role in enlarging the English language and similarly –

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because similar processes will have been in place in other languages – the world at large. By the time an expression has rooted itself down in general conversation it requires quite a lot of skill to find out where it came from, and Nash’s text is full of fascinating examples, at least for the Anglophone circle. But somewhere between shop talk and show talk, there is, as he puts it, an awkward and treacherous country where words keep their original meanings but are already acquiring analogous use: for example, in the way that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) shop talk can be found in ‘windows’, ‘countdowns’, ‘launch pads’, ‘all systems go’ and ‘lift offs’. Britain was a maritime nation by necessity, and today it is difficult to realize that the great tea clippers were still racing back under sail from India to London in the 1860s and 1870s, and that the London Docks, like their counterparts in other maritime nations, would be full of masts for many years afterwards. Their bars and coffee houses would be likewise full of sea folk and many families would have somebody at sea. Not surprising therefore to discover how much ‘sail talk’ is also part of ordinary daily conversational English, Dutch, Italian and Portuguese, amongst others, as for example in the English taken aback, under way, making headway or changing tack. In Portuguese, the equivalent to budget is ‘orçamento’, which found its way via the Italian and Portuguese ‘orçar’ which is what sailing boats do when they ‘tack’ forwards against the wind. Show talk also has its own sources, which are brought in through the ancient art of mixing metaphors and letting them settle down to a quiet life in everyday speech. They are usually elegant and provide a feeling of performative justification; Nash calls them ‘package phrases’. Here are some: at the end of the day; light at the end of the tunnel; giving value for money; in real terms; in place (‘the appropriate instruments are in place to …’). Others have drifted from literature into public action in ways that would require much foraging around the different vehicles that contribute to the public sphere to understand. Here is another example from Nash. It would be interesting to know exactly when the phrase ‘sea change’ was first taken up into British journalese as a kind of emphatic, with the meaning of extensive change, or even complete reversal. ‘Sea change’ it appears, is related to simple ‘change’ as ‘proactive’ is related to ‘active’. Political policies, for example undergo a sea change, or there is a sea change in public attitudes. (1993, p. 25)

Whether it moved from the journalists to the social and political science communities or whether the route was the reverse, it did not drift there;

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rather it was, to use a metaphor, fished. As Nash continues: ‘That Shakespeare is poetically describing a process of transmutation is obvious; but it is a gradual, all-consuming process, the work of the sea which turns mortal remains into “something rich and strange’” – something of another kind and category altogether. “Sea-change” in the Shakespearean text is a hauntingly mysterious world …’ (p.25). The source is from The Tempest, when the invisible Ariel tells Prince Ferdinand: Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made: Those are pearls that were his eyes: Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell: Ding-dong. Hark! Now I hear them – ding-dong, bell.

Nash was concerned about the way these meanings in circulation could also be harnessed in what he called ‘sales talk’. That is, used to gain acceptance for goods, ideas, political parties and such through the control of the potential consumer’s responses to the product. Naturalizing, as it were, the acceptance. Dwight Waldo was an early observer of social languages in the public arena (1948, 1952). His arguments for a theory of democratic administration were founded on his analysis of the non-voiced principles that were to be found hiding within the apparent technical neutrality of public administration. His critical observations on the fusion of efficiency, science, democracy and medieval law into ‘cosmic constitutionalism’ were written around the time of the Policy Sciences (Lerner and Lasswell, 1951) and, like any critique, are clearly directed at discussions in course. In this context can be placed discussions about the social construction of the discipline of public administration itself and its versions (Farmer, 1995; Jun, 2006) and Fischer and Forester’s (1993) collection of papers on the argumentative turn in policy analysis and planning which also open other lines of enquiry and reflection.

SOCIAL LANGUAGES AND FIELDS Mosher (1968) was another writer on the professional state, and the definition he used for profession (social mechanisms whereby knowledge, including particularly new knowledge, is translated into action) is

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not just a way of thinking about public administration, where it remains important (Plant, 2008), but also about the social processes involved in professions in general and the fields that they help form. Professions, he found, were necessary for public service but brought new dilemmas in relation to the contents of their work, which was no longer determined internally but now also linked to their own professional associations and the institutions in which they were trained. Social languages, as has been the theme of this chapter, are highly practical and performative, but they are also adapted and incorporated by a variety of different groupings including professionals. Indeed, later work in policy analysis on advocacy coalitions, policy communities or networks and the like24 applies not only to the themes in focus but to the social languages themselves and, also, could equally apply to all the other social professional languages with their different views on action. These multiple places, their links and the various bits and pieces involved, easily evoke the image of fields and here two lines of work are important. They are not mutually exclusive, even though they have different standpoints on the social character of science, on epistemology and truth.25 One is Bourdieu’s field theory and the other is the actornetwork theory associated with Latour; and both cases have many collaborators. The one, Bourdieu, discusses limits and the way in which science and other areas articulate their internal spaces; and the other, Latour, discusses the ramifications of material and social connections. In the following chapters, both will help to understand something of the complexity of public action. Bourdieu’s concern initially was with the scientific field, but he was clear that this also applied to other fields of activity. He argued that to understand any cultural production (literature, science, art and so on) it was not enough to look at the textual content nor refer to the wider social context as something in direct relation with the text. Instead, he proposed that between these two poles: … there is an intermediary universe which I call the literary, artistic, juridical or scientific field, that is the universe in which the agents and the institutions that produce, reproduce or spread art, literature or science can be found. This universe is a social world like any others, but obeys more or less specific social laws. The notion of field seeks to designate this relatively autonomous space, this microcosm with its own laws. If, like the macrocosm, it is submitted to social laws, these are not the same. It can never escape the impositions of the macrocosm, but has, in relation to this, a more or less accentuated partial autonomy. One of the major questions that emerges from the proposal of scientific fields (or subfields) is precisely in terms of the degree of autonomy that they have. (Bourdieu, 1997/2004, pp. 20–21)

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The identification of the field is also the recognition that this is a force field of objective relationships between agents who determine what can and cannot be done; a field in which symbolic – as distinct from economic – capital is very present. That is, the recognition and the credit attributed by fellow agents, which may include the ability to gather research grants, tend to play a greater role. Here it might be asked how many of the different public action languages are, in practice, relatively autonomous fields that have their own internal social and political, if not actual, economies. Indeed, a number of the public action languages, as will be seen in the following chapters are, to all intents and purposes, quite happy to go on by themselves.26 Latour and colleagues’ actor-network theory is relational in a different way. Law (1999) described it as a semiotics of materiality: It takes the semiotic insight, that of the relationality of entities, the notion that they are produced in relations, and applies this ruthlessly to all materials – and not simply to those that are linguistic (…) the semiotic approach tells us that entities achieve their form as a consequence of the relations in which they are located. But this means that it also tells us that they are performed in, by and through those relations. (p.4)

Here it is interesting to go back to the earlier discussion by Hacking on the various bits and pieces that are swept together to form the refugee woman, or to think what a planner would be without a plan. Law and Mol would emphasize this in their discussion of how materiality and sociality produce themselves: ‘Perhaps association is not just a matter for social beings, but also one to do with materials. Perhaps then when we look at the social, we are also looking at the production of materiality. And when we look at materials, we are witnessing the production of the social’ (1995, p. 274). Relational materiality is also a moving patchwork of possible connections, something which has been a feature of Latour’s work since the early studies on research laboratories and his study of the bits and pieces that are Pasteur in action. Latour (1999) would emphasize this in his critique of the way actor-network theory was beginning to be interpreted, very differently from the original intentions as a critical tool for rethinking the apparent solidarity of institutions.27 What is the difference between the older and the new usage? At the time, the word network, like Deleuze’s and Guattari’s term rhizome clearly meant a series of transformations – translations, transductions – which could not be captured by any of the traditional terms of social theory. With the new popularization of the word network, it now means transportation without

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deformation, an instantaneous, unmediated access to every piece of information. That is exactly the opposite of what we meant. What I would like to call ‘double click information’ has killed the last bit of the cutting edge of the notion of network. I don’t think we should use it any more at least not to mean the type of transformations and translations that we want now to explore. (pp.15–16)

The rhizome, the image of creeping rootstocks that constantly put out new roots which themselves root – ginger for example – leads to a very different approach to text and context, a major difference between Latour and Bourdieu. Latour will emphasize this in his notion of the flat social, and his critique of the mystification of a place called context where problems come from to be solved. ‘To be sure, the structure of language is spoken by nobody in particular and yet it is out of this that all speech acts are generated, although the ways in which la parole meets la langue have remained totally mysterious ever since the time of Saussure’ (2005, p. 167). Given that action is always dislocated, translated and shifted around in a variety of ways, any given interaction will have elements coming from other times, places and agencies. However, as will be returned to in later chapters, this does not mean that these other times, places and agencies are some overriding context which can and should take over and force the abandonment of the local scene.28 Here Rorty’s (2000) draft essay on the Decline of Redemptive Truth and the Rise of a Literary Culture is more than apt: I shall use the term ‘redemptive truth’ for a set of beliefs which would end, once and for all, the process of reflection on what to do with ourselves. Redemptive truth would not consist in theories about how things interact causally, but instead would fulfill the need that religion and philosophy have attempted to satisfy. This is the need to fit everything – every thing, person, event, idea and poem – into a single context, a context which will somehow reveal itself as natural, destined, and unique. It would be the only context that would matter for purposes of shaping our lives, because it would be the only one in which those lives appear as they truly are. To believe in redemptive truth is to believe that there is something that stands to human life as elementary physical particles stand to the four elements – something that is the reality behind the appearance, the one true description of what is going on, the final secret. (p.2) The problem about the attempt by philosophers to treat the empirical scientist as a paradigm of intellectual virtue is that the astrophysicists’ love of truth seems no different from that of the classical philologist or the archive-oriented historian. All these people are trying hard to get something right. So, when it comes to that, are the master carpenter, the skilled accountant, and the careful surgeon. The need to get it right is central to all these people’s sense of who they are, of what makes their lives worthwhile. (p.8)29

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THE INVISIBLE ART OF SPEECHWRITING Speechwriters are also dedicated to trying to get it right, and perhaps there is nothing more performative than speechwriting and no better way to sum up this chapter than by introducing this often unrecognized and very important action language – the speech. Most people involved in some way in the academic world will, as part of their work, need to prepare a presentation, a paper, a talk or a contribution. It takes time; a half-hour presentation needs at least another half a day, if not longer, to prepare. If it is a keynote, then even more time is needed. Imagine, then, a political figure who has to deliver at least one such talk, keynote, presentation or, as it is called in the performatics of public affairs, a speech, nearly every day of the week – if not more. Clearly there can be times when this is, to use the expression, off the cuff; a few notes at the most in a less formal setting. But even when it is a major speech those who are listening are hoping to listen to someone who is talking to them, or with them as if they were together, and not at them. The resulting balancing act between formality and informality is very hard to prescribe or describe. Enter stage left, to use the expression of one of the founders of the art of speech-making in the theatrical sense,30 the mystical and invisible speechwriter. If diplomats tend to keep in the background, they can usually be found somewhere in the photo shoots and are present at major events. There are also other moments of diplomatic visibility and performatics, the presentation of credentials and many other events. Nowadays, nobody kills the messenger who brings bad news, although they may be expelled, and a diplomatic career is indeed a career, probably the first of the public sector careers and highly praised. There are also non-career and at times other highly visible diplomats called to fill strategic posts or assume specific missions, but they are also a recognized feature of the work of government. Speechwriters on the contrary are totally invisible, because their work is to ensure that the person on the platform (or on the radio or on the television) who speaks so beautifully is ‘our’ President/Prime Minister/Secretary/Minister/Secretary General. In doing so, they have the duty and responsibility indeed to be that person, and their sometimes mundane, often important and at times crucial contributions to statehood and ‘statespersonship’31 must always go without recognition. To use an early and epoch-marking example. In 1932, the UK’s King George V gave the first of what was to become a traditional Christmas radio speech to the British Empire and later the Commonwealth. He began: ‘Through one of the marvels of modern Science, I am enabled, this Christmas Day,

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to speak to all my peoples throughout the Empire.’ In doing so, through his voice and words he became the embodiment of Empire and Kingship. Nobody amongst the few who knew would have even dared to add ‘written by Rudyard Kipling’.32 It is still said that the one overriding requirement for any speechwriter is a passion for anonymity, an expression used to describe the proposal for a small group of direct US presidential aids by the 1937 Brownlow Committee. If the performatics of the speech are taken apart, the different bits and pieces are amazingly complex. Democracy requires key figures to have replies, positions and answers to difficult questions. The speechwriter knows it’s a speech and is writing it for someone specific. There is no point in Queen Elizabeth sounding like Shakespeare, or Obama sounding like Johnson. The press knows it’s a speech and has a pretty good idea of how it got put together and who was involved, single or plural (but that is backstage knowledge that is rarely shared). The public may see the key figure bring out a piece of paper from her or his pocket, or a series of cards, but they ‘hear it’ as from her or him to them. At that moment, the speaker is a persona (a person in a social role). Obama has to sound like Obama, not dad or uncle Barack or the neighbour from down the street mowing his lawn, and the Queen has to sound like the Queen, not grandma nor the princess driving an ambulance. Other far less welcome figures have also to sound like ‘themselves’ and some, like Hitler and his staff, were able to turn this into a very frightening tool. Given that speechwriting is hidden behind speech-making, it is difficult to talk about where and when it began to become part of the daily life of doing government. In parliamentary democracies, there is more demand placed on the capacity to stand up and speak, and debating societies can still be found amongst school and university activities. Churchill for example was not seen as a good speaker in his earlier years, he was judged by his peers as exaggerating on the rhetoric. Later, however, he was to prove to be the right speech-maker for the period. He also wrote what he said. Alistair Cooke, who for 58 years read his weekly Letter from America on the BBC, recalled this in the letter of 23 February 1990 on presidential speechwriters.33 There was a time, less than a month after the United States came into the Second World War, when, at Christmas time, Prime Minister Churchill arrived suddenly (…) in Washington to stay with President Roosevelt (…) Towards the end of this now-famous visit, the two leaders agreed that within a few days of Mr. Churchill’s safe return to London, each of them would go on the air and broadcast to the peoples of the new transatlantic alliance his own inspiring version of their discussions. There was a firm, but unwritten agreement that the two broadcasts – radio, of course – would fall on the same

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Beyond public policy evening. The American radio networks were made privy to the arrangement and, while Churchill was flying home, Roosevelt wasted no time and summoned three of his most dependable and gifted ghosts, Judge Sam Rosenman, the poet Archibald MacLeish and the playwright Robert Sherwood to compose as soon as possible and, in view of the formidable competition, a piece of memorable prose. They were, next morning, not much further along than a first draft when they had a telephone call from London to the effect that Churchill was safe at home and was going on the BBC that very evening (…) ‘How’, moaned President Roosevelt to his slaving ghosts, ‘how can he do it? How did he do it’. It was the playwright Sherwood who gave the melancholy answer. ‘I’m afraid Mr. President’, he said, ‘he rolls his own.’

In the introduction to a collection of radio and sound recordings of key historical moments, released as an LP record with Fred Friendly in 1949 under the title ‘I Can Hear it Now: 1933–1945’, newsman Edward R. Murrow was to say of Churchill: ‘Now the hour had come for him to mobilize the English language, and send it into battle.’ The phrase reveals the intuitive sense of language in action by someone who himself was a legendary writer and broadcaster. It would later be borrowed by President Kennedy (or one of his staff) in presenting Churchill with honorary American citizenship.

NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

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Jefferson (1786). The Columbia University Teachers College Classics in Education No. 6 which focuses Jefferson’s essays on education is entitled: ‘Crusade against Ignorance’. Munro (1895). Ashbridge (2010). War on Want is a London-based charity founded in 1951 to fight poverty and injustice. Brenon (1998). Westphalia (1648), accessed 23 August 2018 at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/ westphal.asp (articles XC and CXII – the numbering of the text is Roman). Nash (1929), Dollinger (1970), Lloyd (1991). Created in 1980, see www.hanse.org For example in Habermas’ discussion of system and lifeworld (1984); Karl Polanyi’s (1944) analysis of the repositioning of economic and social life; Bendix’s analysis of ideologies of management during industrialization (1956); Skinner’s work on the liberty dilemmas of sixteenth-century England (1998), and Boltanski and Thévenot’s economies of worth (1991). See Lewin (1936, p. 19): ‘what is real is what has effects’. In her text on this period, Frentzel-Zagorska will say ‘I use civil society here in its modern meaning’ (1990, p. 759). See for example, Burke and Porter (1991). Collected papers of Mead edited by Strauss (1956). See for example the volume edited by Bazerman and Paradis on the Textual Dynamics of the Professions (1991). A rare exception is the chapter by Bertelli in the Oxford Handbook of Public Management (2005) but even there it is only one of 30 chapters.

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18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

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‘Thus the articulation of society into technique, economy, law, politics, religion, art, etc. which seems self-evident to us, is only one mode of social institution, particular to a series of societies to which our own belongs’ (Castoriadis, 2006, p. 112). Brazil, through Portugal, follows the Code tradition and in a classroom discussion with postgraduates, all of whom had had experience in the public sector, they confirmed the important role that officially documented instructions played. ‘Show me where it’s written’ was a very common response to a new activity of strategy for action. Patterson (2009). See also Schmidt (2010) on discursive institutionalism. In a similar way, the idea of climbing Mount Everest and all the bits and pieces involved is very much a social production; but what would happen if a climber is caught at the top in a five-day blizzard is far from imaginary. Frederickson (1991), Wedel et al. (2005), Catlaw (2007), McLaughlin (2009). Gilbert and Mulkay (1984). M.J.P. Spink and de Pinheiro (2004). Colebatch (1998), Sabatier (2007). Kale-Lostuvali (2016). A leading US political scientist who followed the growth of policy and the introduction of the policy schools during the 1970s suggested to the author that the idea of interdisciplinary work was never really on from the beginning: ‘the schools were interdisciplinary and people had their offices on the same corridor, but everybody did their own work’. This would be something that Foucault had worked on with the notion of dispositive (dispositif): ‘An absolutely heterogeneous set which implies speeches and talks, institutions, architectural structures, regulated decisions and laws, administrative measures, scientific proposals, philosophical, moral and philanthropic positions … the dispositive is the network that is established between these elements’ (from an interview cited by Giorgio Agamben (2009), also Bussolini (2010)). Here it is worth remembering Gilbert Ryle’s use of the term category-mistake in his critique of body–mind dualism (1949). The mind does not exist, it is not a place, person or location, it is only a reference to the manner in which somebody behaves or refers to their thoughts. Rorty (2000), accessed 26 August 2018 at http://olincenter.uchicago.edu/pdf/rorty.pdf Shakespeare continues to be considered one of the founders of modern theatre and his scripts included not only the speeches but also the movements, the entries and the exits of his characters. The expression migrated into everyday talk – as a way of introducing an important character. In 2017 there are often more stateswomen than there are statesmen. Probably the most Empire sensitive of British writers. Cooke (1990). The last US president to write his own speeches was said to be Woodrow Wilson, on a typewriter that he kept over from his academic days.

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4. Some active governments and their action languages The 1937 report of President Roosevelt’s Committee on Administrative Management (known as the Brownlow Report after its chairman) is a well-known feature of US public administration. In a recent retrospective issue on the report, Newbold and Rosenbloom (2007) comment ‘At no other time in our nation’s history has a report by public administrative scholars and practitioners so fundamentally transformed the federal government’s working’ (p.1006). Here is the opening part of the summary:1 Modern management equipment for the Federal Government so that it may do promptly and efficiently what is expected of it by the American people is the keynote of the report made today to the President by his Committee on Administrative Management. The purpose of making Federal administrative management modern and businesslike is to make American democracy efficient. It is the view of the Committee that self-government cannot long survive even in this country unless it can do its work efficiently. ‘The forward march of American democracy at this point of our history,’ says the Committee, ‘depends more upon effective management than upon any other single factor.’ To this end a five-point program of reorganization of the Executive Branch of the Government is presented to the Committee including these major recommendations. Modernize the White House business and management organization by giving the President six high-grade executive assistants to aid him in dealing with the regular departments and agencies. Strengthen the budget and efficiency research, the planning and the personnel service of the Government, so that these may be effective managerial arms for the President, with which he may better coordinate, direct and manage all of the work of the Executive Branch for which he is responsible under the Constitution. Place the whole government administrative service on a career basis and under the merit system by extending the civil service upward, outward and downward to include all non-policy-determining positions and jobs. Overhaul the more than 100 separate departments, boards, commissions, administrations, authorities, corporations, committees, agencies and activities which are now parts of the Executive Branch, and theoretically under the 84

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President, and consolidate them within twelve regular departments, which would include the existing 10 departments and two new departments, a Department of Social Welfare, and a Department of Public Works. Change the name of the Department of Interior to Department of Conservation. Make the Executive Branch accountable to the Congress by creating a true postaudit of financial transactions by an independent Auditor General who would report illegal and wasteful expenditures to Congress without himself becoming involved in the management of department policy, and transfer the duties of the present Comptroller in part to the Auditor, to the Treasury, and to the Attorney General. These five points are woven together in a single comprehensive program. (Brownlow, 1937)

President Roosevelt’s Committee was made up of Louis Brownlow, Director of the Public Administration Clearing House, Luther Gulick, Director of the Institute of Public Administration, Charles E. Merriam, Chairman of the Department of Political Science, University of Chicago, with Joseph P. Harris of the staff of the Committee on Public Administration of the Social Science Research Council as Director of Research. Committee reports, findings and recommendation are usually the products of wide processes of consultation, in which many conversations, ideas and proposals move around. Independently of their later effectiveness, in this case considerable, they offer an important window on at least part of the ideas and assumptions that were around. The experience of the Great Depression, or the later Second World War, the idea of proposing a career civil service, a miniscule White House with borrowed staff, the trauma of the Vietnam War, the UK without the National Health Service are not feelings that many can draw upon today, but it is possible to relate in part to some of the broader questions being approached. The distinction in the title of ‘active’ governments is qualitative and perhaps even literary, for all governments are active in their ways. The use of the qualifier in this chapter is a reference to one of the questions raised in the introduction: what can be learned from the way that governments went about doing public affairs before policy became a synonym for government in action? At times in today’s current texts, policy and government appear to be so closely linked that it seems almost impossible to imagine governments making things happen without the expression. The three cases that will be looked at, all from the twentieth century and each in their own way contributing to the construction of the democratic welfare state, did just that. They are not the only cases which could be taken, but they can certainly be seen as periods in which there was a lot of action for the public good. The three are the Roosevelt

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Administration, the New Deal and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA); the Attlee post-war government, the National Health Service and the Beveridge Report; and the Johnson Administrations in relation to domestic affairs. The first is from a period when policy was still very much a posture; the second is from a time when very initial changes are taking place; and the third from a time when there are clear indications of ascendance. The choice of governments from the USA and the UK reflects what appears to be the common understanding of the early importance of these countries in the policy field. How then did they go about public affairs, what were some of the other social languages available and what happened to them? The second and third points of the Brownlow Committee’s proposed programme are good examples from which to start. First, in terms of managerial efforts, the emphasis is on budget and efficiency research, planning and personnel services. Second, linked to personnel, is the proposal for a career-based administrative service for all ‘non-policydetermining positions and jobs’. The first points to the principal articulating notions of government action at that time, including the word efficiency, and the second provides an idea of the way that policy was in use as something that is ‘determined’. It is also worth noting that it was in a memorandum prepared for the Committee that Gulick spelt out his view on organization using the acronym POSDCORB (Planning, Organizing, Staffing, Directing, Coordinating, Reporting and Budgeting). Like Woodrow Wilson before and for a good many years after, there were those who determined policy, which was government policy, and there were those who got on with administrating with dedication in the public good. ‘Steady, hearty allegiance to the policy of the government they serve will constitute good behaviour. That policy will have no taint of officialism about it. It will not be the creation of permanent officials, but of statesmen whose responsibility to public opinion will be direct and inevitable’ (Wilson, 1887, pp. 216–217).

PERSONNEL, BUDGETING, EFFICIENCY AND PLANNING: THE PERFORMATIVE BASIS OF DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENTS The discussion of a career-based public administration had been around for a long time, going back, in the US, to Woodrow Wilson’s own proposals, written while still an academic, and before that to the Northcote–Trevelyan Report to the British Parliament published in 18542

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which recommended a totally open and regular competitive entrance examination of a carefully selected body of young men3 as a means of overcoming the ‘evils of patronage’. The examination was to serve as the entrance point to a merit-based career in which promotion depended on the ‘industry and ability’ of those selected, who: ‘with average abilities and reasonable application may look forward confidently to a certain provision for their lives, that with superior powers they may rationally hope to attain to the highest prizes in the Service, while if they prove decidedly incompetent, or incurably indolent, they must expect to be removed from it’ (Northcote and Trevelyan, 1854, p. 9). Their view was that if somebody could do better than a well-trained university student, then ‘there can be no reason why the public should not have the benefit of such mens’ services, in preference to those of inferior merit’ (Northcote and Trevelyan, 1854, p. 12). It would take until 1870 for the report to be put into practice and then even gradually, but it would provide an important future stepping stone for merit, even though it was a merit, at the time the report was published, restricted to an upper-middle-class and aristocratic elite.4 The original proposal was to have a broad-based exam, of which: … we need hardly allude to the important effect which would be produced upon the general education of the country, if proficiency in history, jurisprudence, political economy, modern languages, political and physical geography and other matters, besides the staple of classics and mathematics, were made directly conducive to the success of young men desirous of entering into the public service. (Northcote and Trevelyan, 1854, p. 14)

Of the three other terms in the opening part of the Brownlow Report, one (budgeting) was much older than the discussion on careers and merit, and the other two (planning and efficiency) were, at that time, very recent. It is said that from the Latin bulga (to bulge) came the French bouge and then the bougette or little bag. Making its way to England as a term for a leather satchel, it carried the statements of accounts to parliament. In 1733 the then prime minister (Robert Walpole) described the beginning of the discussion of the accounts as the opening of the budget and, over time, the bag was replaced by other containers and the contents of the bag became the budget. Budgeting is probably one of the oldest public action languages on the government side, along with diplomacy. Whether from the side of kings and emperors seeking to finance armies or the different sectors of society that slowly – through negotiation, revolution or execution – contributed to current procedures and controls on public spending, it has become a highly independent space of talk and performance. The British may have tweaked the term budget, but it was

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in France that the Inspection Générale de Finances was created in 1797, followed by the ‘Cours de Comptes’ of Napoleon in 1807. Napoleon had also been instrumental in bringing in the idea of Administrative Law which, when combined with public accounts in the countries influenced by the Civil Code, was to become a very special dialect of the budgeting language. It would take time for other countries to follow the French move towards centralized financial management, but by the second half of the nineteenth century there were already a number of cases (such as Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden). The UK itself would take until 1866 to have full control, and in the USA the Bureau of the Budget was only created in 1921.5 Important for the general line of analysis here, is Webber and Wildavsky’s recognition of the implicit social and performative characteristic of budgets. Ask how budgets should be made and you will be asking how social life ought to be lived. Cultural organization requires social support. People must be able to do things for others. They must be able to act together to support their way of life, to oppose other ways, and to hold one another accountable for things that go wrong. Getting and spending by governments is an important mode of collective action and accountability. (1986, p. 22)

How the west arrived at modern-day financial languages and how structures of accounting were built up over time has already merited many books. One story is worth retelling, because it serves as a reminder of how social languages weave around each other. Venice had much to do with the early developments, as it seems to have with other terms and practices from the crusades onwards, no doubt in part due to its location as the gateway to routes towards the east, from where news of very different views of the world were likely to arrive. Leonardo da Pisa, known as Fibonacci (c.1170–1240), grew up in what is today Algeria where his father worked at the Pisan custom house: The young Fibonacci spent his days in the local bazaars, where he was captivated by the extraordinary system of writing numbers the Arab merchants used to conduct their business. He later wrote ‘There following my introduction, as a consequence of marvelous instruction in the art, to the nine digits of the Hindus, the knowledge of the art very much appealed to me before all others’. The numerals used by the Arabs in bazaars across the Mediterranean – in Egypt, Syria, Greece, Provence – could be applied to computations Fibonacci had never seen before, such as addition, subtraction and multiplication (…) The Arab merchants had learned their number system in India by the ninth century and had been using it for centuries to calculate interest, convert currencies and solve other problems of trade. (GleesonWhite, 2013, p. 18)

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Fibonacci’s book, written in Latin and published in 1202, became the most important book on the Hindu-Arabic numerals, yet the Venetian adoption of double entry bookkeeping, which Gleeson-White suggests may have also come from the Arab traders or more likely from Indian merchants, remained faithful to Roman numerals, which don’t have a ‘0’. The two sets of knowledge, Hindu-Arabic numerals and double entry bookkeeping, would remain separate for some 300 years. The use of the new numerals was outlawed by the Venetian Guilds and the Church and they were seen as too easy to alter and falsify. The last Italian arithmetic book with Roman numbers was published in 1514. In other parts of Europe: ‘… the adoption of Hindu-Arabic numerals was even slower: in 1520, the German Municipality of Freiburg refused to accept accounts as legal proof of debt unless they were made in Roman numerals or written out in words; and Roman numerals were still used in Scotland in the seventeenth century’ (Gleeson-White, 2013, p. 26). Italian merchants, on the other hand, seemed to have seen the practical, as opposed to legal, benefits and local schools were set up in which the slow fusion of double entry bookkeeping and Hindu-Arabic numerals began to take place in the vernacular language. It would be in 1494, in a Venice now filled with printing shops and moveable type, that Luca Pacioli who had started as a teacher of Hindu-Arabic numerals, published his Particulars of Reckonings and Writings as part of his mathematical encyclopedia.6 Both the book and a separate publication of the chapter became the most widely read mathematical works in Italy for the following century and Luca Pacioli would later be regarded as the father of modern accounting. Accounting is a somewhat independent social language with its own terms and its own courses and departments, with many of the early schools of business administration growing out of the even earlier schools of finance. Budgeting, too, has its schools of thought, as can be seen in practices that might make sense in one part of a government structure, while being delicately rejected in another (Planning, Programming and Budgeting System – PPBS, for example). Zero-based budgeting may be taught in business schools, but, as Webber and Wildavsky comment: Major spending programs – pensions, education, health, the armed forces and the like – are the cumulative results of decades of incremental change. Agreements entered into in an earlier age still affect the amount and feasibility of change. In other respects, however, the ideas that animated past taxing, spending and borrowing, like that of the balanced budget, appear out of synch with contemporary conditions. (1986, p. 608)

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Brazil’s participative budgeting is another way of approaching financial decisions that has received a lot of attention for the way it engages citizens in direct decision making on budget distributions and actions (Wampler, 2007). Its language is immediate and highly focused. It is not about policy priorities, but about what is more important: a school over in that neighbourhood or a health centre in another one. It is disjointed and incremental but seems to work in redistributing local government funds. What is more, people – often those with very little familiarity with budgets, plans and other public administration action languages – feel very comfortable in arguing and voting for streets to be paved, or squares to be tidied up. It has become a social language that draws in other bits and pieces, but it is very much a field in itself – very direct and to the point. The Brownlow Report put budget and efficiency research together, for reasons that can only be guessed. However, it is worth the conjecture that, at that time, those technically concerned with finance and budgeting were also familiar with the language of efficiency. Efficiency is said to do many things, but it normally comes with a promise of saving money or using it better. Budget offices and financial departments were by then an established part of the public administration scene and an important source of professional staff, both technical and university trained. Even though efficiency was a much broader theme than the earlier scientific management, it is not difficult to imagine that the implicit appeal to doing more with less – a line that much later on would be picked up in the economics of cost-effectiveness – would be favourably received by those who also had the technical and mathematical skills to put it to work.7 As both Bendix (1956) and Waldo (1952) from different disciplinary positions have pointed out, this may have seemed the natural route to ‘neutral’ administration, but seeming and being are very different. Planning, the other term in the second recommendation of the Brownlow Report, was very much the ‘new kid on the block’ at the time and, like budgeting and finance, is still as strong today. National planning had been introduced in the Soviet Union in the mid-1920s and aroused much suspicion because of its relationship to a centralized state, more so when Italy and Germany also moved in similar directions during the early 1930s; planning of a different kind, for cities and towns had emerged a bit earlier, around the turn of the century. The British Housing and Town Planning Act, for example, dates from 1909. Peterson in his study on the birth of city planning in the USA cites the introduction to one of the early texts on City Planning in 1916, as noting that while most of the individual topics that formed the field had long histories, bringing them together as city or town planning was recent.

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Olmsted voiced what he and others in the movement called ‘the new social ideal of unified and comprehensive city planning’. By this he meant that the overall development of the modern city as a physical entity should be controlled in a coherent, all-encompassing way by public authority. Without question, this was a new idea, warranting fresh nomenclature. (Peterson, 2003, p. 2)

Planning is a social language for public affairs with many tentacles in different places, not just to budgeting, but also to participation and governance where it can be found in approaches to citizen planning. But it is also very independent and in the day to day; planners plan, and though urban planners may talk of urban policy, when it comes to action they are looking for instruments. Planning as a term comes from the French plan, which was a graphical (flat, two-dimensional) reproduction of an object or even a city. The Real y Supremo Consejo de las Indias in Spain would send out flat drawings of how the cities in the New World were to be built. A main square with the church, the house of the colonial representative, the cabildo or meeting place for local affairs, amongst others. The Marquis of Pombal probably drew up a plan when he set about rebuilding Lisbon after the earthquake and tsunami that destroyed one of the most beautiful cities in Europe on All Saints Day, 1775. Pombal’s Lisbon is the Lisbon of the squares and blocks downtown by the river. Pombal did not have much time for Lisbon’s religious leaders, who saw the events as an act of God.8 As Ambassador to England from 1738–1745 he had become a member of London’s Royal Society and he tested his proposals by building models of the downtown area and having heavily armed soldiers march around them. He certainly wouldn’t understand the suggestion that he was one of the founding fathers of planning, along with Baron Haussmann a century later in Paris, or that he introduced risk management into public affairs by requiring each parish priest in Portugal to report on local events at the time the earthquake happened. Equally, none of those involved in setting up the villages and sites of the colonial settlements in the Americas saw what they were doing as planning. ‘Commonly, a landowner or public official simply hired a surveyor to devise a plan showing the streets and lots. No special terminology had drawn attention to this service’ (Peterson, 2003, p. 6). From town and later city planning at the beginning of the century to national planning in the 1930s, the term became applied to development planning in the post-war period, with social planning to follow. India’s first five-year plan following Independence, for example, covered the 1951–1956 period. Along the way, different professionals were arriving on the scene, the architects and urbanists, the economists, social

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scientists, business consultants along with associations, courses and professional diplomas. Many of the earlier proposals about policy were to be made in the intersecting space of planning and decision and it is important to note that the two could be found together at various moments – especially in the earlier years.9 But there were also attempts to make distinctions, as for example Wildavsky’s (1973) ‘If Planning is Everything, Maybe it’s Nothing’. There is no doubt that both policy and planning along with budgeting are currently much-used languages in the field of public affairs. But it is also the case that they seem most of the time to get on individually by themselves, or to see one or the other as part of themselves or, even, to see themselves as each other. They also share common texts, as for example Lindblom’s Science of Muddling Through (Good, 2011). Most budget specialists will say that budgeting is planning (meaning, planning is part of budgeting) and Friedmann, in his text on planning theories, will say ‘State planning, of course, also includes policies and programs …’ (1987, p. 28). In concluding the chapter on ‘Planning as Policy Analysis’ – key for anyone wishing to follow the early 1970s and the relation of policy analysis to government – he will comment: And although modern policy analysis, with its array of sophisticated models and computers, is of very recent origin, there is no question that, in one form or another, it will survive indefinitely into the future (…) Still the recent shift in emphasis from on-line analysis to “enlightenment” and from decision theory to implementation and interaction is a significant one. Once decision theory has been displaced as the principal focus of policy analysis, the way is open for many different approaches, some of which may well depart from the hallowed traditions of the field. A major alternative to decision is “action”, and actions imply the existence of actors who act (…) In the public domain, there are always multiple actors, such as political parties, social movements, trades unions, and farmers’ granges, whose roots are deep in civil society (…) This new focus on action leads us to different models of planning and, indeed, to two new traditions. These models have two things in common: 1) they are not specifically addressed to the ruling elites, and 2) they focus on actions rather than on decisions. (Friedmann, 1987, p. 179)

Policy analysis may remain as a provider of knowledge for authority, but public planning moves on, as would be clear in Friedmann’s (2011) selection of key essays where policy is hardly found. In his introduction, he recalls his earlier years in Brazil when he asked himself a question that could well apply to many of the public action languages present in governmental circles: ‘what is this new-fangled soft technology called planning?’ (p. 1).

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ROOSEVELT, THE NEW DEAL AND THE TENNESSEE VALLEY AUTHORITY In 1933, in the middle of the Great Depression, Roosevelt won a landslide victory and, supported by a very able group of academics, lawmakers and social liberals, men and women, produced a flood of bills in his first 100 days that changed the social landscape of the country (see for example the work of his Secretary of Labour, Frances Perkins10). His inaugural address is an interesting insight into policy at that time: Through this program of action, we address ourselves to putting our own national house in order and making income balance outgo. Our international trade relations, though vastly important, are in point of time and necessity secondary to the establishment of a sound national economy. I favor as a practical policy the putting of first things first. I shall spare no effort to restore world trade by international economic readjustment, but the emergency at home cannot wait on that accomplishment. The basic thought that guides these specific means of national recovery is not narrowly nationalistic. It is the insistence, as a first consideration, upon the interdependence of the various elements in and parts of the United States—a recognition of the old and permanently important manifestation of the American spirit of the pioneer. It is the way to recovery. It is the immediate way. It is the strongest assurance that the recovery will endure. In the field of world policy, I would dedicate this Nation to the policy of the good neighbor—the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others—the neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a world of neighbors.11

He would also mention national planning, which, as planning, had already taken shape in urban affairs and had jumped into a different shape in the economic arena with the work of Keynes. Roosevelt and Keynes had met and had different ideas about deficits, but the desirability of governments getting involved in the economy was increasingly accepted. Bit by bit this would be called economic policy, and planning would become a broader instrument than that for urban affairs. In the address, he would also mention: ‘… national planning for the supervision of all forms of transportation and communications and other utilities which have a definitely public character’. However, there was no specific plan for the New Deal, rather many different programmes, agencies, acts and regulations across and in a wide variety of areas. Webber and Wildavsky (1986) comment that it was never a coherent set of measures, ‘Rather it comprised ad-hoc answers to immediate crisis’ (p.453).12

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Amongst these was a totally new concept of public sector organization that set out to show that regional planning could be democratic. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) reorganized floodwaters, built hydroelectric schemes and locks, and led programmes and projects in regional development over an area that included major parts of a number of states and, in doing so, consolidated regional planning as part of democratic society. Yet there was no department of planning in the TVA, certainly no ‘plan’ and, also, no policy. In its practice, TVA was much less a planning agency and more an action theory about planning the interests of government, the private sector and the community in a collective and cooperative way.13 It ran into a lot of difficulties, for the original presidential message charged it not only with the ‘broadest duty of planning for the proper use, conservation and development of the natural resources of the Tennessee River drainage basin (…) For the general social and economic welfare of the Nation’, but also gave it the ‘necessary power to carry these plans into effect’. There was to be much discussion in both public and academic14 spheres as a result, but it happened and in the long run was more effective than perhaps was expected (Couto, 1988). David Lilienthal, the TVA’s second chairman, summed up this experience in a much-reprinted paperback entitled Democracy on the March (1944), which he saw as the TVA’s report to its stockholders, that is, the American public. For current students of planning theory, some of the discussion on planning will seem very much up to date, as the following extracts show: The reason that the TVA Plan is not available is that there is no such document. Nor is there one separate department set off by itself, where planners exercise their brains (…) The TVA is a planning agency, the first of its kind in the United States. The great change going on in this valley is an authentic example of modern democratic planning; this was the expressed intent of Congress, by whose authority we act. But through the years we have deliberately been sparing in the use of the terminology of ‘plans’ and ‘planning’ within the TVA and outside, and those terms have hardly appeared thus far in the book. For the term ‘planning’ has come to be used in so many different senses that the nomenclature has almost lost usefulness, has even come to be a source of some confusion … (p.207) The TVA idea of planning sees action and planning not as things separate and apart, but as one single and continuous process (…) The idea that planning and responsibility for action may and should be divorced – the maker of plans having little or nothing to do with their execution – follows the analogy of the planning of a house, an office, any fixed structure. But the analogy is a mistaken one. For the development of a region is a course of action; it has no arbitrary point of beginning and goes on and on with no point

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of completion. The individual acts that make up regional development are the day-to-day activities of plowing a particular field, harvesting timber from a particular tract, the building of a factory, a church, a house, a highway (…) Plans had to be made, of course, many of them. But plan and action are part of one responsibility. TVA is responsible not alone for plans but for results. These results depend chiefly upon the people’s participation. Getting that participation was to be almost wholly on a voluntary basis. To get a job done in this way was a unique assignment, one that required the invention of new devices and new methods. If TVA had been a ‘planning agency’ in the sense that its responsibility had been limited to the making of plans – the usual meaning of the term – those plans would probably have met the fate of so many other plans: brochures decorating bookshelves … (pp. 214–215)

As these excerpts show, Lilienthal was not wandering around the Tennessee Valley in an absent-minded manner without a social action language in which to find himself, his colleagues, technical advisors, local farmers, business people and politicians. His text is a social product, a way of talking, making sense and enacting, that linked many different social actors but also generated questions for others. (Indeed, in the early years the dispute about the government’s role as an active supplier of energy was to produce a major crisis leading to the resignation of the first chairman). Much of what today is taken as obvious in relation to rural development, water drainage, test farming and agricultural extension was heavily influenced by the TVA and, materially, the Tennessee River is no longer the ferocious monster of floods and landslides of the early 1930s. The Roosevelt generation used policy very much in the way that it had been used previously in the nineteenth century; as a position or a stance on certain issues or even in general – first things first. There was foreign policy and national policy, later to be called domestic policy. There would be economic policy – especially once the economy was considered as part of government – and there would be policy-determining positions and non-policy-determining positions.

ATTLEE, THE NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE AND THE BEVERIDGE REPORT The result of the 1945 elections in the UK had a number of similarities to the Roosevelt period. The elections resulted in a landslide of votes for the Labour Party and in the following five years no less than 347 acts of parliament were introduced, radically changing the organizational and institutional landscape of the British public sphere. These included:

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implementing the 1942 Beveridge Report on Social Insurance and Allied Services; creating the National Health Service (NHS); raising the school leaving age to 15; nationalizing key critical areas for industrial infrastructure; and the building of over a million homes amongst many other more local actions. More important still, even with a reduced majority in 1950 and an election loss in 1951, the resulting bi-partisan post-war consensus was to remain firm until 1970. The National Health Service Act of 1946 is a masterpiece of institutional and administrative rearrangement with advisory bodies, councils, committees, authorities, boards, duties, governing bodies, authorizations, requirements, regulations and duties, but not a policy in sight. This is its introductory paragraph: (1) It shall be the duty of the Minister of Health (hereafter in this Act referred to as ‘the Minister’) to promote the establishment in England and Wales of a comprehensive health service designed to secure improvement in the physical and mental health of the people of England and Wales and the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of illness, and for that purpose to secure the effective provision of services in according with the following provisions of this act. (2) The services so provided shall be free of charge, except where the provision of this Act expressly provides for the making and recovery of charges.15

Aneurin Bevan, the Minister for Health, had been a notable orator from an early age and he could speak at length without notes. Like Thomas Jefferson with his pen, they were both good with words. Indeed, it is worth remembering that rhetoric is, in itself, a very early public action language. However, his skills also lay in other directions, as Kynaston (2008) notes in his history of the austerity period of 1945–1951: But if no one denied that Bevan was a fine, inspiring orator, capable also of considerable personal charm, what surprised many – friends as well as enemies – was the remarkably effective way in which he pushed through the creation of the National Health Service. Inevitably the scheme had many complexities, but at root there were seven key elements. Access to health care was to be free and universal; costs would be met from central taxation, not insurance; all hospitals – whether local authority or voluntary, cottage or teaching – were to be nationalized; the great majority of these hospitals would be run by regional hospital boards; the other two legs of a tripartite overall structure would be executive councils (overseeing GPs, dentists and opticians) and local authorities (still responsible for such miscellaneous activities as vaccinations, ambulances, community nursing, home help and immunization programmes); NHS ‘pay beds’ would enable consultants to combine private practice with working for the NHS; and GPs would no longer be allowed to buy and sell practices but would not be put on a full-time salary basis, with the capitation (i.e. per patient head) element in their income making it easier

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for patients to move between doctors. There were plenty of dramas to come, but the NHS Bill that Bevan put forward in March 1946 more or less became actuality just over two years later. (Kynaston, 2008, pp. 145–146)

Bevan fought both within his party and with the other parties; there were disputes about the role of local government, on the wish for health centres – left till much later, and very hard negotiations with the various associations of doctors and specialists. Glennerster (2007), in his history of British social policy, comments: ‘Whatever words may be used to describe this train of events, “consensus” is not one of them’. He mentions Churchill describing the period as one of ‘Party antagonism as bitter as anything I have seen in my long life of political conflict’ (p.53). Many of the elements and parts of the ideas for the NHS were already around. Health had appeared as an aspect of a ‘wider social policy’ in the Beveridge Report and there had been proposals from the coalition wartime government. Bevan, however, had spotted that the key to change was a comprehensive hospital service. His Deputy Secretary is reported as saying: ‘Of course he was right. They [the Coalition White Paper proposals] would never have worked. I came away that night with instructions to work out a new plan on the new basis he proposed’ (Glennerster, 2007, p. 50). Through the hospitals he was able to persuade key sectors of the medical profession that their incomes and freedoms would be more secure than before. The new plan and the details that went into getting everything ready on time would have been mainly the work of the permanent civil service in the Ministry of Health, led by Bevan’s Deputy Secretary, also a civil servant. Plans were probably seen at this time as things that were carried out, or some similar expression; times were set, schedules drawn up, studies made and meetings arranged. It is very unlikely that anybody talked about implementation, at least in the UK, where it is not mentioned even in the 1973 edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on historical principles (the same year as the Pressman and Wildavsky book was published). Implements had been around since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and were used in executing work, as was the verb (to complete, perform; to fulfil; often in an official manner implement the findings of the committee). Merriam and Webster report implementation in the nineteenth-century USA; a helpful reminder not to assume that single languages are homogeneous in their patterns of usage nor in the way they produce new terms as well as new versions of older terms and meanings. On 5 July 1948, doctors, nurses, opticians, dentists and hospitals came together as a single country-wide National Health Service.16 By this time,

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94 per cent of the population was already enrolled and 92 per cent of the 3,000 or more local authority and charity hospitals were effectively nationalized and the newly created health boards took over their administration. The NHS was and continues to be the National Health Service; service, not system as it is sometimes mistakenly referred to in various parts of the world. But there are now health policies and policy documents. The Beveridge Report is often hallmarked as the key to social policy, and Beveridge does use the term in the title of part 6 of the Report, Social Security and Social Policy, but there is only one use of the term in the text of the chapter itself. Policy is used sparingly and either as a general pointer to a broad arena (as in domestic policy, financial policy, or foreign policy) or to higher matters of government. Here are examples from the introduction and summary as well as the introduction to part six: 6. In proceeding from this first comprehensive survey of social insurance to the next task – of making recommendations – three guiding principles may be laid down at the outset. 7. The first principle is that any proposals for the future, while they should use to the full the experience gathered in the past, should not be restricted by consideration of sectional interests established in the obtaining of that experience (…) 8. The second principle is that organization of social insurance should be treated as one part only of a comprehensive policy of social progress. Social insurance fully developed may provide income security; it is an attack on Want. But Want is only one of five giants on the road of reconstruction and in some ways the easiest to attack. The others are Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. 9. The third principle is that social security must be achieved by co-operation between the State and the individual (…) 10. The Plan for Social Security set out in this Report is built upon these principles. It uses experience but is not tied by experience. It is put forward as a limited contribution to a wider social policy, though as something that could be achieved now without waiting for the whole of that policy. It is, first and foremost, a plan of insurance – of giving in return for contributions benefits up to subsistence level, as of right and without means test, so that individuals may build freely upon it. (pp. 6–7) … The State with its power of compelling successive generations of citizens to become insured and its power of taxation is not under the necessity of accumulating reserves for actuarial risks and has not, in fact, adopted this method in the past. The second of these two distinctions is one of financial practice only; the first raises important questions of policy and equity. Though the State, in conducting compulsory insurance, is not under the necessity of varying the premium according to the risk, it may decide as a matter of policy to do so. (Paragraph 24, p. 13)

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Freedom from want is only one of the essential freedoms of mankind. Any Plan for Social Security in the narrow sense assumes a concerted social policy in many fields, most of which it would be inappropriate to discuss in this Report. (Part VI, paragraph 409, p. 154)17

Beveridge, a lawyer and economist, was a leading specialist in unemployment insurance and had been director of the London School of Economics (1919–1937), so he was familiar with and very much part of the discussion around welfare and poverty. His working terms were plans and budgets; policies, as seen above, are broad positions and intentions. These were key to a number of different actions, agencies and forms of contributory and non-contributory methods of finance which would start to stitch together what would indeed be called social policy. While these results, as also Roosevelt’s before, were impressive by any standards, they were done with some very straightforward administrative tools, such as budgeting and planning, regulations and directives, acts and bills and many speeches. But they also, especially in the case of the UK, led to a strong government-centred approach to the welfare state and the new universe of civil, political and social rights. Vast areas of civic life didn’t go away but, metaphorically, were moved into the background. As Prochaska (2006) commented in the conclusions of his study on Christianity and Social Service in Modern Britain: Victorians held government in esteem but expected little from it on social issues. In a national culture dominated by Christianity, they commonly believed that poverty was ineradicable, yet they sought its amelioration through voluntary service. A century later most Britons believed poverty could be abolished, but that the responsibility for welfare provision resided in the political process. An opinion poll in 1948 found that over 90 per cent of people no longer thought there was a role for charity in Britain. With collectivism in the ascendant, the payment of taxes had become the primary civic duty. (Location 1799, Kindle edition)

The NHS language of health boards, advisory councils and committees with representatives of different sectors continues to make a lot of sense in the twenty-first century of participation and governance. But how many creative ways of running charity and local government hospitals were lost in the process?

POLICY IN THE 1940s By 1951, Lerner and Lasswell’s text was arriving in the bookshops but the policy that was around in administrative and government practice at

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least in the UK and the USA was the older policy of position and orientation. There is little if no talk about implementation. Bevan and his senior civil servants didn’t implement the NHS, they just set a date at which it would happen and worked backwards to ensure that would be the case. Equally, Roosevelt didn’t implement the TVA, he just – as some observers of the time would say – pushed the bill through Congress, set up the Board and expected them to get on with their work. What then was ‘policy talk’ in the academic circles of this time? Here, books – especially collected works – are interesting places or sites to look for clues and there are two that appear in references to this period. The first text was edited by Friedrich and Mason under the title Public Policy in 1940. It was a yearbook of the Graduate School of Public Administration at Harvard which included chapters on price policies, industrial markets and public policy, policy of industrial control and monetary policy. Friedrich opened the volume with an article on public policy and the nature of administrative responsibility. He begins with the view that any usefulness – as a matter of emphasis – in distinguishing between politics and administration had been lost by the transformation of the distinction into a fetish or a stereotype in the minds of academics and practitioners. In other words, a problem which is already complicated enough by itself – that is, how a policy is adopted and carried out – is bogged down by a vast ideological superstructure which contributes little or nothing to its solution. Take a case like the AAA.18 In simple terms, AAA was a policy adopted with a view to helping the farmer to weather the storm of the depression. This admittedly was AAA’s broad purpose. To accomplish this purpose, crop reduction, price-fixing, and a number of lesser devices were adopted. Crop reduction in turn led to processing taxes. Processing taxes required reports by the processors, inspection of their plants. Crop reduction itself necessitated reports by the farmers, so called work sheets, and agreements between them and the government as to what was to be done, and so forth and so on. What here is politics and what administration? Will anyone understand better the complex processes involved in the articulation of this important public policy if we talk about the expression and execution of the state will? The concrete patterns of public policy formation and execution reveal that politics and administration are not two mutually exclusive boxes, or absolute distinctions, but that they are two closely linked aspects of the same process. Public policy, to put it flatly, is a continuous process, the formation of which is inseparable from its execution. Public policy is being formed as it is being executed, and it is likewise being executed as it is being formed. Politics and administration play a continuous role in both formation and execution, though there is probably more politics in the formation of policy, more administration in the execution of it. In so far as particular individuals or groups are gaining or losing power or control in a given area, there is politics; in so far as official

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act or propose action in the name of public interest, there is administration. The same problem may be considered from another angle. Policies in the common meaning of the term are decisions about what to do or not to do in a given situation. (Friedrich, 1940, p. 6)

The second is a collection of papers organized by Appleby, in 1949, the then Dean of the Maxwell Graduate School at Syracuse. Starting life as a newspaper publisher, he served in the US Department of Agriculture with Roosevelt and then in the Bureau of the Budget before becoming Dean. In the collection, entitled Policy and Administration, Appleby contrasts the then still current tendency to separate policy from administration (like politics before), with the description of what is actually taking place in an aptly named first chapter on ‘Fallacies and Definitions’: If one wishes then, to define policy as that which Congress decides, and administration as that which the executive branch does, policy and administration may be regarded as separated, and the definitions, like so many others having to do with social processes, become rather meaningless. Similarly, within the executive branch, if policy is defined as decision-making at top levels and administration is decision-making and decision-application at lower level, a kind of separation is achieved, but the definitions are not useful. The position taken in this discussion is that description is more appropriate than definition; that many types of decision involving policy-making are and must be delegated as a usual thing; that, on the other hand, almost any type of decision may become on occasion a matter for top-level consideration and determination, even for popular determination; that the movement of work materials and decisions perpendicularly and laterally in the levels and divisions of government is of the essence of both policy-making and administration; and that the whole government context is important to legislation, to administration, to policy-making, and to court decisions. (p.10) An intricate process is subject to definition, but the definition must be made in such general terms as to reveal very little. Here administration is viewed as the government in direct action on behalf of and in restraint of citizens; policy-making in administration is the exercise of discretion with respect to such action. There are different orders of action, and different orders of policy, but these orders together are a continuum, with the fundamental common character which use of the term requires. Confusion enters when the continuum is denied. Wisdom comes when the process of decision making is considered as a whole. (p.15)

Placing these two examples together suggests the gradual coming together of notions of policy with decision and discretion, and the recognition that in practice the fusion of politics and administration with decision and discretion is how things get done. Policies are adopted and carried out, formed and executed in a continuous manner. As the 1940s

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merged into the 1950s and then into the 1960s, so do the number of areas and questions on which governments, officials and, later, technical staff need to have positions or statements of posture, of the relative importance of certain lines of action or priorities. In the same way that foreign policy will become policy on different issues for different places, so the domestic front finds itself with more are more themes. The idea of domestic policy will slowly fade away and will be replaced by specific terms – agriculture, housing, employment, amongst many others – and eventually social policy will become social policies and then different policies on a whole host of more specific themes.

POLICY, DOMESTIC POLICY AND PUBLIC POLICY: THE JOHNSON ADMINISTRATIONS FROM 1963–1969 For most people outside of the USA, and also for many inside it, mention of Lyndon B. Johnson will provoke – if anything – traumatic images, often visual, of Vietnam. Dallek, who has made an extensive study of Johnson, suggests (2015) that it is the strength of this same image, of a war seen over time as a big mistake by a majority of the American people, that served to push Johnson’s work in the domestic arena into the background. In this area, what he qualifies as an extraordinary body of achievements included: civil rights, voter rights, Medicare, federal aid to elementary/secondary and higher education, environmental protection, clean air, clean rivers, clean harbors, consumer protection, truth in lending, safe tyres, safe roads, the National Endowment for the Arts, National Public Radio, national public television (and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting), the Freedom of Information Act, and the extraordinary immigration reform statute of 1965. (2015, p. 22)

After six terms in the House of Representatives, Johnson entered the Senate in 1948, becoming the Democrat minority leader in 1953 and, with the Democratic victory, majority leader. He is credited with rare legislative skills learned over those years, and as Glickman et al. (2015) describe him in the introduction to their recent volume on his neglected legacy in the domestic affairs arena: Although he had been a public servant early in his career, Johnson approached governing not as a chief executive officer or an experienced administrator might but, rather, as a master legislator would. His political strategy was to get “laws on the books” that he hoped would ultimately, not immediately, achieve his goals. As legislator in chief he instinctively left it to

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future Congresses to resolve any controversies arising from the initial authorizing legislation. Dallek (1996, 80) has written that Johnson ‘understood from past experience that once a major government program had been put in place, it would be easier for supporters to modify its workings than for opponents to dismantle it’. (p. 8)

In the 1960 electoral campaign Johnson was elected vice president to John F. Kennedy, becoming president on 22 November 1963 when Kennedy was assassinated. He immediately assumed Kennedy’s congressional agenda with a tax bill and also what was to become the Civil Rights Act of 1964. By 1964 work was already ongoing to prepare the platform for the elections and a host of other measures were being introduced, including Acts on Economic Opportunity, Housing and Urban Mass Transport, as well as the creation of various historical and scenic sites and parks, the Inter-American Development Bank (BID), Nurse Training and the War on Poverty. On 22 May 1964, six months after Kennedy’s death, Johnson made a major keystone address to graduating students at the University of Michigan, which is remembered as the Great Society address. Many of his staff worked on the address, as did some highly skilled speechwriters, and commentators see it as the moment when Johnson set the base for his coming electoral platform. Speechwriting, which was discussed in Chapter 3, had already been part of the White House in the 1930s and its ubiquitous and continuous presence is well described in Robert Schlesinger’s White House Ghosts (2008). As commented earlier, speeches are fascinating social products, often collective, and Johnson had many good writers19 as well as his own direct staff. What is interesting about the address is not so much the final text, which doesn’t mention the word policy at all, but the various suggestions along the way, made by aids and staff in internal memorandum and handwritten notes on different versions. Here again it is clear that policy, if anything, was something very broad and background. Here are two suggestions, one in the early days of the speech and the second in relation to the third draft, neither of them making the final version.20 We do not serve ourselves or our society by speaking or heeding past answers – simple solutions – or petty platitudes. For this complex age, there are no uncomplicated answers – in politics, in foreign policy, in business decisions, in labor negotiations, and least of all in raising our children. From the earliest days of the Republic we have struggled to protect the life of our nation and preserve the liberty of our citizens that we may pursue the happiness of our people. Our success in that pursuit is the test of our success as a nation. It underlies all our policies, our programs and our prospects for the future.

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Here are some of the central parts of the address as it was given, showing very clearly that there is a coherent action language present, that things will take place, as indeed they did, but that the language of action is not that of public policy: [The Great Society] demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning. The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community. It is a place where man can renew contact with nature. It is a place which honors creation for its own sake and for what it adds to the understanding of the race. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods. But most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor. So I want to talk to you today about three places where we begin to build the Great Society: in our cities, in our countryside, and in our classrooms. (…) These are three of the central issues of the Great Society. While our Government has many programs directed at those issues, I do not pretend that we have the full answer to those problems. But I do promise this: we are going to assemble the best thought and the broadest knowledge from all over the world to find those answers for America. I intend to establish working groups to prepare a series of White House conferences and meetings on the cities, on natural beauty, on the quality of education, and on other emerging challenges. And from these meetings and from this inspiration and from these studies, we will begin to set our course towards the Great Society. The solution to these problems does not rest on a massive program in Washington, nor can it rely solely on the strained resources of local authority. They require us to create new concepts of cooperation, a creative federalism, between the national capital and the leaders of local communities.

The Johnson period in the domestic arena is very like the UK post-war period, but with a much stronger drive of equity and equal opportunity both for the poor and for the black population. There are many bills (an average of around 40 per full year), and programmes bringing new ideas to the fore and creating new agencies, such as the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), but even though people may talk today about Johnson’s social policies, that will be in hindsight; Johnson himself and

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his team didn’t. Kennedy had initiated the outside task force as a source of ideas and Johnson made it a central feature from the ‘Great Society’ onwards. The task force approach was one that the president was familiar with and that was compatible with his management style. Johnson recalled that his first task force experience was with a group established by Roosevelt during the 1930s to study economic conditions in the south. Throughout his senate career and as vice president Johnson relied ‘extensively on advice gathered by independent groups of experts.’ The task force process reflected central elements of Johnson management: reliance on ad-hoc, informal bodies, maintenance of personal control of process, and retention of flexibility through confidentiality. (Redford and McCulley, 1986, p. 78)

There were many conferences with debates on what needed to be done, and some signs of the shifting times, such as an early scheme for White House interns, and there may be talk about domestic policy in contrast to foreign policy. But the driving languages were those of bills, rulings, programmes and budgets. Evaluation was beginning to be important and the OEO had an Office of Research, Plans, Programs and Evaluation. The language of PPBS was brought into the mainstream of public administration in 1965, following McNamara’s earlier work in the Department of Defense. Johnson himself was very concerned about the effectiveness of government, sending a special message to Congress in 1967 on the quality of American Government (17 March 1967), and he was highly critical of excessively bureaucratic communication, the use of which he had referred to in a 1964 cabinet meeting as ‘gobbledygook’ and appointed the then Chairman of the Civil Service Commission John Macy to lead the war against it.21 Evaluation was also present, as this citation from W. Gorham, the then Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at the Department of Health Education and Welfare (HEW), demonstrates: ‘The very process of analysis is valuable in itself, for it forces people to think about the objectives of Government programs and how they can be measured. It forces people to think about choices in an explicit way’ (cited in Lynn, 2015, p. 382). There are major actions on civil service training and recruiting professionals to ‘top policy positions’ and there is no doubt about the concern with getting things done; it was just that those concerns and an amazing array of actions did not need policy to serve as a hierarchical and authoritative focus. Policy had been around in Washington, just like it had been around in the UK. But it was very much the policy of orientation and position, a guide for decisions, not unlike its earlier uses. Roosevelt in his 1941 Message to Congress had talked about national

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policy in internal affairs and national policy in foreign affairs. Internal affairs had become domestic affairs and domestic policy, but the general approach was similar. Policy, as could be expected, was very much part of the State Department (the US equivalent of the Foreign Office) where, from 1947, as the Policy Planning Staff, it served as a source of independent analysis and advice for the Secretary of State. Johnson too would have no problem using the expression within the arena of foreign affairs, as in an internal memorandum requesting a concise summary of ‘all favourable developments in policy towards and relations with Latin America’,22 or in the introduction to an important address on Vietnam in April 1965 at Johns Hopkins University entitled ‘Peace without Conquest’: My Fellow Americans Last week seventeen nations sent their views to some dozen countries having an interest in South East Asia. We are joining these seventeen countries and stating our American Policy which we believe will contribute towards peace in this area of the world.23

Policy can also be found, very occasionally, being used by members of Johnson’s own White House staff in a similar way to refer to the domestic arena (domestic policy), to matters of personnel administration, to access to documents (the administration’s policy on executive privilege), but never more than that. The Director of the Bureau of the Budget would discuss the location of the OEO in terms, amongst others, of strengthening ‘the authority of the director to make his policy decisions binding on the various delegate agencies’;24 similar to the notion of top policy positions. Likewise, when seen from inside the daily working of the White House and through working memos from staff, or within those key agencies that spearheaded the Great Society push, there is no doubt that a lot of action is going on. But it is referred to through the social languages of programmes, proposals and projects, as in R. Sargent Shriver’s testimony on the OEO before the USA Senate on 19 August 1966, or when leading academic deans write in in support of the OEO in response to suggestions that it should be dismantled.25 The OEO was key to Johnson’s war on poverty and this is from the earlier letter he wrote to Shriver on his appointment: You will also undertake the coordination and integration of the federal program with the activities of state and local governments and of private persons, including the Foundations, private business and industry, labor unions, and civic groups and organizations. I ask that you invite their close cooperation; that to the extent that they desire, you integrate their efforts with

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our work at the federal level; and that you encourage joint planning, joint programs and joint administration wherever feasible. (White House, 11 February 1964)26

Public policy as a field of study and a language with which to organize public affairs was certainly strengthened by the fact that many of the actions initiated in the Johnson period went on to be later discussed in policy terms, or that the concern with evaluation would lead to later discussions on implementation, but to suggest that one caused the other would be incorrect. Policy as an action language did not orchestrate what was a tremendous and often undervalued push over a wide social arena. In major events such as the White House Conferences it is possible to see that the idea of policy is beginning to pop up in comments by universitybased academics, for example in the Conference on Education (20–21 July 1965) ‘critical problems in urban education may more often be at a policy rather than a program level’, or in comments about the importance of policy planning in federal–state partnerships. But when the US Congress passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act on 9 April 1965 it used the language not of government policy, nor of public policy, but of a policy of the USA, an expression already present in Foreign Affairs: In recognition of the special educational needs of low-income families and the impact that concentrations of low-income families have on the ability of local educational agencies to support adequate educational programs, the Congress hereby declares it to be the policy of the United States to provide financial assistance (…) to local educational agencies serving areas with concentrations of children from low-income families to expand and improve their educational programs by various means (including preschool programs) which contribute to meeting the special educational needs of educationally deprived children. (Section 201, Elementary and Secondary School Act, 1965)

The Act itself was signed by the president on 11 April in the same one-room school where Johnson had begun his studies as a four-year-old and in the company of his then school teacher. It was seen as one of the cornerstones of the ‘war on poverty’. By the end of the Johnson period, when some of the major achievements are being written up, those directly responsible will continue to talk about programmes and projects, but already external commentators will be introducing the language of policy as very much a foreground device. In one of the various books discussing social affairs that were in circulation at that time in the USA, with little mention of policy in the chapters, a preface by the Swedish development economist, Gunnar Myrdal,27 makes use of policy in the way it would be recognized today:

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A dramatic change in American attitudes towards the social problem is under way. The nation is finally – and rather suddenly – becoming prepared to accept the welfare state (…) Broad policy measures which a few years ago would have seemed to be radical and unacceptable are now becoming part of practical policy. The swelling flood of statistical investigations devoted to the poverty problem, conferences and seminars, books and articles, speeches and policy declarations, give expression to this catharsis at the same time as they spur it on. (p. i) We are increasingly coming to recognize as part of this great catharsis that not only social security policies but almost all other policies – agricultural policies, taxation policies, housing policies, minimum wage legislation, and so forth – have followed the perverse tendency to aid the not-so-poor, while leaving a bottom layer of very poor unaided. The War on Poverty will therefore have to be fought on many fronts and will in the end have to imply not only an enlargement but a redirection of all economic and social policies. (p. vii)

If policy was not a driving force, the action languages of planning, projects, bills and budgets were hard at work – as would be another new kid on the block: evaluation. There has been much discussion on the introduction of PPBS in the US Federal Government as a whole in 1965, following its very effective development in the Department of Defense under McNamara, where it still remains in use (Lynn, 2015). Five years later, under Nixon, the now Office of Management and Budget quietly put it aside. PPBS overlaid budget practices with concerns for the outputs (planning and programming) but did not replace the traditional areas of expenditure (such as salaries, operating expenses etc.). Specialized staffs analysed proposed expenditures for what they were expected to accomplish in maintaining or increasing military capabilities and what they would cost, that is their cost effectiveness in performing military missions, such as strategic nuclear deterrence, close tactical air support of troops in combat, and airlift and sea lift of military forces to theatres of conflict. (Lynn, 2015, p. 375)28

Charles Schultze, Head of the Bureau of the Budget from 1965–1968, had suggested to Johnson that this could be an important way of avoiding costly mistakes by establishing goals for the direction of ‘domestic policy’.29 Heads of Department were to have analytic staffs that would be both recruited and also selected from existing staff who would be trained ‘in the modern techniques of program analysis and management’. If output-related budgeting was to have a chequered life – even though it remained in the background in many forms – the same period was to see the rapid growth of evaluation research (Frumkin and Francis, 2015). The original Economic Opportunity Act, 1964, did not require evaluation but

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allowed 1 per cent of programme funds to be used in this way, and its Office of Research Plans, Programs and Evaluation (ORPPE) carried out studies in the late 1960s and early 1970s: ‘the ORPPE engaged in ambitious evaluations of Head Start, Follow Through, Upward Bound, VISTA, the Job Corps and Neighborhood Health Centers, as well as the first large-scale social experiment of the era, the negative income tax experiments’ (Frumkin and Francis, 2015, p. 400). The result was to be a demand that couldn’t be attended to by staff within the different departments. Frumkin and Francis cite a 500 per cent rise in federal expenditures on evaluation between 1969 and 1974, with about 60 per cent of 1974 expenditure going towards contract research. By 1970 there were some 300 firms, both for-profit and non-profit, qualified to receive proposals from the OEO – some that were already in existence before programme evaluation began, such as the RAND Corporation, and others that were created afterwards. It would be into this mix that the language of the policy sciences (including the first number of Policy Sciences journal in 1970) would slowly shape itself out of a shared common ground with planning, budgeting, programmes, projects, decisions, evaluation and, then, implementation. Its consolidation would also get a big push from another part of the block: the differently named graduate professional schools that became known as the Policy Schools (including the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas Austin); many of which were set up with significant support from the Ford Foundation. Soon meetings were being held to discuss these early experiences and various existing academic associations began to adjust their conference structures around this new agenda item of public policy. A good example is the 1975 meeting organized by the Ford Foundation to discuss the ‘Mission of Public Policy Programs’ at which 12 leading US schools were represented by deans or senior faculty.30

POLICY BECOMES INTERNATIONALLY ESTABLISHED The same concerns about the growing demand for a more technically qualified administration, able to deal with a growing area of public affairs, issues, programmes and activities, was taking place in the UK. Many of the texts being circulated, especially around public planning and decision, were moving backwards and forwards across the Atlantic and the number of journals was infinitely less than today. Operations

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research, a wartime product, was still an open field and far less mathematical than it is today; problem analysis was another theme making its way, as were open systems and a growing questioning of planning itself – at least in its orthodox form. Much of this was leading to suggestions that while it was important to have good generalists in the public service, other talents were also necessary. On 8 February 1966, Prime Minister Harold Wilson (Labour) announced the appointment of a committee to examine the structure of recruitment and management, including training, of the Home Civil Service and to make recommendations. The committee was chaired by Lord Fulton, the first Vice Chancellor of the University of Sussex and a key architect of that university’s rapid growth both in student numbers and importance (1959–1967). The Fulton Report,31 as it was referred to, was seen at the time as being as significant as the 1853 Northcote–Trevelyan Report. Amongst its many important dimensions was its very clear position on the changes faced by the British Civil Service and the role for ‘policy support’ that this involved. Here are some excerpts from chapter 2 of the Report on the tasks of the modern civil service and the men and women it needs: Civil servants work in support of Ministers in their public and parliamentary duties. Some of them prepare plans and advise on policy, assembling and interpreting all the data required, e.g. for a decision on a new social security policy, a change in defence policy, a new national transport policy or a new international joint project in the technical field (…) They prepare legislation and assist Ministers with its passage through Parliament. They draft regulations and answers to Parliamentary Questions. They produce briefs for debates and the mass of information which the constitutional principle of parliamentary and public accountability requires (…) Some of this varied work has no counterpart in business or, indeed, anywhere outside the government service. Operating policies embodied in existing legislation and implementing policy decisions take up most of the time of most civil servants. There are taxes to be collected, employment and social security offices to be run. There is a mass of individual case-work both in local offices and in the central departments of state. New policy may require the creation of a new administrative framework. There are major programmes to be managed and controlled, such as the planning and engineering of motorways (…) Some of the work involves the Civil Service in complex relationships with other bodies which are partners in the execution of government policy or are directly affected by it. They include local authorities and nationalised industries in the first category and a multitude of organised interests in the second. This work calls for practical judgement and negotiating skill. It also calls for a thorough knowledge of the subject under negotiation and of the problems and interests of the bodies concerned (…)

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Even this brief and impressionistic description is perhaps enough to make it clear that, as a body, civil servants today have to be equipped to tackle the political, scientific, social, economic and technical problems of our time. They have to be aware of interests and opinions throughout the country and of many developments abroad. They have to keep up with the rapid growth of new knowledge and acquire new techniques to apply it. In short, the Civil Service is no place for the amateur. It must be staffed by men and women who are truly professional. (Report of the Committee on the Civil Service, 1968, chapter 1, pp. 15–16)

The Report would, amongst other recommendations, lead to the setting up of a special department to look after civil service recruitment and training with a new top to bottom career grade in the civil service that placed professional, scientific and technical staff as equals alongside the traditional administrative generalists. More important for the current discussion was the proposal for long-term policy ‘thinking and planning’ at the ministerial (i.e. department) level: We emphasised in Chapter I the growing need for long-term planning if the problems of modern government are to be foreseen, and the groundwork for decisions prepared in good time. We believe that this responsibility, like the complementary responsibility for the execution of policy, needs to be more clearly defined and allocated. At present, policy making, especially long-term policy thinking and planning, is the responsibility of officers over burdened with more immediate demands arising from the parliamentary and public responsibilities of Ministers (…) We propose that a department’s responsibility for major long-term policyplanning should be clearly allocated to a planning and research unit. In the rest of this chapter, we call these ‘Planning Units’. Research is, however, the indispensable basis of proper planning, and the phrase should be understood as referring to a unit equipped to assemble and analyse the information required for its planning work. The unit should be relatively small. Its main task should be to identify and study the problems and needs of the future and the possible means to meet them; it should also be its function to see that day-to-day policy decisions are taken with as full a recognition as possible of their likely implications for the future (…) (p.57) We think that Planning Units should be staffed by comparatively young men and women. Thus, some of the most able, vigorous and suitably qualified young civil servants will be able to have an early and direct impact on top policy-making, as they do so impressively in France and Sweden. Planning Units also offer scope for the employment of men and women on short-term contracts or temporary secondment to the government service (…) We think that people should not normally remain in these units beyond their mid-forties (except for the head of the Planning Unit) (…) they should then expect to move – some returning to work outside government, others into the operating sections of their departments. (p.58)

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The Fulton Committee’s Report was widely supported, careers were reorganized and regrouped, the Civil Service Department (CSD) created and staff training taken much more seriously. Even before the Civil Service College started in 1970, central management training had increased by nearly 80 per cent with a 100 per cent increase for managerial grades.32 Wilson lost the 1970 election to the Conservatives under Edward Heath, but the incoming prime minister was equally committed to the recommendations of the Report. The result was the Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS) – nicknamed the ‘think tank’ – physically located within the Cabinet Office under Lord Rothschild, former head of research with the Shell oil company. Half of the staff, never more than about 20 in all, came from the civil service and the others came from universities, the business sector and consultancies. The work continued under Wilson after the 1974 elections and was an important stimulus for the gradual spread of specially appointed policy advisors to senior ministers and the setting up of departmental policy units (James, 1986). PPBS was also to influence the development of what was termed Programme Analysis Review, introduced by Heath to look at the priorities, objectives, costs and effectiveness of government actions. Making allowance for the institutional, cultural and political differences between the UK and the USA, the similarities between events, arguments and analyses are interesting. Policy is clearly entering into government in a much wider manner than before, but is the policy now being talked about the policy of position or stance, or is it something different? Did Laswell’s earlier proposal about the policy sciences prove prophetic or was the 1951 text something that, in arguing for the importance of a ‘new’ approach to policy, became a convenient reference on which to lean? There are also differences in the two cases. In the UK the linking of policy and planning would also bring in management services and operations research in its softer form, especially in the context of decision processes. In the USA, meanwhile, there would be a sharper reference to policy analysis, for example in Wildavsky’s defence of policy analysis in relation to PPBS (1969). But in both countries there was already a growing academic community talking itself into – and, in doing so, creating – this new field of work, still potentially interdisciplinary. Lindblom – whose pioneering work on decision processes had led him to be placed as a key figure in the areas of budget and planning, as well as policy – would describe both the moment and its performative characteristics in his 1968 text on policy analysis:

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The idea of making the ‘policy-making process’ itself a major focus for specialized enquiry is still so new that no one seems to want to answer the question of what is supposed to be included in the process and what excluded from it (…) But one characteristic of policy making important for our method is worth noting here: its complexity and apparent disorder (…) We are going to look at policy making as an extremely complex analytical and political process to which there is no beginning or end, and the boundaries of which are most uncertain. Sometimes a complex set of forces that we call ‘policy making’ all taken together produce effects called ‘policies’. (1968, pp. 3–4)

NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

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Brownlow (1937). Northcote and Trevelyan (1854). The report is not gender neutral. This was 1854, and as was seen in Chapter 2 most of the meritorious women were elsewhere. This was still the time when the Ragged School Union was struggling to provide some basic education and it would be only in 1880 that the law required basic education for all children from five to ten years of age. Webber and Wildavsky (1986). The Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni e proportionalita is the equivalent of a 1,500-page modern textbook. It was expensive but a commercial success. Ten years later the part on bookkeeping was published separately with the title of La scuola perfetta dei Mercanti (The Perfect School of Merchants). This was also the case throughout Latin America at this time. Organization and Methods would be commonly located in the finance ministries. Sebastião José de Carvalho e Mello, Marquis of Pombal, was a somewhat mercurial figure in Portuguese political history and was also responsible for the general purge against the Jesuits which led to them being exiled back to Rome and in doing so ended their missions in Latin America. See Rittel and Webber’s (1973) ‘Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning’ with their discussion on problems of social policy as ‘wicked problems’. See also Healey (2012) on the three planning traditions: economic planning, physical development, and public administration and policy. Downey (2009). Roosevelt (1933). Interesting here is to point to (a) the possibility that the lack of coherence may have been one of the contributors to Roosevelt’s success, and (b) that coherence is not an abstract notion, it depends on the point of view of the observer. Lilienthal (1944). Amongst these was one major study that would be foundational for the later organizational studies on co-optation and institutions: Selznick’s 1949 TVA and the Grass Roots. National Health Service Act (1946). It is easy to forget that the 1939–1945 wartime effort was an invisible college of intensive administrative training not just in military but also in non-military affairs, in which learning was very much done by doing. The Beveridge Report Social Insurance and Allied Services, accessed on 15 August 2018 at https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.275849/2015.275849.The-Beveridge_djvu.txt (Agricultural Adjustment Act, 1933: note by author.) Including the novelist John Steinbeck.

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114 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

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Beyond public policy Statements of Lyndon Baines Johnson 20th May–23rd May 1964 Box 106, File University of Michigan Address, suggested remarks Busby, Comment on Draft between Goodwin and Valenti. LBJ Presidential Library, University of Texas – Austin. Personal Papers of John Macy, Box 12, Reading File, January to March, 1965. LBJ Presidential Library, University of Texas – Austin. Office Files of Horace Busby Box 19 (1301), memorandum from Busby to Assistant Secretary Mann, 16 August, 1964. Johnson (1965). LBJ Presidential Library, University of Texas – Austin. Memorandum for the President, March 7, 1964 from the Director, bureau of the Budget. File FG 999-2, FG 11-1. LBJ Presidential Library, University of Texas – Austin. File FG 11–15, 6/11/66–9/13/66 in Box 125. LBJ Presidential Library, University of Texas – Austin. Office of the White House Press Secretary. Text of President’s letter addressed to the Honorable Sargent Shriver, Director of the Peace Corps, February 11, 1964. File: FG 11-15 Office of Economic Opportunity, 11/22/63–11/24/64. Myrdal (1965). Could it be that part of the reason for the effectiveness of PPBS in the Defense Department as opposed to elsewhere is the very clear distinction made about who sets policy on foreign and military issues and who carries them out? From a text cited by Lynn (2015, p. 376). Yates (1977). The Civil Service: Report of the Committee 1966–68 (1968) Cmnd 3638, London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office. Fulton Report (undated).

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5. Public action languages seen from elsewhere: from the Treaty of Rome and public administration reform to the arrival of public policies in Brazil PUBLIC POLICY ON THE MOVE: CONCEPTUALLY Advancing through each chapter it has been possible to see various threads that woven in different ways would lead to and support different public action languages. Some of these are technical and some more governmental, others very much belong to publics themselves in action. At times they interweave, at times they go their own way and at times they enter into conflict. This interweaving will continue in the next two chapters with, first, more attention to government in action and then in the next chapter to the people(s) in action. From the side of governing, it has been possible to see times when administrative positions were described as non-policy-determining, which implies that there would also be others that were policy-determining; policy therefore was something that was determined and different to administration. Policy makers, a later arrival, were involved in policy making and, later, policy formation. Policies were also sometimes adopted and sometimes carried out or executed, they also could be formed and executed in a continuous manner. Policy, as an ‘in general’ approach to international or foreign, internal, domestic or social affairs, became policy for specific areas and themes, and policy became policies, and policies became public policies. Policy advisors also started to appear, but to advise on policy it is necessary to say more than just ‘that’s a good idea’; advice requires substance. Analysis is a more academic word and the policy analysts were seen as somewhat independent, more scientific and able to provide substantive advice.1 Later, this was expanded to critical analysis as part of a branch of ‘critical policy studies’, but already in the 1940s there were doubts about the various attempts to separate stages, or responsibilities. 115

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Evaluation was a new presence, playing a big part in terms of practical influence, and financial incentives and planning were always around somewhere. But planners planned and the basic vocabulary stopped there. Implementation is usually treated in the literature as a ‘natural progression’ and much is made of landmark studies such as that of Pressman and Wildavsky (1973). But, considering the different policy narratives that have appeared so far, what would implementation have meant to each of them? How are principles, positions and determinations implemented? Part of the answer is in the preface of the first edition of Pressman and Wildavsky and to the discussion of the different versions of policy that were around at that time. Here are the key paragraphs: In everyday discourse, we use policy (when referring to decisions) in several strikingly different ways. Sometimes policy means a statement of intention: Our policy is to increase employment among minorities. Policy here is treated as a broad statement of goals and objectives. Nothing is said about what might be done or whether anything has been or will be done to accomplish that purpose. Other times we speak of policy as if it were equivalent to actual behaviour: Our policy is to hire minorities, meaning that we actually do hire them. Policy in this sense signifies the goal and its achievement. Both these meanings of policy rule out the possibility of studying implementation. When policy remains a disembodied objective, without specifying actors or the actions in which they must engage to achieve the desired result, there is no implementation to study. When the statement of the objective includes its attainment, implementation is unnecessary. We can work neither with a definition of policy that excludes any implementation nor one that includes all implementation. There must be a starting point. If no action is begun, implementation cannot take place. There must also be an end point. Implementation cannot succeed or fail without a goal against which to judge it. (1973, p.xxi)

Pressman and Wildavsky also commented that, at that time, implementation was much discussed but rarely studied; but this could have been for a different reason. ‘Honesty is the best policy’ is something that can be followed or not followed, and certainly ‘We are long term allies of Portugal’2 is designed to avoid the need to take action. Principles aren’t implemented but they influence action when they are followed as normative injunctions (moral or value positions rather than laws). To take, for example, the already mentioned Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union: a sustainable food supply at affordable prices with a fair standard of living for farmers. The result will be regulations, directives, decisions and a host of other forms of action trying to balance the implicit equations involved. Here policy is not implemented, it is followed.

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That such a variety of ways of using policy can be found is not in itself a problem; nor is it a signal to search for a new theory. On the contrary, it is to recognize that there are many different discussions happening, different versions of ideas, terms and concepts in circulation and lots of action taking place. The Pressman and Wildavsky text could lead the reader in the direction of thinking that there are different versions of policy in circulation, all of which are valid, because they are circulating and being used and understood, and all have implications for action, which may not imply implementation. But it could also lead the reader in the direction of thinking that policy is only that which can be implemented and, therefore, the practical definition of policy goes backwards from the definition of implementation. In a later edition of the book (1979), Majone and Wildavsky will rework these ideas and recognize the dangers of creating a what-comesfirst type of argument. They propose that ‘implementation begins neither with words nor deeds, but with multiple dispositions to act or treat certain situations in certain ways’ (p.169). Evaluation studies, also around at the time, were moving on from results to look both forwards at the impacts of the results and backwards to the processes that produced the results and were also on their way to becoming an applied scientific profession. By the preface to the third edition of the book, implementation and evaluation will be seen as the ‘opposite sides of the same coin’. While implementation seems to have caught on fairly quickly in the USA this was not the case in the UK. Barrett and Fudge in their 1981 collection of essays on the implementation of public policy, also seen as a key reference, would note that ‘much of the existing published material on implementation is North American. Given the growing interest in Britain from academics, practitioners and students, we have aimed to contribute a body of British material to the debate’ (p.ix). They would take a different line from Pressman and Wildavsky by suggesting from the beginning that implementation was translation – a very different social process and one that does not require a specific version of policy. Indeed, it works with all of them. This book is about the relationship between public policy and action, the processes at work within and between agencies involved in making and implementing public policy and the factors affecting those processes. As a working approximation we suggest that the term ‘public policy’ may be defined as the implicit or explicit intentions of government and the expression of those intentions entailing specific patterns of activity or inaction by government agencies. Public policy provides the framework within which agencies of government operate to control, regulate or promote certain facets

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of society in the interests of national defence, law and order, economic and financial management, social welfare and the like. In recent years, professional and academic concern with problems of public policy implementation – translation of policy into practice – has increased, and this concern relates to wider anxieties about the effectiveness of public policy and government in general. At one level, concern with effectiveness forms part of wider ideological debates about the role of the state in society and about the ‘governability’ of an increasingly complex industrial society, in which, it is argued, interventions are likely to have unforeseen or counterintentional results. (p.v)

For Barrett and Fudge, policy itself can be expressed in a party manifesto, a formal decision or legal resolution, government circulars, administrative procedures and rules, amongst others, and, as they say, for executive officers involved in local service delivery ‘administrative procedures may well appear to be policy in so far as they comprise the framework governing the scope for action. On this basis, implementation is the process of successive refinement and translation of policy into specific procedures and tasks directed at putting policy intentions into effect’ (Barrett and Fudge, 1981, p. 11). In this sense, they argue, it becomes important to: … investigate what is happening to policy as it is successively refined and translated. How far do detailed frameworks for action – legislative, administrative, procedural – reflect or relate to original intentions; that is, what exactly is being implemented? If what is being implemented is different from the original policy intention, is this ‘good’, for example, demonstrating that policy was flexible enough to be tailored to local circumstances, or ‘bad’ in that the original policy goals have been distorted in the process? (pp.11–12)

As policy began to spread in the UK and other parts of Europe, there was a tendency towards the more easygoing definition of policy as seen in the Barrett and Fudge citations3 and which recalls the 1940s’ discussion of rights: it works and is useful provided that nobody asks what it is (see Chapter 6). Titmuss, who founded the discipline of Social Administration at the London School of Economics, would say: For our purposes the word ‘policy’ can be taken to refer to the principles that govern actions directed towards given ends. The concept denotes action about means as well as ends and it, therefore, implies change: changing situations, systems, practices, behaviour. And here we should note that the concept of policy is only meaningful if we (society, a group or an organization) believe we can affect change in some form or other. We do not have policies about the weather because, as yet we are powerless to do anything about the weather. But we do have policies (or we can have policies) about illegitimate

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children because we think we have some power to affect their lives – for better or worse depending on whether you are the policy-maker or the illegitimate child. The word ‘policy’ is used here in an action-oriented and problem-oriented sense. The collective ‘we’ is used to refer to the actions of government in expressing the ‘general will’ of the people – whether of Britain, Nigeria or China. The meaning and validity of a concept of the ‘general will’ is, of course hotly debated. (Titmuss, 1974, pp. 23–24)

At a similar period in time, also in the UK, Friend would note that despite the tacit assumption that somehow public policy making is broad, it is possible to make a distinction: I would like to suggest that a decision is essentially an act which passes into history once carried out, while a policy is essentially a stance which, once articulated, contributes to the context within which a succession of future decisions will be made. The act of declaring such a stance through some formal channel can then be properly described as the taking of a ‘policy decision’ – though this is not to imply that the ‘making of policy’ can be considered purely and simply as the accretion of a series of policy decisions of this kind. (1977b, p. 40)

Policy is clearly polysemic and as Wilson (2006), a former senior member of the UK civil service and an academic, would say: ‘The word “policy” is imprecise and is usually used loosely by those who make it.’ In his chapter on policy analysis and policy advice in the Oxford Handbook of Public Policy he proposes that: ‘policy means the actions, objectives, and pronouncements of governments on particular matters, the steps they take (or fail to take) to implement them, and the explanations they give for what happens (or does not happen)’ (p.154). Bovens et al. in the same volume, will say: When public policies are adopted and programs implemented, the politics of policy making do not come to an end (…) they merely move from the main stage, where political choices about policies are made, to the less visible arenas of policy implementation, populated by (networks of) bureaucratic and non-governmental actors who are involved in transforming the words of policy documents into purposeful action. (2006, p. 320)

Here it is worth remembering the dictum that rules are made to be broken, laws to be disobeyed; perhaps a continuation might read ‘and policies to be ignored’. However, even with these different views, some forcing a harder and precise definition, others a softer approach, some implementing and others translating and transforming, plus the various texts in public administration that were already embracing public policy

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(for example, Frederickson and Wise, 1977), it seems fair to say that by the late 1970s and early 1980s, public policy and public policy analysis were making their presence felt in the USA and also in the UK. In 1978, a Sloan Foundation-sponsored conference in the USA to discuss public policy and management curriculums at universities would lead 15 policy schools and research institutes in May 1979 to create the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. Remembering the earlier discussion of Lasswell’s text, once something has become the focus of analysis and management it starts to become very real and material. After all nobody analyses, and much less manages, things that don’t exist. But, it might be asked: what is it that exists? Something very different or something that is still very much linked to the older expression of principles and positions; or both and many others? Important here is not the theoretical question of what is more correct or adequate or logically valid, but the acceptance that these are versions that are circulating and are very much in use in a mix and match way, as this example from the discussion of legal deposit legislation4 makes clear. Legal deposit legislation serves a clear national policy interest by ensuring the acquisition; the recording, the preservation and the availability of a nation’s published heritage. Such a national collection is undoubtedly one of the major components of a country’s cultural policy and should also be considered as the foundation of a national policy of expression and access to information. (Lariviere, 2000, pp. 4–5)

THE WIDER DRIFT TO POLICY If there were clear signs that a policy field, later referred to as policy studies or policy analysis with or without the addition of public, was becoming consolidated at a similar period of time in the UK and the USA – with all the differences and nuances of specific political, governmental and academic contexts – that was not necessarily the case elsewhere. Comments were made in the initial chapter about the arrival of policy – not the consolidation – in France and Spain in the 1980s, and in the Netherlands a bit earlier, and it would take until the end of the 1990s to start to appear in places like Brazil. In the case of France, Halpern et al. (2018) suggest that the earlier translation of Laswell’s policy as ‘la politique’ possibly didn’t help as the term can be used to mean policy, politics and polity. It was only when policy studies as a discipline emerged during the 1980s that the term was translated as ‘politiques publiques’. The same would happen in Latin America more than ten years later. Curiosity grows when this is compared with other

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aspects of public administration theory and its associated technologies, which seem to have moved around much more quickly. Many of the same European countries which would take their time over public policies were actively working together in the European Economic Union of the mid-1980s,5 with a founding treaty that made very good use of the earlier notion of policy as a position. At the beginning of the Treaty of Rome (1957), the ‘King of the Belgians, the Queen of the Netherlands, the Grand Duchess of Luxembourg and the Presidents of the Federal Republic of Germany and of the French and Italian Republics, state their desire to contribute, by means of a common commercial policy, to the progressive abolitions of restrictions on international trade’. They also state that they have decided to create a European Economic Community and ‘to this end have designated as their Plenipotentiaries …’.6 The Treaty, which also establishes the European Economic Community (EEC) lists amongst its principal concerns (article 3), the adoption of a common policy in the sphere of agriculture, a common policy in the sphere of transport and the application of procedures by which the economic policies of member states can be coordinated and the disequilibria in their balance of payments remedied. Within a few years the common policy in the sphere of agriculture had become one of the most important areas of action in a Europe of many family farmers and smallholdings: the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Here is the CAP today, a set of principles to guide action: Farmers provide a stable food supply, produced in a sustainable way at affordable prices for more than 500 million Europeans. The European Union’s farm policy ensures a decent standard of living for farmers, at the same time as setting requirements for animal health and welfare, environmental protection and food safety. Sustainable rural development completes the picture of the EU’s common agricultural policy (CAP).7

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)8 offers another site from which to follow some aspects of what is probably better called a drift to policy; certainly not a sea change, paradigm shift or even a transition to use more academic expressions. However, the metaphor of drifting helps as it allows the recognition of all the other bits and pieces of hard and soft technologies around, as well as the different variants on policy that have already appeared. In 1967, UNESCO held a round-table meeting in Monaco to discuss the idea of cultural policy, given that an increasing number of governments had set up departments of cultural affairs, but in very different ways, and that there were many different ideas from one country to the

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other of what actions public authorities should take. This is policy in use in the same way as the earlier social policy, economic policy or the CAP, as this extract from the final report shows: This publication is the first in the Studies and Documents on Cultural Policies series, published as part of the programme adopted by the Unesco General Conference at its fifteenth session for the study of cultural policies. In this context, ‘cultural policy’ is taken to mean a body of operational principles, administrative and budgetary practices and procedures which provide a basis for cultural action by the State. Obviously, there cannot be one cultural policy suited to all countries; each Member State determines its own cultural policy according to the cultural values, aims and choices it sets itself. (UNESCO, 1969, p.iii)

It would take some 20 years to complete the set of individual reports by member countries about their cultural policies and, indeed, there was much questioning by leading cultural activists as to whether governments should get involved in culture, other than in a generally supportive manner. Was government’s heavy hand of regulation the most appropriate way to deal with cultural expressions? Government regulation has come up several times in the preceding chapters and the UNESCO example is doubly helpful. It points to a sense of policy being used at this time (policy as principle) but also adds an addendum to the question posed by Dewey: what about those problems that are public, but that the public doesn’t want governments to get involved in solving? The apparent drift towards the idea that policy is serious, central to government and needs to be studied (despite the various versions of what this is) seems very natural until a few questions are raised. When policy was a stance or principle, the answer to ‘what is your policy on X’ can be answered either as ‘ABC’ or ‘there isn’t one’. In the latter case, there is no need to feel guilty for the answer can be that it is not a public concern, or not one that it is necessary to have a position on, nor one where the public wants the government to get involved. It is very doubtful that there was much of a position on the Antarctic, apart from the fact that it was very cold, until expeditions started to feel their way around the area at the turn of the early twentieth century. But when foreign policy moves to domestic and then social policy, from social policy to different areas like educational policy and then policies and, later, environmental policies, it becomes difficult to disagree when it is said that policy is what governments do or don’t do. If any of the Southern Hemisphere countries don’t have a formal policy on the Antarctic then the lack of a policy will become a policy. For now, who is discussing policy is the observer and not the observed; policy becomes an

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analytical fact and is what policy analysts do. Titmuss’ 1974 position on the weather, for example, would now be disputed by those who talk about climate change. Dryzek (2006) in his discussion of critical policy analysis will point to the different traditions of critique and their implications for analysis, yet he too will also assume that it can all be called policy. Ryle (1949), when introducing the idea of a categorymistake in his critique of the existence of mind, uses the example of a visitor to Oxford who when shown around the different buildings (colleges, libraries, playing fields and such) asks: but where is the ‘university’? Where, then, is the ‘policy’ and how did it become so polysemic? Perhaps one of the answers, amongst many others, is that it was an elastic and easygoing expression that made a great deal of sense to many people in different conversations in which they all assumed they understood each other – with enough connection to keep it going until, like ‘university’, it became a social and very powerful institution. There is no need to define it, because those who use it know what it is. But, as with the examples of ‘university’ or ‘mind’, this is a social dynamic that is not unique to policy itself. For this reason and also to explore other possible lines of discussion about these curious social processes through which meanings circulate, it is helpful to move sideways to another field that has captured the attention of public affairs scholars of various disciplines in recent years as well as many generations of practitioners.

IMPROVING GOVERNMENTS THROUGH REFORM In their ten-nation study of public management reform, Pollitt and Bouckaert (2000) commented that in the period after 1980 a ‘pandemic of public management reforms’ moved through the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Some of these became associated with the more hardline expression of New Public Management and others were moving in other directions, but together they would help consolidate the idea of public management as somehow distinct from public administration and requiring significant changes in organizational patterns and behaviours. These include making savings (economies), in public expenditure, improving the quality of public services, making the operation of government more efficient and increasing the chances that the policies which are chosen and implemented will be effective. (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2000, p. 6) As a first approximation we could say that public management reform consists of deliberate changes to the structures and processes of public sector

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organizations with the objective of getting them (in some sense) to run better. (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2000, p. 8)

Reform, however, is not something that just happens at one moment. Here they distinguish between trends (drifts with vague patterns that can be interpreted) and trajectories: intentional patterns, routes that people are trying to take. These, they grouped under finance (budgets, accounts and audits), personnel (recruitment, posting, remuneration, security of employment etc.), organization (specialization, coordination, scale), (de)centralization and performance measurement systems. In each of these there are many different schools of thought which may share a broader field, such as financial management reform, or even just budgets, but do so in a variety of ways. They found that, more often than not, reform in practice was far more incremental or ‘muddling through’ to use the Lindblom (1959) expression. In these spaces of adjustment, they would find that many other more local changes would take place, led by public servants themselves rather than by specialists. Such ‘improvements’ may occasionally be self-serving but often they are substantially other-directed, and result in gains in productivity, service quality, transparency, fairness, or some other important value. If close-up scrutiny of many ‘great operations’ tends to reveal incremental rather than strategic decision-processes, it also reveals endless examples of beneficial opportunism and pragmatic reform by public servants at all levels. (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2000, p. 191)

In contrast to these local value agendas for trying to get things better, they pointed to the well-articulated and apparently coherent versions of reform circulating in an increasingly internationalized setting. These ‘communities of discourse’, as they described them, can very easily disconnect from the practicalities of the everyday and create an almost independent vocabulary, heavily based on values of progress. ‘Within this managerialist thought-world there is only limited consciousness of the flimsiness of many of the current principles of good public management. A more historically-informed awareness would show how such “principles” or “proverbs” come and go over time’(p.190). The wave of public management reforms was an incentive for many comparative studies. The various experiences offered a middle ground for looking more closely at what came to be called the machinery of government, as well as the various functional areas that were key to the continuity of public affairs. As the analyses moved from one country to another it would not be uncommon to find that there were many similar bits and pieces, ideas, soft and hard technologies and ways of organizing,

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but that in each country these followed specific paths. In their preliminary analysis of the characteristics of the different governments studied, Pollitt and Bouckaert (2000) refer amongst other characteristics to the diversity of forms of what they term policy advice; that is, where advice comes from. In their ten countries, there are five (Canada, Finland, France, Germany, New Zealand) where this is predominately from inside the civil service itself, two (Australia and the UK) where this was also the case up until the 1980s after which others began to be involved. The remaining three have a broader mix: civil servants, academics and other experts in the Netherlands; academic experts and trade unions in more corporatist roles in Sweden; and in the USA, the policy advice arena is described as very diverse with political appointees, corporations, think tanks and consultants. A further part of the mix refers to the backgrounds of the civil servants and public administrators themselves. Germany, France, Finland in part, and Sweden until recently, tend to draw heavily on people with a background in public law, others prefer non-specialist generalists. Halpern et al. (2018), in their text on France, point to the difference in the ways in which studies for policy (including analyses and recommendations) and studies of policy processes have usually taken place. The first is largely seen as a responsibility of an elite corps of highly trained civil servants taught in schools such as the National School of Administration (ENA) by largely former students and few independent academics; the second – research centred and seen as independent of government – are the policy studies of the academic community. Only rarely are researchers involved in commissioned studies or consulted on specific policy issues – very different to the flourishing practices of policy analysis that link governments and bureaus to think tanks and academics in the USA (Lynn, 1999). Given such a variety of relationships and orientations, it is perhaps indeed not surprising that pinning down policy, as opposed to discussing approaches to budgets, has become an increasingly difficult task, nor that different countries have their own versions. A further distinction that is often commented on, and which is in part influenced by different legal frameworks, is between those countries for which the concept of ‘state’ is a central integrating concept and force within society, and those for which the state is rarely used as an expression and, instead, the central concept is that of government. Laws are present in both, but in countries such as Australia, New Zealand and the UK, legal training will not be part of public service training and civil servants tend to see themselves as working for public sector organizations rather than having a mission in relation to the state (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2000). The case of the USA is different again. Stillman

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(1997), who studied the relationship between public administration and the state, argues that whereas in different ways and with different histories, continental Europeans deduce public administration out of a sense of state, in the USA the reverse is the case and state is induced from public administration. Here, could the continued discussion of the relationship between public administration and government – in which the state is a result of practices (as Waldo had pointed out (1948)) – also have something to do with the importance of policy as a mediating concept?

FROM CENTRAL BANKS TO ADMINISTRATIVE REFORM IN LATIN AMERICA Different from its very influential neighbour to the north in which, for most residents, state refers to a middle tier of government such as the State of Texas, the national state in Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Latin America is very central, even in the federalist countries (Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela). Political regimes tend, almost without exception, to be executive led with a strong presidential role. In the very early nineteenth century, when most of the countries gained some form of independence, there were two influential and innovative approaches to organizing affairs on the known international scene: the US Constitution and the French Civil Code. Both would play a major role in shaping affairs and in approaching later reforms. In Spanish Latin America, universities were already present in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (initially as theological colleges), Brazil had law and medical schools and there were many ties with France and later the USA. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that the discussion of public administration and how to go about being more efficient and, later, effective, has a long history. As Caiden, a constant observer of public administration in the region, commented in 1991: The most important fact about Latin America over the past four decades has been the stubbornness with which it has pursued administrative reform, despite so many failures and disappointments. Possibly nowhere else in the world have so many governments announced bold, imaginative reform plans to achieve so little in practice. (p.262)

In the 1920s, well before Bretton Woods and the multinational financial community, financial loans to countries were a very individual affair and guarantees were important, not just of repayment but of financial competence. In this setting, Edwin Walter Kemmerer, a US economist, university professor and specialist in international finance, made several

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trips to Latin American countries, as well as within Europe and to the Philippines, to argue in favour of independent central banks, currency reform and balanced budgets (Drake, 1989). Using the US General Accounting Office as a model, the missions of the ‘money doctor’, as he was called, left results that can still be seen in a number of countries (solid-looking buildings with the copper-plated names of the original central banks). With the central banks and the knowledge and skills of financial administration and budget control would also arrive a new cohort of professionals, far more used to quantitative methods and practices than their legal colleagues, who had a different administrative tradition. Documental studies suggest that there was a fairly constant flow of discussion amongst administrative elites of different countries about the new ideas in administration, even though these would be interpreted in Latin America within a legal framework influenced by French and German law and containing a theme that was not present in common law: administrative law (Spink, 1999, 2001). When Gullick’s POSDCORB (planning, organizing, staffing, directing, coordination, reporting and budget) along with efficiency and organization and methods arrived on the scene of public administration in the Northern Hemisphere, they were quickly picked up also in Latin America. By the 1940s there were many Organization and Methods Offices located either within the judiciary (seen as subordinate to administrative law) or within the budget and finance offices (where they were more successful). The problem, as Wahrlich later commented (1979), was that POSDCORB was taken up as a creed for administrative organization, and even today many formal legal instruments specifying the functions of senior role holders in public organizations use these or very similar terms. In the same way that training and, later, staff development became a growing theme in the north so, along with actions initiated by President Truman in 1949 that continued up to Kennedy, came support for the development of public administration schools. In a similar way, staff colleges on the UK model were being set up in Africa, and the new United Nations was discussing the importance of training for the, equally newly termed, developing world. National planning was also very much on the table, especially so in Latin America whose diplomats had managed, despite US counter-pressure, to reach agreement on a United Nations planning agency for the region. The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), or ‘CEPAL’ as it is widely known, soon became a reference for its progressive approach to national development planning and for a more independent Latin America (Iglesias, 1992). Planning for development required an effective civil

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service and programme budgeting was also adopted in the 1960s, following suggestions from the USA in the 1961 Alliance for Progress. While there was progress in many areas, personnel administration was often the Achilles heel. Many international advisors and specialists, as also the newer generations of Latin American specialists who were moving around the development community, were influenced by the UK model of a permanent career civil service and the clear separation of politics from administration. (Curiously, despite the legal links to France and Germany, the idea of a guiding elite trained within highly specialized schools was not to prove popular until much later on and still remains only partial today.) Neither approach was succesful. Much of Latin American experience went in a different direction and still does, with many hundreds of managerial posts being changed with each change in government. More important than the differences is to note that each new approach to efficient or effective government and administration did not replace the previous approaches. They were added on: budgeting led to organization and methods, which led to staff training, planning and new schools and institutions for technical advice. Eventually, around the 1960s, these threads began to get pulled together, internationally, under a new term: administrative reform (echoing discussions elsewhere about efficient government). This is part of the summary report from a UN seminar on major administrative reforms in developing countries held in the UK in 1971: Programs of major administrative reform are frequently essential to set up the necessary administrative capabilities for economic and social development and for carrying out government functions in general (…) major administrative reforms are defined as specially designed efforts to induce fundamental changes in public administration systems through system-wide reforms or at least through measures for improvement of one or more of its key elements, such as administrative structures, personnel and processes. (UN, 1971/1973)

When the post-1950s developmental period, often with populist governments, started to break down, the consequences for many Latin American countries was what O’Donnell (1978) termed bureaucratic authoritarianism and Calvert and Calvert (1992) as military developmentalism. Reform discussion would continue, the Latin American Centre for Development Administration (CLAD) was set up in 1972 and held its first major open meeting at which experiences were presented in 1979 in Mexico. In a previous study (Spink, 1999, 2001), the author was able to follow many of these events through reports and documents. To repeat a theme already mentioned in relation to public management reforms in

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OECD countries, in practice – and despite attempts to pull the different topics together as major articulated trajectories – the results, even in times of hardline rule, were are at best incremental. At the United Nations 1981 Bangkok Conference on Enhancing Capabilities for Administrative Reform in Developing Countries, the final report would talk about a considerable variation in what is meant by administrative reform and would note that there is: ‘a marked absence of any clear-cut criteria to distinguish administrative reform from other activities such as administrative improvement, administrative change and administrative modernization’ (UN, 1983, p. 4). In his 1991 review of administrative reform in various parts of the world, Caiden listed 16 major areas that could be found associated with this title. These were: scope and activities of the administrative state; national planning, agenda setting, performance indicators; organization and structure of the machinery of government; rule of law – constitutions, accountability, right to inform; public policy making; programme execution – professional delivery; public budgeting and financial administration; public employment, practices and conditions; public regulation, safeguards and practices; preservation and maintenance of public capital; general services – consistency, performance, standardization; public enterprises – impact on economy and return on investment; public management practices – organization and methods, de-bureaucratization, efficiency, quality; public ethics – honesty, professionalism, anticorruption; public participation – voluntary actions, complaint handling; institutionalization of reform – research and development, training, agencies and schools. The list is extensive and covers most themes and activities that can be thought of when discussing administrative actions in the broader sense. The question then follows that if they can be identified in fairly practical ways – and if action seems to be again incremental or at the most in relatively clear focused programs – why insist on putting them together as a major articulated strategy? Could this be overloading the limits of Pressman and Wildavsky’s criteria for implementation, or the possibilities of approaches to evaluation? A first observation about the list of topics is the presence of public policy making as part of a community of ideas on improvement. A second is that to those involved in each of the other 15 areas, their specific set of sub-topics, techniques and theories is as central to them as public policy making may be to those for which it is a key concern. A third point that emerges when examining the breadth of these technical and administrative areas is how some go on to produce further areas of performative discussion when types of activity cross over with different areas of public concern. Planning may be one line of

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professional activity and health will certainly be an area where planners can be found; but what happens when planners who work in health become ‘health planners’? Are the ideas and approaches of those who work with efficiency and quality independent of the field in which they work, or will this vary from field to field? Are public administrators and managers ‘social service’ managers before they are managers, or vice versa? Are environmental services staff regulators or environmentalists? What happens when these cross over with the different versions of the public that can be found in different approaches to public administration, such as Frederickson’s (1991) interest groups, consumers, voters, clients, citizens, or McLaughlin’s (2009) analysis of the subtle and not so subtle changes in the labels that perform social work relationships: patients, clients, customers, consumers, service users, experts by experience or whatever will be next to emerge. How do Lipsky’s (1980) under-pressure street-level workers make performative sense of trying to get things done with so many suggestions for improvement around them? Evidence that certain themes, topics and terms are hard to pin down is not in itself problematic. It becomes more difficult when the number of different ways of looking at and performing the activities that try to pin down possibilities of action increase, and it is even more problematic when these are not taken into consideration. Bakhtin’s alert to ‘never minimise the extreme heterogeneity of discursive genres and the consequent difficulty to define the general nature of statements’ (1979/2016, p. 15) applies not only to the difference between the socio-political, the scientific and the literary but also within each. Between the national languages and the intensity of everyday talk lies an intermediary territory where it is possible to find civil servants, technical professionals, politicians, advisors, analysts and, as will be discussed in the next chapter, lots of different social and thematic movements and forms of citizen action. All recognize each other in talk, whether they get on or not.

THE CONSENSUS OF WASHINGTON AND THE RISE OF STATE REFORM In the early 1980s, large parts of Latin America had been going through considerable financial crisis and needed support with debt payments. Others required support to break inflation cycles and the sources of all these funds were in international organizations located in Washington DC (especially the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank) as well as the US Government itself. The various conversations, reports, documents and debates about what to do, and the way support was

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provided, resulted in a set of programmatic orientations that Williamson in 1989 described as the Washington Consensus (Williamson, 1990). Later, in the 1990s, with many of the same Latin American countries either consolidating or moving towards democratic regimes, a different type of consensus would emerge (although it was not referred to as such) around a successor concept to administrative reform: state reform. State reform would draw on many of the ideas that were being tried out in the countries that Pollitt and Bouckaert (2000) had studied, but it would seek to articulate this within a general approach of rethinking the state; how government could or should be. This is how Williamson introduced the first consensus: No statement about how to deal with debt crisis in Latin America would be complete without a call for the debtors to fulfil their part of the proposed bargain by “setting their houses in order”, “undertaking policy reforms”, or “submitting to strong conditionality”. The question posed in this paper is what such phrases mean, and especially what they are generally interpreted as meaning in Washington. Thus the paper aims to set out what would be regarded in Washington as constituting a desirable set of economic policy reforms. An important purpose in doing this is to establish a baseline against which to measure the extent to which various countries have implemented the reforms being urged on them. (…) The Washington of this paper is both the political Washington of Congress and senior members of the administration and the technocratic Washington of the international financial institutions, the economic agencies of the US government, the Federal reserve board and think tanks. (Williamson, 1990/2002)

The rigour of the consensus on economic policies, plus the emergence of conditionalities, had a marked impact on the social arenas of many Latin American countries, for spending cuts nearly always aggravate socioeconomic differences and have a negative impact on poverty reduction. Hardline regimes were also ending with democratic transitions which would bring new discussions on rights and eventually lead to a broadening of the use of policy beyond the diplomatic and economic arenas. It would not, therefore, be long before the rigour of the Washington Consensus began to lose force, especially because of the growing backlash against what became termed neo-liberal economic policies. In its place came another set of terms that, while not ignoring fiscal responsibility and the market, were to return the developmental agenda to a more comfortable middle ground between neo-liberalism on the one hand and state socialism on the other. Amongst the many words in use, three became increasingly present in the annual reports and publications of the international agencies in the

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1990s: institutions, civil society and social capital. Supported by the new institutional economics of North (1990), they in turn acquired a degree of rhetorical certainty; yet another consensus. This suggested that institutions matter; that a strong civil society is the key to strengthening the institutions of democracy, that civil society, in partnership with the state, has a key role in guaranteeing effective public service delivery; and that increasing social capital is the way to strengthen civil society. The value orientation is clear in reports from the United Nations agencies, from the World Bank and from a host of International NGOs. When used at the broader societal level at which many programme officers of aid agencies operate, or in the language of evaluation reports that sweep up entire populations in broad descriptors of social capital, such terms have a shadowy certainty; they are neither as precise as class nor are they as vague as society. The overall line of argumentation may be appealing to some, but what are social capital and civil society in daily life in many places in Latin America, especially in the conflict-ridden, local and mid-range horizons in which most local governments, community groupings and social movements work? At this point it could be asked – why worry? If the successive production of new ideas about ‘good for government’ is a fairly perennial process, whose waves have washed over Latin America at least since the Kemmerer missions, why be concerned about yet another. One response would certainly be: only because it is necessary to recognize that this happens and to be prepared to discuss the effective contribution of each proposal. Another line of argument would move to the critical debate on development itself, highly important but outside the scope of this book. A third, more relevant and within the scope of the book, is to note the subtle changes in the ways in which different ideas, technical proposals and articulating concepts are put together. Whereas in the 1920s and 1930s some governments would be concerned with central banks and later organization and methods specialists, others would not. Equally, the early institution-building approaches of the post-war period, especially in the staff training field, would show many local variants. Administrative reform had some adepts in the 1960s, but certainly not all of the countries that were to get together under the CLAD banner in the 1970s were to go down that line. By the 1990s the pattern was changing. Administrative reform had become state reform and all Latin American countries reported important activities under this label on the 1997/1998 CLAD database of reform activities. The move from public administration to state is a significant one, for it is a movement from organizational effectiveness and the improvement of service provision in different ways and for different

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reasons and arguments, to the questioning of the institutional architecture of the state and the introduction into the 1990s development agenda of yet another articulating proposal: governance (Sundaram and Chowdhury, 2012). Here is an example from the OECD: The challenge for governance at the end of the 20th century is one of institutional renewal. Setting appropriate frameworks for both public and private sector activity under conditions of increasing global interdependence, uncertainty and accelerating change is a major challenge. It requires a reappraisal of the rationale for government intervention and a re-examination of the cost-effectiveness of public sector institutions, their programs and regulatory activities. Governments must strive to do things better, with fewer resources, and above all differently. Outdated institutions and practices need to be redesigned or replaced with ones that better match the realities and demands of dynamic market economies with the objectives and responsibilities of democratic systems. If the public sector is to remain responsive to the needs of those it serves, governments must foster the development of organizations that perpetually adapt and reshape themselves to meet changing client needs, and that develop new ways to cope with the changing world. Government must be willing and able to learn. (OECD, 1995, p. 7)

CLAD itself was to argue in its own conclusive document, A New Public Management for Latin America (1998), that there was now a clear trend to public sector reforms. The many reforms reported at that time on the CLAD database match those also noted by Caiden (1991) and Pollitt and Bouckaert (2000). Of 23 areas of reform mentioned by 17 countries, no country reported less than five and the great majority reported 11 or more areas of reform (Spink et al., 2001). Of these the most frequent were: institutional restructuration and development; political and administrative decentralization; restructuring of public sector enterprises and public services; financial reform; social security reforms; constitutional reforms; electoral reforms; judicial reforms; commercial reforms; social programme reforms; social sector reforms; reform and simplification of administrative procedures, amongst others. Interesting also is that only one country reported on an integrated programme of public sector reform and modernization. The importance of the social sector reforms was, in many cases, a consequence of the earlier budget crises and structural adjustment economic policies, but it was also a sign of the recognition by newly elected social democratic governments of new social responsibilities. Amongst the more active countries reporting was Brazil in tenth place with some 11 categories of activities. It is to Brazil that the analysis now turns to look at the arrival, within these many different themes, of the notion of policy.

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POLICY COMES TO BRAZIL Brazil is neither a special case, nor is it an example of many. Following the various partial conclusions of the chapter it is, as in other countries, a bit of both. Many of the same bits and pieces of terms, ideas, actions, soft and hard technologies can be found, but they appear within specific stories. Using Brazil serves also to call attention to the need for other accounts from other countries, which may show similar or dissimilar results. In Brazil, policy was on its way up the chain of visibility for a variety of reasons, but again lots of very important developments and actions were done without policy; yet policy suddenly became important. There are various places from which to start the hunt for the use of public policy in practice and, as in all forms of documental research, a lot depends on availability and a dose of serendipity. To begin with, a number of the principal Brazilian newspapers have recently digitalized their archives in open access form. The Brazilian press has played a very important independent role in societal affairs, as elsewhere in Latin America; journalists talk to academics, specialists in research centres, political activists, politicians and to each other. The press is sensitive to the fluctuations in the spoken word and provides a very good source in which to look for an overview. The second place, also a part of these conversations, is the databanks of dissertations and theses held by the Ministry of Education’s postgraduate agency (CAPES)9 in which there is a consistent register of all masters and doctoral dissertations along with their titles and keywords. The third place is the digital archives of the principal – and for much of the time, only – academic journal in the field of public administration and government, produced by the widely recognized and again highly independent Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV). FGV is itself a product of the 1940s and 1950s institutional building initiatives in the region in the areas of teaching, training and research, with its headquarters in Rio de Janeiro, the former capital, and undergraduate and graduate schools in Rio and São Paulo. Some more specific examples and cases will be used to complement this broader sweep, ending with the internationally important initiatives in the area of HIV/AIDS. The search for the use of public policy or policies (politica(s) publica(s)) in the electronic archives of the Folha de S.Paulo, the O Estado de S. Paulo and the Rio de Janeiro-based O Globo, together representing the solider part of the press spectrum, showed 13 entries for all daily editions of the three newspapers from 1960–1969 followed by

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79 for the following decade. In 1980–1989 this rose to 392, followed by 2,068 between 1990 and 1999. For the 2000–2009 decade, the number of mentions was already at 11,086. Thus, over 90 per cent of all mentions were to be found in the two decades from 1990 to 2009, with between 75–85 per cent in the second of these (cross-checks were made for nearly all the mentions so as to avoid false positives). Looking at the same period through the archives of masters and doctoral reports maintained by CAPES provides evidence from a wide range of disciplines as the database refers to all postgraduate programmes in all fields. Using as a search item the expression public policy (politica publica) in the title, summary or as key words, and without any restriction of academic discipline, it was possible to identify 611 masters dissertations and 126 doctoral theses approved between 1990 and 1999. In the following decade (2000–2009) the numbers had increased nearly tenfold to 5,298 masters dissertations and 1,266 doctoral theses. Masters and doctoral dissertations and theses are an interesting indicator of shifts in ideas, for they are a highly interactional product. They need a subject matter, theory, cases and data, but also a supervisor. They have to be written in and accepted in disciplinary languages and, further, are examined by a panel in a process that is open to the public. During this period there was some growth in postgraduate programmes, not enough to explain the growth in output, but here again the growth of programmes was part of the same story, a gradual acceptance of public policy as a valid course title. Confirming policy’s arrival, a 2011 bibliographic review showed that 65 per cent of all Brazilian journal articles with public policy in the key words were published between 2006–2010 (Marques and de Faria, 2013). The Brazilian public administration journal Revista de Administração Pública was founded in 1967 and was one of the few academic journals that was able to maintain some regularity during the military period (1964–1985), with between four to six numbers a year plus special issues, and some eight to ten articles in each number. Until the mid1980s it basically stood alone as a journal in the field of government and public administration. By the mid-1980s, other centres were beginning to appear, including the important Nucleus for Public Policy (NEPP) at the University of Campinas, and the number of journals and possibilities for publication expanded, but up to that point it can be considered a fairly good observatory of the academic scene. From 1967 through to 1979, and with the exception of a special seminar which will be discussed later, there were only 12 articles published in which policy was featured, and always as policy. Nearly all were references to policy in major areas: development policy; scientific

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and technical policy; transport policy; financial and economic policy; urban development policy; industrial policy; government policies and controls. In the following ten years the number grew to 20, and then to 33 in the 1990s. Policy starts to take a more solid presence qualitatively in the 1980s with major discussions of social policy, both in relation to the effects of structural adjustment agreements but also in relation to the new constitution. Environmental policy would also make its presence felt, possibly also stimulated by the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro (1992). Another theme that would appear quite often, also in the broader social area but not in relation to policy, was that of health. Here the discussions were very much couched in the language of the Unified Health System itself, its systems and its related themes of health planning, decentralization, coordination and programmes. The result of this review of the journal’s contents over the years confirms the idea of the gradual drift from policy to public policy, and then to public policies, that has been commented on before. Different for example to the areas of reform or administrative improvement which were nearly step by step with discussions elsewhere, these were ideas that took time to arrive. The one event that was outside the drift was an International Seminar on Public Policy Analysis, held at FGVs Brazilian School of Public Administration (EBAP) in Rio de Janeiro, 1976. The seminar’s papers were published in a special issue of the journal with the following introduction: The analysis of public policies, although recent, is an area of research in full development and constitutes today the most advanced frontier of the study of public administration and government. Its objective is the analysis of governmental decisions in its most diverse areas of action, from the point of view of the factors which influence them, the alternatives considered and selected, the process of decision making, as well as the social and economic impact of the policies adopted. (RAP, 1976, p. 3)

The ten articles covered many of the topics that would be found at the same time in the discussion of policy analysis in the USA, for example: politics and policies; economic models in public policy analysis; nonincrementalism in public policy; general frameworks for the analysis of public policy; PPBS (Planning, Programming and Budgeting System) and incremental budgets and the history of social welfare policy in Brazil. Despite being up to date and contrary to other areas of administration and government, the impact of the seminar was very slight and, basically, negligible. It stands as an isolated event without consequences;

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it would be nearly 20 more years before the public policy arena of investigation would be seen, locally, as a legitimate arena for discussion and debate. This was also confirmed in a later article in the journal by Medeiros and Brandião (1990), under the title of ‘On New Paradigms for the Analysis of Public Policies’, which mentioned the earlier seminar but noted that it, indeed, came to very little and pointed to the later 1980s as the time when the field began to get itself together. What then could have been some of the reasons behind what appears to have been a false start. All the other terms from the reform and modernization agendas were very much present and PPBS was also in vogue as well as systems and many other expressions – so why not policy? Could it be that policy in its newer versions, especially as public policies, no longer as a position or stance but as a more explicit discussion about government action, is a performative that brings with it the idea of inspection, options, problems and critique within a minimally constructive although not necessarily collaborative relationship between the worlds of scholarship and government? At the time of the seminar in 1976 and despite signs of easing the very strict controls that had been imposed during periods of armed resistance, it would still be some eight years before the military finally handed over power to a civilian government. Following this line, the boom in the late 1990s and the beginning of the new millennium would be a period of, first, social democratic government (1995–2002) and, second, from 2003 to 2010 the two terms of the progressive Workers’ Party. However, whether these governments stimulated discussion in terms of policy, or merely provided a space in which the terms could be legitimately used, is an open question and one that would require a very different study. Brazil’s 1988 Constitution is frequently referred to as the starting point for effective social policy, but the expression ‘public policy’ is nowhere to be found and the expression ‘policy’ only appears as a general reference to one or other chapter (Urban Policy or Agricultural and Land Policy) or to orthodox areas such as monetary policy or personnel policy (for public sector workers). However as a sign of what was to follow, the section on health includes ‘Health is the right of all and a duty of the State, guaranteed through social and economic policies’ (article 196) and, in relation to the Unified Health System and social services, reference is made to participation in policy formulation (articles 200 and 204). A preliminary discussion of these observations led a colleague10 to the records of one of São Paulo’s small progressive municipalities (Penápolis) during the 1983–1992 period. Her search included various laws, a discussion of local planning, a master’s dissertation and the first municipal health conference in 1991. She found, as in the Constitution,

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references to policy in a background and non-specific sense, but in each case the more direct language within which action would take place was that of programmes, projects, actions and systems, fed by principles that were the guarantee of rights and the democratization of municipal government. Public policy as an articulating theme was absent from the texts. Similarly, the Public Management and Citizenship Awards Program on innovation in subnational government, which was supported by the Ford Foundation and run by the Centre for Public Administration and Government Studies at the Getulio Vargas Foundation between 1996– 2005, was to point to many very important innovations that could have been classed by observers as policy experiments (to use Rondinelli’s 1993 term) but were basically described by those involved as projects and programmes that were seeking to guarantee basic services and rights (Farah and Spink, 2008). It was only in the later years of the innovation programme that the expression public policy began to appear.

BEING INNOVATIVE WITHOUT POLICY: THE BRAZILIAN HIV/AIDS PROGRAMME This final case serves as a summary of much of what has been discussed in this chapter and also in Chapter 4. It looks at the way in which Brazil responded to the AIDS epidemic and to actions that were to place its National Program as an internationally highly praised source of good practices and strategies for action (Nunn, 2009). By 1982, the first cases of AIDS in Brazil had been officially reported, as well as the first identified deaths in the main urban centres of the south-eastern region. Even though the country was still under the control of its last military president, transition was already under way with direct elections for state governors in 1982. Social movements were finding more space for action and there were already a significant number of activist NGOs in various areas, all of whom would be very present in the constitutional assembly of 1987. Second, and more specifically, the health reform movement was already raising its voice against the excessive privatization of health services and was gathering wider support for extensive public health services for all – as a right. Very present in the pressures for health as a right were the Catholic Church’s ecclesiastical base communities, influenced by liberation theology, which will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter. Early moves on AIDS started in the state of São Paulo in 1983, where the recently elected democratic movement governor was a social reformer and Christian Democrat. The first diagnoses were reported by

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public health physicians at the Emilio Ribas Hospital, a specialist referral centre for skin diseases including leprosy (Hansen’s disease). Representatives of the gay rights movement and other human rights militants in the state of São Paulo were able to gain access to the State Health Secretariat to demand an official position. The State Health Secretariat responded by establishing a task group, which included many of the same public health professionals who had been dealing with the early cases (Teixeira, 1997). They drew on previous experience in public hospitals and health centres with Hansen’s disease, where they had learned to deal with discrimination and prejudice through engaging directly with the population involved. This gave them the technical competence and social legitimacy to argue the case for specific AIDS measures. As public health professionals, many were also active in the health reform movement, which again had the active support of the Governor and his staff. In 1983 the São Paulo State AIDS Program was created and the programme roll-out included regular open meetings with many of those who had raised earlier concerns. These community meetings gave rise to GAPA-São Paulo (Support Group for AIDS Prevention), the first and one of the most influential AIDS NGOs in Brazil. At the beginning, the gay rights community activists were the most predominant, but they were later joined by other organizations representing haemophiliacs, women, sex professionals and healthcare professionals, as well as social workers working with drug users. In the state of Rio de Janeiro, mobilization was also taking place, but in a different way. The former federal capital until 1960, Rio was the site of key national health research institutes such as the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) and the National Public Health School. As a result, and along with the progressive Social Medicine Department of the Rio de Janeiro State University (UERJ), it was home to a group of professionals with a broad view of health and a focus on nationwide issues. Social mobilization here was different, drawing on well-known public personalities who had taken part in the national democratization movement. Early organizations were the Brazilian Interdisciplinary Association for AIDS (ABIA, 1987), and Pela Vidda (1989), the first organization specifically for people living with AIDS, their families and friends. Other influential AIDS NGOs were also established in Rio de Janeiro and many of them, as also those in São Paulo and elsewhere, were to receive early support from international cooperation organizations. Although state governments, social organizations, associations and NGOs worked hand in hand to prepare and implement programmes, this relationship would assume different forms. In Rio de Janeiro, the founders of ABIA ‘consciously rejected any direct role in the protection

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and treatment of people with HIV/AIDS’ because they felt this was a government obligation, and focused their efforts in advocacy, ‘criticizing government policy – or the lack of one – particularly at the federal level’ (Parker, 2003, p. 24). On the other hand, GAPA-São Paulo, while maintaining its advocacy role, moved to provide services not offered by the government. (In this earlier period before the Unified Health System, there was little space and funds available for municipal governments.) Those different positions reflected debates that were taking place in the wider health arena. Reformist ideas for public health were gaining strength and would eventually gain the high ground with the 1988 Constitution and the Unified Health System (SUS) and its platform of free healthcare for all. As many health reform activists were also involved in the AIDS mobilization, the two agendas provided important stimuli for each other. Amongst the themes in circulation were: decentralization; regionalization; community involvement; health as a right and a duty of the state; and integral and universal care with equity. By then, the AIDS mobilization was beginning to acquire more federal visibility with the creation of a national advisory commission in the Ministry of Health. However, a major political crisis in the early 1990s led to the impeachment of the president in 1992, during which federal– subnational government relations in many areas deteriorated considerably. In 1992, a new National Program Coordinator was able to attract different sectors of society by reformulating the National Commission and beginning negotiations with the World Bank. The subsequent agreements with the World Bank were to reshape the field and the interorganizational relationships between many, if not all, of the actors. The World Bank was already playing an active role in promoting investments in the social and health areas and in fighting poverty. Without giving up its market-driven economic policies, the Bank’s AIDS approach was based on two premises: the importance of expenditure on prevention rather than care and treatment; and the importance of the involvement of civil society organizations which were considered better placed to reach the poorer and marginalized populations than the government agencies. In the case of the Brazilian agreements there were a number of conflicting issues that continued despite the signing of the first loan agreement. Important for the case is to note that despite these often-considerable differences, the loans would go ahead while discussions continued. This was a very open debate indeed and was marked by considerable respect all around. It was with the World Bank loans11 that the AIDS NGOs were to grow considerably and become more visible as a result of their various forums and other inter-organizational associations. One such was the National

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Meeting of AIDS NGOs (ENONGs). From the first meeting in 1989 supported by the Ford Foundation with 14 organizations, the number of participant organizations quickly rose to 87 in 1992 and to 212 in 1997. After the loans were introduced, with funds available for NGO activity, the AIDS NGOs began to work less and less with the national programme and more and more with state and local programmes which were closer to their on-the-ground activities. Agendas were also changing, and the AIDS NGOs were now increasingly assuming the dual role of advocacy and service provision. The national programme also began to move back from direct operations. Campos et al. (2012) were to refer to this aptly in the opening part of the title of their article on these changes and their implications for the AIDS NGOs: from ‘dot.org’ to ‘dot.gov’. Thus, from a fairly tight, clear and initially local set of arenas, HIV/AIDS had become integrated and national, centralized and now was to be decentralized again. In the period, key actors had changed roles – moving from the local to the national and to the international arena, governments had changed – giving greater or lesser importance to HIV/AIDS, and the arena had both grown and become far more complex, as had HIV/AIDS itself. Amongst all these changes a very new category of social organizations had created itself – the AIDS NGOs – and all of this took place in the languages of the time, as shown by the documents and reports of meetings. An important study here was that sponsored by the National AIDS Commission to register its work up to 2002 and which had full access both to formal documents and minutes of meetings (M.J.P. Spink, 2002). The opening part of the official remit given to the National Commission (then called the Advisory Commission on AIDS) was stated in 1986 as: ‘To advise the Ministry of Health in all aspects related to the control of the syndrome’. In 1987, the Commission became the National Commission for the Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, with the remit of ‘advising the Ministry of Health on the definition of technical-operational mechanisms for the control of AIDS’. This remit was to remain the same for the 1988 Commission, now termed the National Commission for the Control of the Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome – CNAIDS’, and for the more openly engaging 1992 version. It was only in 1994 that the now National AIDS Commission (CNAIDS) would have as its remit: ‘to participate in the formulation and give its views on the policy of prevention and control of sexually transmitted diseases and aids DST/aids’ (M.J.P. Spink, 2002, p. 12). Thus, during the whole of the period in which the HIV/AIDS programme was being talked into practice and gaining international recognition from many areas, the languages in use were those of projects, actions, budgets, loans, plans, a new kind of organization (AIDS NGOs),

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and only later on – within the first social democratic government and following the trends that have already been noted – that of policy. Weaving around these earlier action languages were certain equally important notions – one of which was that of equality. Equality as a political position was central in the collective health movement, and that there should be no social discrimination in terms of health was an explicit statement in many of the SUS documents. Health was about rights for all and not about promises; rights, as mentioned before, are a more immediate relational language – people have them or they don’t.

NOTES 1. See also deLeon (1989) on the development of the policy sciences. 2. The Alliance between England and Portugal was ratified in a Treaty at Windsor on 9 May 1386 and still stands today. It is the longest continuously standing treaty in global history. 3. See also Barrett (2004). 4. It is difficult to think of one area that is more crucial to knowledge, as it is known amongst us, than legal deposit legislation, which since the sixteenth century has guaranteed that what is being written down is preserved in some way. 5. Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany (1957), followed by the UK, Denmark and Ireland (1973), Greece (1981) and Portugal and Spain (1986). The European Union (EU) was formed in 1993. 6. Here it is not very difficult to recognize the echoes of that earlier diplomatic action language that was seen at an equally important European moment some 400 years before. 7. EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) (undated). 8. See Toledo Silva (2015) for a fuller discussion. 9. Coordenadoria de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) – Foundation for the Coordination and Improvement of Higher Level Education Personnel. 10. Maria do Carmo Meirelles Toledo Cruz. 11. The first loan (AIDS I) was granted in 1994 with US$160 million; the second loan (AIDS II) was granted in 1999 with US$165 million; and the third loan (AIDS III) was granted in 2003 with US$100 million (World Bank, 2003).

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6. From noisy rights to hybrid forums: languages of mobilization The notion of rights has a special relevance to the discussion of public policy both academically, technically and also empirically. For, as was seen in the last chapter, at the same time that more advanced democracies were moving firmly into the field of public policy (especially in the late 1970s and early 1980s), some of the emerging democracies were struggling under military or authoritarian regimes in which the tense and conflictive relation between citizens and the state was often expressed through the conflict over basic civil rights and liberties. The names of the countries may have changed but, unfortunately, the themes continue to the present. Even in the USA where the theme of civil rights and voting rights was very strong, it would be policy that would, as it were, take over the stage of government action. It wasn’t that rights weren’t around, after all the Universal Declaration of Human Rights had been proclaimed in Paris on 10 December 1948. But – and despite Marshall’s (1950) formulation of civil, political and social rights – they remained in the background as the developed world set about social reconstruction. Indeed, there was for some time much tension about the use of rights in international affairs, especially during the Cold War. The result was that instead of moving forwards to its next phase within the United Nations as one document, the Universal Declaration became two covenants: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (19 December 1966) and the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights (16 December 1966). Both were to come into force in 1976 but ratification would go on for many years after and is still incomplete. It may be convenient to think of the Universal Declaration as being resolved in 1948, but the idea of rights has still got a long way to go. As Nelson and Dorsey comment: The curious separation of human rights and development began immediately after the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, when cold war politics thwarted efforts to forge one treaty legally binding upon government signatories. Civil and political rights and economic, social and cultural rights were bifurcated along the political fault lines of the period (…). (2008, p. 13) 143

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THE AGE OF RIGHTS AND DIGNITY We, who, though unworthy, exercise on earth the power of our Lord and seek with all our might to bring those sheep of his flock who are outside, into the fold committed to our charge, consider, however, that the Indians are truly men and that they are not only capable of understanding the catholic faith but, according to our information, they desire exceedingly to receive it (…) The said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property (…) Nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no effect. (Pope Paul III, ‘Sublimus Dei’, 29 May 1537)1

Pope Paul III did not use the term rights, nor did he talk about humanity. His definition of ‘truly men’ was expressed in religious terms and the ‘Sublimus Dei’ had also a lot to do with the economics of slavery. Today’s human rights workers would certainly argue in a very different way and use other expressions, but they might well draw Paul III into their bibliography in the same way as the English discussing liberty and freedom in the seventeenth century would do the same with Roman texts.2 Social concepts and ideas are social, and being social they are also historical. Bobbio restated his position on human rights in a collection of his texts on the theme, aptly named The Age of Rights. My theoretical approach has always been and continues to be, in the light of new arguments, that human rights however fundamental are historical rights and therefore arise from specific conditions characterized by the embattled defence of new freedoms against old powers. They are established gradually, not all at the same time, and not for ever. It would appear that philosophers are asked to pass sentence on the fundamental nature of human rights, and even to demonstrate that they are absolute, inevitable and incontrovertible, but the question should not be posed in these terms. Religious freedom resulted from the religious wars, civil liberties from the parliamentarian struggles against absolutism, and political and social freedoms from the birth, growth and experience of movements representing workers, landless peasants and smallholders. The poor demand from authorities not only recognition of personal freedom and negative freedoms, but also protection against unemployment, basic education to overcome illiteracy, and gradually further forms of welfare for sickness and old age – all needs which the wealthy can provide for themselves. Next to this so-called second generation of rights which concern social questions, there is now emerging a third generation of rights which is still too vague and heterogeneous for an exact definition. (Bobbio, 1996, pp.x–xi)

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Some of these different threads came together in the Universal Declaration, where they provide a well-documented example of an action language in formation. The Human Rights Commission was led by Eleanor Roosevelt and the other 17 members came from a wide variety of backgrounds, countries and regions, both religious and philosophical, from eastern to western, from the left through to the liberal centre. The many discussions and debates, sometimes very heated, are evidence of their determination to make the post-war world a better and safer place (Glendon, 2001). In order to contribute to the work of the Commission, UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) carried out an enquiry into ‘the theoretical problems raised by such a Universal Declaration’ and circulated a questionnaire to thinkers and writers, most of whom were philosophers, asking for their views. The replies were discussed and proposals were made. Fortunately, the results were kept and many of the replies were published in 1949 along with an introduction by Jacques Maritain, philosophy professor and former French Ambassador to the Holy See. In the introduction, he comments on all the different schools of thought present from all different religious, philosophical and non-faith positions. In doing so he mentions the surprise generated in a UNESCO committee meeting at the news that champions of violently opposed ideologies had agreed on a list of rights. The reply was ‘Yes, we agree about the rights but on condition that no one asks us why.’ Here is part of his own contribution in which he discusses a certain number of practical truths about life together on which agreement could be reached from widely different and even absolutely opposed theoretical positions. Though it would probably not be easy, it would be possible to arrive at a joint statement of these practical conclusions, or in other words, of the various rights recognized as pertaining to the human being as an individual and a social animal. But it would be quite useless to seek for a common rational justification of those practical conclusions and rights. That way lies the danger either of seeking to impose an arbitrary dogmatism, or of finding the way barred by irreconcilable divisions. While it seems eminently desirable to formulate a Universal Declaration of Human Rights which might be, as it were, the preface to a moral Charter of the civilised world, it appears obvious that, for the purposes of that declaration, practical agreement is possible, but theoretical agreement impossible, between mind and mind. (UNESCO, 1949, p. 72)

McKeon, from the University of Chicago, was on the drafting committee and in his own contribution (1990) he stresses the practical importance of

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rights, as Bobbio also would confirm. The conception of rights, McKeon argued, was written into constitutions not because those involved had agreed on a philosophy, ‘but, because they agreed, despite philosophical differences, on the formulation of a solution to a series of moral and political problems’ (McKeon, 1990, p. 37).3 One of the consequences of this position is that of the capacity to enforce rights, to guarantee them and to actively produce the performative sense of ‘having rights’. As most people working with human rights would argue, this depends in the international arena on the tools of ‘naming’ and ‘shaming’ as well as agencies capable of balancing the equally delicate tools of observations, missions, judges and arguments. Nationally it can imply constitutions and judges as well as specialist agencies.4 Nationally there may be laws that are more easily enforced, but if institutions fail these can quickly be undermined. Given that rights are not implemented but enforced – that they are not something that budget cuts can suspend or redirect, something that planners can place at some future point – it follows that the more there are, the more difficult it is to guarantee them. As Gutmann will say, ‘Proliferation of human rights to include rights that are not clearly necessary to protect the basic agency or needs or dignity of persons cheapens the purpose of human rights and correspondingly weaken the resolve of potential enforcers’ (Gutmann, 2001, p.x). This is very clear in the international arena, especially with human rights, but it also applies to national arenas and to what have been called positive rights (the rights to have) or collective rights. ‘I share the concern of those for whom applying the word “rights” to demands for what are at best future rights, means creating expectations which can never be satisfied among people who use the word “right” according to its current meaning of an expectation which can be satisfied because it is protected’ (Bobbio, 1996, p. 57). The problem comes in deciding where to draw the line: should basic human rights be restricted to freedom from abuse, oppression and cruelty; should this be understood in relation to dignity and if so what is dignity and should freedom from poverty also be seen as part of the basic basket of human rights?5 Dignity is present in the second line of the preamble to the UN Charter ‘to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small’ and takes pride of place in the first line of the preamble of the Universal Declaration: ‘Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.’

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These are far from abstract questions, and despite long periods when rights were seen as something for the legal profession or for specialized activists who dealt with events somewhere over the horizon of western democracies, they are increasingly present. In the developing world, as Nelson and Dorsey (2008) comment, the themes of development and of rights are coming closer and closer together as rights-based organizations and development organizations connect their agendas.6 Nationally and locally as new questions arise so do communities and movements reach out to the language of rights as a new public action language for change both in terms of pressure for priorities and also for individual action itself; as for example in the extensive and very current discussion of judicialization.7 The implications of rights for public administration as a field of action is not a new question; Frederickson, for example had pointed to the citizen-based approach to thinking about the public as one of the ways of talking of public administration (1991), and concern with rights can be found in the foreground of a number of democratic countries, especially in their more progressive moments. The difference, perhaps, is when rights become the principal shaper of action. Decisions are made, budget priorities are changed, and activities are re-routed because somebody (individual or collectively) has a right to whatever is involved. As with comments about other public action languages throughout this book, the question is not as to whether or not this is an inherently good thing. All public action languages make sense to those who use them, otherwise they would quickly disappear. Rights can be important pressure points for policy, or plans, but they can also be pressure points for mass action and, rather than moving into the background as democracy progresses, they are increasingly present; as are many other social languages that have made their presence felt over the last century. Take, for example, the earlier mention in Chapter 2 of the gradual emergence of housing onto the scene of public concern. Engels, who had already published his The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1845, was – in a later series of essays On the Housing Question published in 1872–1873 – strongly against attempts to provide housing for workers. He saw this as a ‘philanthropic plot’ to tie workers to capitalists in a semi-feudal manner. Here he also included the actions of the middle-class ‘bourgeois philanthropists’ who sought to do good in relation to housing and health, largely to protect themselves. Neither, he argued, recognized that the social order that they were part of produced the conditions that their actions were aimed at improving. What, it can be wondered, would Engels have made of the Fifth Session of the World Urban Forum under the auspices of UN HABITAT that took place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (22–26 March 2010)? The title of the report was The

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Right to the City: Bridging the Urban Divide. The first of its five key messages was: The time has come to move beyond mere advocacy and commitment to the legal notion of the ‘right to the city’. Greater effort needs to be directed towards putting in place appropriate legal and institutional frameworks as well as the necessary investments to make the right to the city a reality. Practical efforts to give effect to this right must take due account of the social and cultural diversity that prevails in each context and must use that diversity to build the strength and vitality of urban communities. (p.5)8

The ‘right to the city’ is not just an academic concept found in urban studies9 but a growing gathering point for social action. Adequate housing is part of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and here is part of the address of the special rapporteur10 on adequate housing to the Third Committee of the General Assembly of the United Nations (25 October 2016): The right to life has been described as ‘the supreme’ human right. It embodies the commitment to the dignity, security and inherent worth of every human being that is the cornerstone of the entire human rights system and at the foundation of every human right (…) The link between inadequate housing and the right to life is obvious and deeply disturbing. An estimated one third of deaths worldwide are linked to poverty and inadequate housing (…) On official missions and working visits, I have met people of all ages who are homeless or living in container settlements, institutions, relocation sites or informal settlements, forced to live without safe drinking water, or electricity, amidst excrement and garbage, without adequate protection from inclement weather, with no bed to lie on, no place to wash or defecate; threatened by violence, insecurity, discrimination and stigmatization and, worst of all, forced to watch children suffer and frequently die from prolonged diarrhoea. All are hanging by the thinnest thread, clinging to life, dignity and humanity. I have been astonished at the resilience and inherent dignity of those who live in these circumstances and their ability to affirm their human rights. I have learned that they articulate their human rights claims not simply as a demand for housing with basic services and secure tenure, but more fundamentally as a claim to equal recognition of their right to live in dignity and security.

The notion of dignity was and remains the cornerstone of the United Nations Declaration and many of its documents. It is another expression that has seen much change over the years. From the times that it referred to only a few, the dignitaries who were worthy of being dignified, through its presence in theological and philosophical debates, to the time when various delegates brought the idea to the founding Conference

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of the UN in 1945 (including the USA and New Zealand)11 where, in the tweaking and polishing of the preamble, the part that is always remembered, it would later become an expression for mankind. As remarked, the Declaration was by no means an immediate success and the field of rights and human rights is by no means stable, but, somehow, dignity has come to stand, as Schachter well remarked, as an expression of a basic value accepted in a broad sense by all peoples. Political leaders, jurists and philosophers have increasingly alluded to the dignity of the human person as a basic idea so generally recognized as to require no independent support. It has acquired a resonance that leads it to be invoked widely as a legal and moral ground for protest against degrading and abusive treatment. No other ideal seems so clearly accepted as a universal social good. (1983, p. 848)

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE, CONTROVERSIES, ISSUES AND STRUGGLES There are a number of people who, in some way or through an image, personify dignity. One of them was consulted by UNESCO for the study on human rights. His reply is given pride of place in the edited volume of replies and in the attached list of biographies, it is the shortest: Mahatma Gandhi – the Father of Modern India. Here is part of his reply: I learnt from my illiterate but wise mother that all rights to be deserved and preserved came from duty well done. Thus the very right to live accrues to us only when we do the duty of citizenship of the world. From this one fundamental statement, perhaps it is easy enough to define the duties of Man and Woman and correlate every right to some corresponding duty to be performed. Every other right can be shown to be a usurpation hardly worth fighting for. (UNESCO, 1949, p. 18)

Most people when they think of Gandhi will refer to his very special type of non-violent, mobilizing and civil disobedience. A significant part of this came from his religious upbringing and his wise mother, but another part can be traced to a little book that he read while in prison in South Africa in the early part of the twentieth century. In 1846, Henry David Thoreau refused to pay the state poll tax in protest against both the USA–Mexican War and slavery. He spent a night in prison and was released the next day when somebody paid the taxes for him. The result, after a number of lectures and talks, was an essay published in 1849 under the original title of ‘Resistance to Civil Government’ and now known as ‘Civil Disobedience’. Gandhi would use the Sanskrit word

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satyagraha, which means devotion to truth. Here is a similar argument in Thoreau’s text: But to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it. After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted and for a long period continue, to rule, is not because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it. Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience? – in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable? Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have the right to assume, is to do at anytime what I think right. (1849/1995, pp. 3–4)

Civil disobedience is part of a complex moral universe which includes non-violent rule-breaking in order to pressure governments for change. Those involved know that they are disobeying and that there are consequences for breaking rules and laws. Students sitting in their universities, black women sitting in the wrong part of buses, people sitting down in traffic lanes are just some of thousands of examples. But the same moral universe of pressuring for change can also imply direct action such as breaking windows, pulling statues down or, in a milder form, taking on governments through their own rules which, while it is not really disobedience, creates a nuisance and a lot of extra work for those on the receiving end. There seems to be no simple definition for pressuring for action and change, nor is there a catalogue of its many different versions which are constantly changing and being added to. People just seem to get on with it; what matters is a sense of civic collective, the will of people to organize themselves and values of dignity, solidarity and justice.12 Sometimes those engaged in action will use the term collective to describe their way of organizing, but they may also refer to themselves as social movements, associations, neighbourhoods, alliances, amongst others, and can position themselves or not as being part of ‘civil society’. Many of these, such as social movements, are major fields of study in themselves with extensive literatures which cross over with a number of

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the themes in this book. Here, concern is less with how they are formally described in order to be debated and explained, an important discussion in its own right, but about how they describe themselves, or are described, and the performative implications. For example, when different groupings of urban youths in the poorer outskirts of major cities in Brazil refer to each other as collectives and discuss their alliances within The Peripheral Cultural Movement, they are producing a performative identity that will push and shove its way into both local and broader horizons of public action. As a wider collective term, ‘civil society’ is a strong image that has travelled a lot in recent years.13 Amongst these different meanings, the notion of struggle was very present in Gramsci’s discussion of cultural hegemony developed in the 1930s (1971; and Bobbio, 1988) which later became very important for social movements involved in processes of democratization in different parts of the world. Early Enlightenment thinkers saw civil society as a society capable of self-regulation as, for example, in Thomas Paine’s defence of the rights of man (1791/1984). For others, civil society is a necessary counterbalance of the state and versions of all these and others can be found within the different action languages of pressure and protest themselves; especially so, but not only, in settings where relations between governments and different sectors of their societies are far from settled. In these different uses, the expression usually comes linked to the broader moral arena of the civic collective, of civic agency and its associated values about which there are also different meanings in circulation. Dagnino (2008) alerts us to the danger, first, of these broader collective expressions leading to fields being taken as homogeneous rather than heterogeneous and diverse, and, second, as having some kind of naturalized virtuous quality. As she comments: Recognizing the diversity of meanings coexisting in the real world acknowledges the conflicts and disputes between different and often divergent and antagonistic conceptions. To the extent in which different conceptions are related to different political projects of ‘what society should be’, this recognition should also cast light on ‘what kind of change’ is at stake in different types and understanding of civic agency. (2008, p. 28)

As she points out, neo-liberals, radical democrats and conservatives can find themselves using a vocabulary (as may also – it can be added – many different types of social association) in which apparently similar or linked concepts such as civil society, citizenship and participation are associated with civic life, but are doing so from very different positions. For example, in the case of ‘civic’ this can happen when it is used as a

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reference to a location (civil society, lifeworld) pertaining to citizens and when its virtue (civic action) is naturalized as a quality that is inherently part of that location and to the organizations that so define it. An alternative way to look at the civic as a virtuous attribute is to recognize that it may or may not result from a historical/empirical creation, which implies that it is not necessarily or intrinsically there. In this case as in much of the real world, and depending on how we understand it, the ‘civic’ may be absent and its construction would be precisely the kind of change required. (Dagnino, 2008, p. 29)

The discussion of civic has received an important renewed impulse from the area of development studies in a series of initiatives led by the Institute of Social Studies in the Netherlands.14 Under the heading of civic-driven change, concern is with the primacy of people’s own actions in shaping society, challenging institutional prescriptiveness, and with opening up to multiple types of knowledge and sites of knowledge making (Biekart and Fowler, 2009). Rethinking civic also implies rethinking citizenship from outside the straightforward model of nation state, government, civil society and citizenship which, as many scholars from Third World and developing countries have commented, is not what is found in practice and which may not be what is found in practice elsewhere. As Clarke et al. (2014) argue from a recent, cross-national study, to recentre citizenship requires first its decentring: that is, unpacking these assumed relationships which are often put forward as naturally fitting elements in which formations of state, nation and law provide the status of citizenship. Somehow, in the midst of this collective confusion, various fragments of ‘us’, different parts of some of the people, do continue to argue, discuss and put questions forward. They may or may not use the language of plans, projects, policies, budgets or other professionally driven social languages, but if they do it will be on their terms as part of a language of concerns, of things that happen in the day to day and that are very real, because they hurt. They are important not because they affect a certain percentage of the population and therefore have gained the seal of visibility; but they are important because they are somebody’s problem and there are enough somebodies directly or indirectly implicated to make this one of Dewey’s problems. As Marres (2007) argued, the issue deserves more credit and the issue is in itself a language. Issue is another of these amazing elastic terms that have many different and distinctive uses, as a look at any major dictionary will reveal. In the case of public affairs, it probably came into the field fairly recently from the legal arena (otherwise Dewey might have used it) where it has been

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in use in Anglo-Saxon legal practice as the ‘point in question’ since the sixteenth century. That is, the key to the legal argument, that which is in contention (popularly adopted as the bone of contention) and remains to be decided. Marres (2007) placed issues at the centre of discussion of public involvement in politics through research on controversies in the area of science and technological studies and in doing so took Dewey’s public problems into new directions. Dewey defined a public affair as a problem that jointly affects an association of actors who were not directly involved in its production, but it seems more appropriate to say that actors are jointly and antagonistically implicated in issues. Partly exclusive associations are entangled in an issue. Such an understanding of controversy brings into relief a distinctive merit of public articulations of issues: a publicizing issues articulation highlights the partial irreconcilability of the associations that coalesce with that issue. (2007, p. 773)

Controversy, issue, civic concerns are not an a priori given, but are the result of many interlinked socialities and materialities within many different conversations. Take for example the question of climate change and who speaks for the climate. What is the climate for the public works department of a large city seeking to get ready for the rainy season, paying attention to specific roads, low-lying areas and drainage clearance? What is climate for a soon to be approaching weather system that will slam a cold front into a highly charged and overheated conurbation? What is the climate for the hills, hillsides, rivers and very often hidden streams behind the dense urban and con-urban landscape, or for the different members of local communities who may be living with risk in its most immediate forms? Anyone who has followed even a small part of the climate debate(s) will be very much aware that this is not a traditional example of cohesion around problems and solutions. Here the earlier observation of Heclo about issue networks (1978) is worth noting. Iron triangles and subgovernments suggest a stable set of participants coalesced to control fairly narrow public programs which are in the direct economic interest of each party to the alliance. Issue networks are almost the reverse image in each respect. Participants move in and out of the networks constantly. Rather than groups united in dominance over a program, no one, as far as one can tell, is in control of the policies and issues. Any direct material interest is often secondary to intellectual and emotional commitment. Network members reinforce each other’s sense of issues as their interests rather than (as standard political or economic models would have it) interests defining positions on issues. (p.102)

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In everyday practice, all these different languages get shuffled together. After all, they are social. Separating them is helpful in that it shows that there is no a priori reason for assuming that one has superiority over the others, or that the art of crafting social languages for doing public work has finished, but in practice they all crowd together to position people and create moral traps and dilemmas, and they can be used to include and exclude, create markets for professional services and careers, and support zones of intolerance and hegemonic spaces. They can also be used to strengthen democracy. This move from an individual-centred rationality to a communicative rationality, as proposed by Jürgen Habermas (1987), has had an important effect on current discussions of democracy, especially in terms of participation and deliberation. However, as Iris Marion Young’s (2000) ‘decentered’ and ‘agonistic’ (contested) approach to deliberative democracy mentioned in Chapter 1 shows, this does not mean that people should be nice to each other. Struggle is a process of communicative engagement of citizens with one another. People of differing social positions or interests must struggle to raise issues because others may be threatened by those issues or they may simply think that different issues are more important. Once the issues that concern them are on the agenda, citizens must struggle with others over the terms in which they will engage the issue, they must struggle to get their views heard, and must struggle to persuade others. The field of struggle is not level; some groups and sectors are often at a disadvantage (…) Because disadvantaged and excluded sectors cannot wait for the process to become fair (…) oppressed and disadvantaged groups have no alternative but to struggle for greater justice under conditions of inequality (…) Disorderly, disruptive, annoying or distracting means of communication are often necessary or effective elements in such efforts to engage others in debate over issues and outcomes. (Young, 2000, p. 50)

NEVER DO FOR OTHERS WHAT THEY CAN DO FOR THEMSELVES The title of this part of the chapter is an expression that has served as an ‘iron rule’ for community organizing and mobilizing by the many different alliances, interfaith associations and organizations that in some way share the views of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF). The IAF has some 65 affiliates in the USA, Canada, the UK, Germany and Australia. It is only one of many different experiences in community strengthening that can be found, of which there must be hundreds of thousands around the world and all of which will certainly have tales to tell; this, then, is one of many.

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The IAF was set up by a Roman Catholic bishop (Bernard J. Shell), a businessman and founder of the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper (Marshall Field III), and a community organizer (Saul Alinsky) who was rethinking the traditional outreach programmes of the University Inner City Missions in the meatpacking zone of Chicago (the area known as Back of the Yards). In doing so he put the bits and pieces together of a very different approach which focused on linking the many different ways of being together that exist in most places: people’s organizations in their different shapes and sizes. The result, in 1946, was another ground-breaking book, Reveille for Radicals, with a second volume Rules for Radicals following later (Alinsky, 1946, 1971; see also Horwitt (1989) for a biography). Alinsky’s views and the work of the IAF continue to trouble many long after his untimely death in 1972, in part because of the implications of a much-cited phrase in the second volume: ‘The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.’ There are many different social dialects and even quite different social languages to be found around community mobilizing, organization and development; to use some of the words that can be found. As mentioned previously, important for the ongoing theme is that they keep on appearing: out of the woodwork of schools, associations and religious assembly halls, the bricks and mortar of self-help construction and the rural grass roots. There are thousands of articles being produced yearly as scholars chase after these experiences, many of which have very little interest in being the focus of academic studies. Not, that is, because they are anti-academic, but that their concerns and priorities are elsewhere and, it needs to be said, the academic community is in general not much good at being around when things get complicated and push turns to shove. Alinsky’s approach to organizing is one of many and other choices could be made, for example of educators active in social change such as Paulo Freire in Brazil or Myles Horton at the Highlander Folk School in the USA (Horton and Freire, 1990). It is one that has attracted much attention and controversy, yet at the same time has proved highly effective in various parts of the world. Different from some other community development approaches which focus on building participatory relations with local governments and joining committees, Alinsky focused in a very explicit way on power and on learning how to use it from the bottom up, step by step. Most important, however, is the thesis that a solid democracy depends on independent and active people’s organizations and that these are the organizations that are present in the everyday: schools, congregations of different faiths, sports clubs,

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shopkeepers’ associations and so on. IAF organizers work to identify leaders in these different organizations and help them to build broad, independent and increasingly stronger collective organizations. A list of even a few of the names that these horizontal forms take on gives a very good picture of the approach and parts of its mobilizing language: Pima County Interfaith Council; BAY Area IAF organizations; Communities Organized for Relational Power in Action; Sacramento Valley Organizing Committee; Inland Communities Organizing Network; One L.A. – IAF; Congregations Organized for a New Connecticut; Lake County United; Together Baton Rouge; Greater Boston Interfaith Organization; Action in Montgomery; New Jersey Together; Nevadans for the Common Good; Long Island Congregations, Associations and Neighborhoods; Communities Organized for Public Service/The Metro Alliance.15 Their concerns are the issues that people in communities have, whether or not these are part of the agenda of the government of the day. Here is Alinsky in 1965 discussing Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, which used a committee representation approach with quotas for different sectors of business, public service and communities, and of which Alinsky was highly critical; for him the poor should be making the decisions: Poverty means not only lacking money but also lacking power. An economically stable negro in Mississippi is poor. When one lives in a society where poverty and power bars you from equal protection, equal equity in the courts and equal participation in the economic and social life of your society, then you are poor. The meaning of money is in what it can purchase and how it can be used. Therefore an antipoverty program must recognize that its program has to do something about not only economic poverty but also political poverty. (p.47)

His answer was the active engagement of alliances of people’s organizations in defining agendas on their own terms; not in taking part in the discussion of agendas produced by others on the other’s terms. Accepting a minor role in a meeting called by another was not part of the approach, nor was accepting predefined quotas for participation; both were contributors to political poverty. This constant tension and pressure on power created a backlash towards Alinsky but, as his comment on Machiavelli shows, he had an acid sense of humour and remained a radical democrat to the end. One of his favourite phrases was to discuss power in terms not only of what a community has but of what the other party thinks it has, and here everything was valid, including humour and innuendo. Cortes (1997), part of the second generation of IAF leaders, described their approach as a major effort to recuperate the importance of social institutions and democracy:

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The community organizations affiliated with the IAF work to strengthen and in some cases recreate the mediating institutions of communities. These institutions must be broad-based and designed to cultivate and develop the capacity of people to engage in a deliberative process. These institutions must enable people to cross racial lines and class distinctions through their common interests in family and community while connecting the results of deliberation to power. We have a record of success in creating those institutions in communities across the United States and now in the United Kingdom. IAF organizers work to train community leaders in the skills associated with public life, the ‘civic virtues’ that are required for the effective functioning of self-governing democratic institutions (…) Action is critical. Deliberation and discussion are important, particularly as they lead to judgement and wisdom, but unfortunately, in organizations where deliberation is cultivated (such as universities) it is rarely tied to action. That is why IAF organizers create direct learning opportunities and agitate leaders to think in new ways about themselves and their ability to influence their world. All of our organizing is centered around the Iron Rule: Never do for others what they can do for themselves. Victories are won not by speaking for ordinary people, but by teaching them how to collectively speak, act, and engage in politics for themselves. This kind of agitation and organizing enables the leaders of a community to make a collaborative and sustained commitment to change. And as deliberation must be tied to action, so must action be tied to strategy – and to an understanding of power. (Cortes, 1997, pp. 20–21)

Wilson (1997a) and colleagues followed up a number of different experiences of community engagement in state and local government concerns in which the presence of the Texas Industrial Areas Foundation was very significant. One of these became known as COPS (Communities Organized for Public Service and Neighborhood Revitalization in San Antonio). COPS took on the challenge of making the community participation provisions of the 1974 Federal Housing and Community Development Act for block grants for urban renewal and revitalization not only effective but also focused on the direct concerns of the neighbourhoods themselves – instead of being used to strengthen voting patterns in different areas to attend political interests (‘the Mayor’s walking around money’ as it was described). Over more than 20 years COPS has been able to force the concentration of federal funds to areas and issues that its member communities, congregations and associations debated and identified as key (Sanders, 1997). Wilson cites data from the early 1980s concluding that COPS projects were already some 56 per cent of the San Antonio Community Development Block Grant spending, with some 91 per cent of the projects they requested being approved by the city planners and managers.

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The organization initially employed a protest strategy, confronting public officials with unmet promises, packing city council meetings, and mobilizing community residents. It also made unusually effective use of the vote, boosting electoral participation in Mexican American neighborhoods on issues of particular relevance to the city’s economic and political leadership. Finally, COPS tactics have been supported by the evolving structure of local politics and Institutions. (Wilson, 1997b, p. 4)

Other areas of work reported in the studies include work with inner-city congregations and schools to involve parents directly in the debate on school renewal. The work started with COPS and went on to involve many other areas in the state of Texas (Shirley, 1997). Key to the interreligious or interfaith approach is the recognition that people in congregations are also people who live in neighbourhoods and have many other concerns that are common, independently of any specific religious position. Here the approach was made to people as parents and relatives of parents and the challenge was to overturn a feeling of pessimism about academic achievement. This was also the approach within the Catholic Church’s liberation theology movement which played an important role in Latin America in the 1970s and early 1980s. Small grass-roots congregations or base ecclesial communities (comunidades eclesiales de base) would gather together to discuss social conditions and poverty in the light of the gospel, and in many places this would lead to other approaches to mobilizing for change and to learning from doing (Levine, 1988). Many of the different social movements in health, housing, agricultural reform, and other areas in the region, have at least some roots in the experience of community meetings and forums and the skills learned in being able to discuss current affairs, talk about solutions and organize meetings. The same learning about the important aggregating role of religious organizations is very present in what began in the UK in 1996 at a gathering of more than 1,000 people from some 30 organizations: TELCO (The East London Communities Organisation; later Telco Citizens). Other similar gatherings followed and grew into London Citizens and also the Citizen Organising Foundation. Member organizations which help to support the training activities and also to support the small staffs of professional organizers include faith-based congregations of all sorts and sizes, schools, tenants’ associations, community associations and centres, neighbourhood associations, trade union branches, and university and college students unions. Early organizers spent lots of time listening rather than proposing action, and then all of these different concerns became the basis for finding some common ground between

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issues. There were many concerns about poverty, difficult living conditions, and lack of urban regeneration and opportunities. After much debate, the open meetings started to focus on the importance of finding ways of protecting low-paid wage earners in largely low-skilled jobs; many of whom lived in the communities of East London and attended its churches and mosques. Given that the national minimum wage in the UK bore no relationship to living conditions in the capital, the idea of a ‘living wage’ set at an hourly value sufficient for somebody to live with dignity in London became a key item in discussing living conditions. The result was an agreement of a London Living Wage, supported by local government authorities and many others and calculated by agreed research methods. This then served as a target that firms, building contractors, hotels, shops, restaurants, supermarkets and others, including football clubs, could agree to assume as a civic responsibility in a process of pressure and individual declaration that continues today.16 As Alinsky had said in Rules for Radicals: To organize a community you must understand that in a highly mobile, urbanized society the word “community” means community of interests, not physical community. The exceptions are ethnic ghettos where segregation has resulted in physical communities that coincide with their community of interests, or, during political campaigns, political districts that are based on geographical demarcations. (1971, p. 120)

REBELLIOUS BY TRADITION As Chapter 2 already hinted, and this chapter has opened further, once the focus moves beyond policy and into the broader set of possible relationships or non-relationships between different parts of what is customarily called society, a vast and continuously opening horizon of ways of performing public affairs begins to appear. To classify this as ‘civil society’ or ‘social infrastructure’, ‘social capital’ or ‘third sector’ forces a degree of compliance to certain principles that even this brief look at some of these forms of collective association would suggest is unreal. This is not only because the variety of ways of doing public issues shows much more dissimilarity than similarity, but also because the very social action languages themselves are equally as different. In Customs in Common, Thompson (1993) revisited some of his earlier texts and especially that which was mentioned in Chapter 1 (‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’ (1971)). As he pointed out, the arrival in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of the study of folklore, and the positioning of customs as oddities that are

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reproduced yearly in the form of cultural calendars, turned almost invisible another notion of custom ‘not as post-anything but as sui generis – as ambience, mentalité, and as a whole vocabulary of legitimation and of expectation’ (1993, p. 2). This other, earlier notion of custom was something very different. If many of the ‘poor’ were denied education, what else did they have to fall back on but oral transmission with its heavy freight of ‘custom’. If nineteenthcentury folklore, by separating survivals from their context, lost awareness of custom as ambience and mentalité, so it lost sight of the rational functions of many customs within the routines of daily and weekly labour. Many customs were endorsed and sometimes enforced by popular pressure and protest. (p.3) In the eighteenth century custom was the rhetoric of legitimation for almost any usage, practice or demanded right. Hence uncodified custom – and even codified – was in continual flux. So far from having the steady permanence suggested by the word ‘tradition’, custom was a field of change and of contest, an arena in which opposing interests made conflicting claims. This is why one must be cautious as to generalisations about popular culture. (p.6)

Part of the result was the paradox: rebellious by tradition. Customs are conserved and rebelliously defended, including the actions of crowds, of protests and the impositions of sanctions of ridicule, shame and also intimidation. These are, as the study of the ‘Moral Economy’ showed, intensely social languages, as are some of the current versions that can be found when people take to the streets. They can do this spontaneously because streets are public places but, paradoxically, this can also happen in a negotiated way, with consultations, police agreement, accepted restrictions to guarantee traffic flow and booking requirements to avoid conflicts with other events. Unfortunately, apart from major social expressions of celebration and solidarity – such as France winning the FIFA World Cup in 2018 when most of Paris could be found in its traditional public meeting place of the Champs-Élysées – the idea of spontaneous crowds in major protest, especially when this becomes confrontational, often invokes a very different and negative social imaginary. That which can also be found in the tensions between ‘the people’ as a force for change on the one hand and the ‘mob’ or ‘rabble’ on the other.17 The image is that of the enraged mob, the headless crowd or, as it would later become, rioting as pathological social behaviour. This very convenient image would find further support when interpreting the events of the Paris Commune, as discussed in Chapter 2, which also served to censor its various achievements. The result would be the classical crowd psychology set out by Taine (1876), one of the founders of French psychology and popularized

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by Le Bon (1895). His book The Crowd, a simplified and plagiarized version of Taine’s ideas, became a best-seller in its time and also served to influence Freud. As van Ginneken’s (1992) careful analysis showed, neither of the two authors worked from descriptions of the events. Taine, who was born in 1828, was horrified at the reports of events following the Storming of the Bastille in the French Revolution, which he described as spontaneous anarchy and the result of a band of people: … whose aim is violence, composed of those who are most destitute, most wildly enthusiastic and most inclined to destructiveness and to license, but also, as this band tumultuously carries out its violent action, each individual the most brutal, the most irrational, the most corrupt, descends lower than himself, even to the darkness, the madness, and the savagery of the dregs of society. (Taine, cited by Ginneken, 1992, p. 20)

During the Commune, Taine was in England at the University of Oxford and his view was also influenced by letters from elite friends and comments in the English Press. Le Bon was what in today’s terms would be called a scientific journalist, but with a difference – he was quite happy to rewrite other people’s texts without acknowledging the original authors. The impact of the two texts, especially that of Le Bon, was to help crystallize many of the negative notions of crowds that still continue today. Rather than being recognized as a perfectly normal way of gathering on issues and making a presence felt, of being together with others in a special type of horizontal and open relationship,18 as a fairly spontaneous form of voice,19 crowds were increasingly seen as potentially explosive and somewhat dangerous. From an acceptable, and even approved, form of everyday action and reaction, protesting crowds became a sign of chaos that required order, lots of law and, by the end of the twentieth century, new types of anti-riot police. Some may not like the more confrontational approach and may not feel happy about broken windows and shop goods being taken without payment, but these are social action languages that are just as performative as others. Angry crowds of protesters create horizontal identities and choices, and as current observers such as Dikeç on urban rage (2017) and the analyses of riots in the UK by Reicher and Stott (2011) and Stott and Drury (2017) have shown, there are decisions being taken and moral choices being made. They are far from mindless or pathological, and it may be difficult many times for those who tend to see from the point of view of the state, or seek the more reasonable ground of conversation and committees, to come to terms with the very different types of social action languages on which this section has only lightly touched. Indeed, to return to the discussion

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of public action in the opening chapter, they are just some of the languages that become more visible once the horizon of government and public is allowed to find its own balance, unrestricted by classical institutional rules around governments and public decisions. Demystifying prevailing notions about rioting mobs or understanding the confrontational pressure tactics of multi-organizational and interfaith alliances are important in themselves. But they also point to the need to look more seriously at the complex dynamics that are present in governmental and state actions that subtly, or not so subtly, determine social languages for raising and responding to issues and controversies that are seen as acceptable or reasonable. But here the corresponding tensions and confrontations may need to be seen from a different perspective. As Dryzek commented: If the impetus for democratization begins in oppositional civil society rather than in the state – and I would suggest that this has almost always been true historically – then, counterintuitively, a degree of exclusion in the pattern of state interest representation is desirable if civil society and so democracy itself are to flourish. (1996, p. 482)

NOTHING ABOUT US WITHOUT US the reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. (George Bernard Shaw (1903), Man and Superman)

George Bernard Shaw’s often used quotation is as timely today as it was when it was written in the turbulence of the events of the beginning of the last century. It points to the dilemma that is both a product and a producer of public action. There are times when governments, people(s), representatives, service providers and public servants can and do work together quite comfortably; but there are times when working together can take any one of or all these different groupings well outside their comfort zones. As was seen through the different chapters, the ‘art of being unreasonable’ is by no means a privilege of one sector of society and the fairly equal division of the chapters and their different emphases between governments and peoples is a reflection of this observation. In the previous section the focus was on the breaking point between collaboration and confrontation, and there are plenty of burnt cars, broken windows and road blocks, including thousands of smashed ATMs, to suggest that testing the breaking point is a very real part of the clashes

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between public action languages. In this section, the focus and concern are with those social arrangements that are able to support the co-existence of very different social languages in ways that provide a different anchorage for change that can be just as unreasonable and even at times confrontational; albeit in non-physical ways. The title of this section is from the book of the same name by Charlton (1998) on the disability rights movement, based on interviews with disability rights activists from countries in the Americas, South Africa, Asia and Europe. The expression itself became visible initially in sixteenth-century Poland where, translated into Latin (nihil de nobis, sine nobis), it became a reference for legislation that transferred authority from the monarch to the government and later was a key part of Hungarian law. As Charlton relates, he heard the expression from South African disability activists who themselves had heard it from an East European disability rights activist at an international conference. The fact that the phrase emerged in the arena of disability rights and then spread elsewhere has its own significance in relation to identity, as this part of one of Charlton’s interviews shows: I went to Winnipeg to attend the Rehabilitation International (RI) Conference (…) As you know, 1981 was the International Year of Disabled Persons, a year dedicated to full participation of disabled persons. But RI didn’t really practice this. At the conference, there were 5,000 delegates but only 200 disabled persons. So the disabled delegates got together and demanded that the executive committee be 50% people with disabilities. This was overwhelmingly rejected, so there was a split and the 200 disabled persons and some others formed Disabled Peoples’ International of which I have held various posts. I am the current chairperson until 1994. When I returned I was a changed person. When I left I was very passive, but when I returned I was very radical. Immediately when I returned from Winnipeg in 1981 we changed our name from National Council for the Welfare of the Disabled to the National Council of Disabled Persons Zimbabwe. At that time, we began to recognise that disability was about human rights, about social change, about organizing. We did not want to emphasize welfare but organization. (Interview with Joshua Malinga, in Charlton, 1998, pp. 12–13)

The significance of the phrase increased for Charlton, as he tells it, upon seeing a photograph on the front page of the Mexico City daily La Jornada of thousands of landless peasants marching under a banner with the words Nunca Mas Sin Nosotros (Never again without us).20 Commenting on the wide variety of different organizations that have been created in response to different personal and political needs in the area of disability rights, along with the significant changes that they have brought about, he sees the phrase as summing up not just a change in

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posture but also in redefining disability from a medical to a political and social condition. Today, the expression ‘people with disabilities’ – with all the implications that this has in terms of personhood – has replaced the older expressions, largely as the result of this pressure. People(s) can get themselves into the discussion about themselves by breaking down doors, by finding the appropriate moral or legal keys, or because the doors are opened, either permanently or for particular periods and reasons. There is no value scale implication in these or other metaphors for gaining place and space in a thematic meeting room; rather it is a recognition of possibilities. The theme of active presence, of participation or deliberation, is a constant in the social science, political science and development studies literature and has appeared directly or indirectly at many places in this and preceding chapters. Taking part, discussing, forming and taking decisions all happen in talk and happen in places. Recently there has been a growing interest in the variety of ways that these actions can take place, especially outside the formal patterns of representation with forms of gathering that have received the description of ‘minipublics’ (Fung, 2003) or ‘mini-publics’ (Goodin and Dryzek, 2006).21 These are designed to be groups small enough to be genuinely deliberative, and representative enough to be genuinely democratic (though rarely will they meet standards of statistical representativeness, and they are never representative in the electoral sense). Such mini-publics include Deliberative Polls, Consensus Conferences, Citizens’ Juries, planning cells and many others (…) Importantly different though all these designs are from one another, their reliance on small-group deliberations in mini-publics composed of ordinary citizens is what distinguishes them from a raft of other recent democratic innovations. (Goodin and Dryzek, 2006, p. 220)

Fung is more inclusive in his approach to mini publics than Goodin and Dryzin, for he sees this characteristic of small-group deliberation present in or as part of a variety of settings – from educative forums, participatory advisory panels, participatory problem-solving collaboration through to participatory democratic governance. One of the key examples he uses for this last type of setting, also mentioned in a 2005 UK survey of democratic innovations,22 is the participatory budget, introduced in Chapter 4. While all examples of mini publics create or adapt social languages as they create forms (deliberative, consensus, juries amongst others), the experiences of participatory budgeting are perhaps more instigating in that they sit on the intersection of two very different public action languages: participation, with its dynamic sense of involvement, novelty and engagement; and budgeting, in many senses the opposite.

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There have been many descriptions of participatory budgeting especially since it has broadened out from Brazil to elsewhere.23 Whether it is an alternative to orthodox budgeting, an important add-on, an exercise in education or, as Fung describes it, a significant move to democratic governance is a question in debate but the concern in this chapter is with the way that this intersection creates yet another language. There have been many variations in the Brazilian experiences, but they all tend to use a mix of different tiered discussion, beginning at the neighbourhood level, moving up to city districts and regions, and then to a city-wide forum of elected delegates from regions and neighbourhoods. This is complemented by city-wide thematic forums on more general themes such as environment, culture, economic development, transport as well as key social issues dealing, for example, with race, gender and discrimination. The number of delegates from neighbourhoods to regions and regions to a general forum depends on the number of residents who turn up to meetings, usually in a sliding scale: for example, up to 100, one for every ten; from 101 to 250, one for every 20, and so on. Attendance is usually significant, and Smith (2005) cites a figure of 8.5 per cent of the population of Porto Alegre, one of the first cities to adopt the practice, having taken part over a five-year period. In the Brazil case, the opening for participatory budgeting comes from the budget laws that require the executive to prepare the budget for the following year and send this to the legislative by a specified date, usually at the end of September. How the mayor goes about building the budget and who she or he involves is totally open providing that certain general restrictions or requirements are followed. The legislative will have final responsibility for the budget, and despite initial concerns that the different contributions from the participatory budget (usually around specific local investments) and the more city-wide issues may collide with the interests of elected representatives, the result has been a lot of learning on all sides. While the debates in the thematic forums will discuss general plans, major projects, policies and priorities the debates in the neighbourhoods, communities or ‘micro-regions’, as they are sometimes called, are quite different. They do not go from the general to the specific, rather they are and stay at the specific: improving lighting in a small commercial area that is key for people coming home from work after dark; a reform of a school playground that can be opened at weekends for community use; an extension to a health centre; paving an earth road; or building steps up a hillside. These are straightforward actions, there is no discussion of policy or planning, programmes or even projects. These are actions, and in some of the participatory budgets the residents themselves will have the formal authority to oversee the work being done when the particular

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action is approved. ‘Things to be done’ is a reminder of a very simple piece of organizing technology that also goes by the name of a ‘to-do list’. It is about action, very specific and apparently piecemeal, hardly even incremental, a bit here and a bit there, what was done last year and what can be done this year. But the results over some ten years have been major transformations in local neighbourhoods, in the way that budgeting is seen and in the characteristics of community leadership. Tarso Genro, who was mayor of Porto Alegre for two terms of office and followed the participatory budget from the beginning, had this to say in 1997: As a personal observer of this process over eight years, I can point to three different things that happened to community leaders in the participatory budget regions. A first group of leaders who were accustomed to working in a clientelist manner couldn’t overcome the limitations of this mode of working and began to be rejected by their communities. A second group effectively transformed themselves during the process. They acquired a new language and became true intermediaries between their base and the state (…) disputing the improvements that the community needed with the demands from other regions. A third group of leaders could be called as an emergent leadership, those that were formed in the participatory budget itself. (Genro and Souza, 1997, p. 33)

As can be seen, language is not an additional component or a separate part of a process, but is one and the same along with action and identity – in this case, the identity of community leadership within a budget process that is concerned with improvements and possibilities to be negotiated.

COOPERATION, ALLIANCES AND HYBRID FORUMS For ten years (1996–2005) the Public Management and Citizenship Program of the Getulio Vargas Foundation worked with the support of the Ford Foundation to identify, analyse and disseminate innovative practices amongst subnational Brazilian governments (states, municipalities and original people’s tribal governments) that had a positive impact on strengthening citizenship and on the quality of life. During this period, it was able to follow a wide variety of different experiences, including a number from the arena of participatory budgeting. This was also the period in Brazil when, as discussed in Chapter 5, public policy was becoming more visible in public life. The principal method used for identifying innovations was an annual open access award cycle, the starting point for which was an invitation

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sent to all municipalities and states, plus their different agencies, NGOs and Original People’s organizations to send information of what they were doing to improve public services in ways that had a positive impact on citizenship. In its ten years, the programme received information about some 8,000 innovative experiences, localized in 890 municipalities of different population sizes and various socio-economic levels as well as in all the Brazilian states, and also in a number of the Indigenous peoples and amongst the executive, legislative and judiciary branches of government (Farah and Spink, 2008). Experiences were sent in from a wide variety of areas and from many different types of jurisdiction. While it would be expected that the larger municipalities would be active – given that they are usually places with universities and NGOs – there were a significant number of entries from smaller municipalities, including those with fewer than 20,000 inhabitants. Entries came from all over the country, again an indication of the breadth of the experiences that have been received. One of the striking features that ran through the various experiences submitted was the constant presence of other organizations of different kinds, from both public sector and non-public sectors. Overall, some 66 per cent of all the programmes, projects and activities submitted reported working links with other governmental agencies either within the same jurisdiction, across jurisdictions or with another level of government or both. Further, approximately 60 per cent reported links with what can be broadly termed local community-based organizations, business and other associations. In some 46 per cent of the cases links were reported with both other governmental agencies and community and local organizations and associations. In contrast, in only 20 per cent of all the experiences submitted the agency or service was working alone without any external operational linkages. Placed in terms of public administration theory this suggests that in only 20 per cent of the cases were actions being undertaken using the presumed and normally taught managerial model of the hierarchical public sector agency working alone in its own patch, developing and implementing new practices in accordance with its own perspective. In the remaining 80 per cent of cases – hardly a minority – other organizations were present along with their different languages. The public sector organizations present covered the whole range that could be expected within a federal system: municipal, state, regional and federal agencies and secretariats; inter-municipal agencies and national regional bodies (such as development agencies), public system schools and public universities, public foundations and institutes, public banks and state-owned businesses.

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In the case of the non-public sector organizations the first point that stood out was their variety. In terms of presence, most mentions were made of neighbourhood associations and local private business enterprises (11 per cent each), followed by commissions councils or forums (9 per cent); Catholic Church organizations (6 per cent); professional associations (5 per cent); statutory councils (5 per cent); service or activist NGOs (4 per cent); producers’ associations (farming, fishing, etc.) (4 per cent) and trade unions (3 per cent). The remainder were spread around 1 or 2 per cent. Most of the categories used are self-explanatory but a few do require some discussion. First, the category of neighbourhood associations was used to cover all forms of organizations that had a specific territorial root and focus, including residents’ associations and community associations (sometimes called territorial base organizations). In different parts of the country these names will change as also they may change in terms of class. Middle-class neighbourhoods tend to use the term residents, others may use neighbourhood, or dwellers; what are favelas in Rio de Janeiro are comunidades in Recife. Statutory councils are those that are required by the 1988 Constitution to be present at each level of the federation and are gradually being put into place: for example, councils for the rights of children and adolescents and health councils. Many other councils have been created locally and others adopted in an advisory manner. A national study carried out in 1999, in the middle of the period under analysis, placed the number of municipal councils in different areas at 23,987 for the approximately 5,500 municipalities. The presence of business enterprises points to one of the key points from the study. The presence of major business enterprises is in fact very small, they appear at the 2 per cent level as business foundations, whereas the 11 per cent of private enterprises is basically made up of what are usually called local business concerns. That is, shops, small firms, local factories, car dealerships, local franchisees of fast food chains, soft drink distributors and the variety of other commercial activities that form part of everyday life. When added to the other principal categories it can be seen that the great majority of those active in working together with local governments are those who are territorially rooted and are part of the same place. Well over 95 per cent of the first ten types of organizations present are what might be expected to be around in a small and even medium-sized municipality. In a similar way, rather than representing any explicit theory about local governance and networks, the various alliances are taking place for very down-to-earth reasons – bringing resources and technical skills and helping to get things done.

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Interestingly, the principal reasons given for collaborating with other organizations from the public sector were almost the reverse of the reasons given for the non-public sector. For the former, the reasons given in order of magnitude were: first, financial; then, technical and logistical, co-implementation and operational; and, finally, co-management. For the latter, the reasons were: first, operational; second; co-implementation, then co-management, followed by technical and logistical; and, finally, financial. In both cases, public and non-public organizations are contributing with actions that take place in talk, with many different languages present. They are alliances rather than partnerships because they are more simple and straightforward, and they work because those involved think it makes sense, perhaps within some everyday notion of civic action, to be part of a heterogeneous community. In the case of these different experiences the starting point is in the possibility of collaboration. There is, however, another area of joint working wherein the origin is contentious and linked to controversies. The result is far from being a collaborative alliance but, nevertheless, there is a sense of trying to work it through. Here an important breakthrough has been the work of Callon et al. (2011) in the area of social, scientific, technical and technological controversies, where they introduced the expression ‘hybrid forums’ in a discussion of two different controversies. There are striking similarities between the two cases just set out. In the example of radioactive waste as in that of high-voltage lines, the uncertainties concerning the dangers incurred (whether long-term or short-term) are patent. In both cases, despite these uncertainties, indeed because of them, decisions nevertheless have to be made, or, as we say, “something must be done” (…) In both cases the controversies take place in public spaces that we propose to call hybrid forums – forums because they are open spaces where groups can come together to discuss technical options involving the collective, hybrid because the groups involved and the spokespersons claiming to represent them are heterogeneous, including experts, politicians, technicians, and laypersons who consider themselves involved. They are also hybrid because the questions and problems taken up are addressed at different levels in a variety of domains, from ethics to economic and including physiology, nuclear physics, and electromagnetism. (Callon et al., 2011, p. 18)

Hybrid forums emerge in conflict, at times violent, at times as a result of civil disobedience and other forms of resistance. But they can also become offers of collaboration which may open or close doors, give or deny voice – especially as they comment after an analysis of a variety of cases – to those who struggle to make their case but have been unable to gain access. Any organizational form will, simultaneously, support and

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constrain, any social language will include and exclude, and there is no simple answer to the resulting dilemmas. The hybrid forum (and the expression hybrid) refers to the possibility of putting together very different positions in a way that is hardly imaginable. It is not a synonym for difference, rather for radical difference. Sometimes these different forms of connection can begin to move together, but sometimes they fall apart or never connect.

NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

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Paul III (1537), accessed 20 June at http://www.papalencyclicals.net/paul03/p3subli.htm Skinner (1998). See the longer discussion in McKeon (1990). Gearty (2006). Ignatieff (2001). Spink (2000). See, for example, Forejohn (2003). UN HABITAT (2010). Originally introduced by Henri Lefebvre in 1968 (see Lefebvre (1996)) it became a central part of the urban debate in the later writings of Harvey (for example, 2003). Canada (Farha, 2016). See notes by Moyn (2014, 10 June). Roosevelt had used dignity in his 1941 Message to Congress, both as the ‘rights and dignity of all our fellow-men within our gates’ and also in terms of a ‘decent respect for the rights and dignitiy of all nations, large and small’. See for example the discussion by Boltanski and Thévenot (2006) of the civic world in their On Justification: Economies of Worth and Honneth (1995) on collective struggles for recognition, amongst many others. Which has been well treated by scholars such as Keane (1988), Cohen and Arato (1994), Chambers and Kymlicka (2002), Edwards (2004). Fowler and Biekart (2008). Industrial Areas Foundation (undated). Living Wage Organization (undated). Rudé (1964/1981). Canetti (1962). See Hirschman’s Exit, Voice and Loyalty (1970). Charlton (1998, p. 16). In both cases the authors report back to Dahl’s ‘minipopulous’ (Dahl, 1989) although they differ in the way of writing the term. The author has adopted mini public as an intermediate position. See Smith (2005). Smith (2005), Wampler (2007, 2015), Costa (2010), Bertelsmann Stiftung (2011).

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7. Beyond public policy: public action languages and the negotiation of possibilities The argument set out in the introductory chapter consisted of three points. First, that although it may seem central and obvious, policy is only one of a number of social languages that can be found in and around government action. Some have been in place for a long time before policy, others are more recent or, even, emerging. Some were seen as equally central in their time and others, such as governance, may be vying for centrality. Some can be found linked together, but rarely in a hierarchical manner. Others just seem to go their own way. The second point was a question about centrality. If the first point turns out to be acceptable and valid, as the previous chapters that looked at some of the social languages that can be found around government seem to indicate, then apart from a normative desire to somehow place governing into a logical hierarchical framework, as for example in the persistent narrative of authoritative instrumentalism, centrality is more of a hindrance than a help. To remember Colebatch et al.’s critique: In the narrative of authoritative instrumentalism, governing happens when ‘the government’ recognizes problems and decides to do something about them; what it decides to do is called ‘policy’. The narrative constitutes an actor called ‘the government’ and attributes to it instrumental rationality; it acts as it does in order to achieve preferred outcomes. (2010, p. 15)

How then to deal with the heterogeneity of these different social languages that are part professional, part political and part everyday; that can be found in different departments and agencies of public sector affairs? The third point was to take this evolving argument further, to the other side of the street or out into the fields, the rivers or along the coasts, and ask if collective life is merely a question of the government or the governed, with some generic addendum to bring in society as context. What happens when the same questions are applied to the way in which people(s) go about creating and raising issues and, also, solving problems 171

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for themselves? Does this happen in a single social language called civil society or are there, equally, a heterogeneity of social languages which may connect or disconnect with one another and, equally, connect or disconnect with those to be found when talking from the government side of public affairs? After six chapters which have looked at these points from a number of different angles and in various moments and periods in time, it would seem that the argument continues to stand. It may not be a popular argument and there may be disciplinary difficulties, but at least for the moment it offers a way of understanding part of the complexity of public affairs. How then to deal with the challenge of creating and negotiating possibilities? This is the focus of this last chapter. It begins with an example of a setting in which there is little or no connection between these different languages and where ‘service’, in anything other than a minimal sense, breaks down. It uses a middleincome country, Brazil, but similar situations have also appeared in recent research from the USA (for example Desmond’s 2016 study of evictions) and, in a literary format, in Ken Loach’s award-winning film I, Daniel Blake about social services in the UK (2016). Together they suggest that this type of setting is more common than is thought. In discussing the example, the chapter will bring in some of the ideas that have been developed in the preceding chapters as well as introducing others that may help to understand the challenges of heterogeneity. It will go on to look at the possible futures for policy and touch on an issue that a number of colleagues have raised when debating the idea of public action languages but which, as mentioned in the introduction, would require a different kind of study to address in any depth: why did public policy become so popular? To finish, the chapter will reinforce what has been said at different points: the proposal of public action languages is an approach, which, if followed, implies the negotiation of possibilities. By implication, it is also about the presence of impossibilities.

WORKING WITH URBAN VULNERABILITY The example comes from an ongoing cluster of applied research projects on the micro-level impacts of social, material and institutional vulnerabilities present in big cities and multi-city conurbations; especially those which are aggravated by precarious processes of high-density land occupation, habitation deficit and changes in patterns of sustaining livelihoods. It involves colleagues from various universities in São Paulo who share the idea of carrying out different studies in the same territorial

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area and, in doing so, look for ways in which resources could be combined and results made more useful to those directly involved in local affairs. This simple starting point of linking research, public service and a more equitable use of university resources is one that colleagues in urban affairs are assuming in various parts of the world. It has echoes of urban outreach, of field stations1 and of community-based action research, to name but a few traditions, but is perhaps better located within the current discussion of the civic university (see Goddard, 2009). The work has been going on since 2013 in the peripheral south zone of the municipality of São Paulo. São Paulo with 11 million inhabitants and the greater São Paulo metropolitan area with 21 million inhabitants are situated only 35 miles from the port of Santos on the coast but at an elevation of some 750 metres above sea level within the coastal mountain range. Unlike most of the big cities of the world which can be found near the outlets of rivers or at least considerably downstream (Cairo, Rome, Paris, London, New York, to cite but a few), São Paulo is not just upstream but sits on top of its catchment area in a broad water basin whose many streams and artificial lakes push water inland to form the Paraná River, which passes Paraguay and Uruguay before reaching the sea at Buenos Aires, Argentina. Hence, despite the photographs which suggest that São Paulo is a flat maze of high-rise buildings, it is in fact a city full of hills and valleys, from which and through which emerge and flow numerous small streams and rivers – under roads, in back gardens and even under houses. The south zone of São Paulo can be divided into three successive areas. The first is what those in the wealthier regions call the south zone (zona sul) which starts at the Paulista Avenue and goes out past the Ibirapueira Park and the well-urbanized houses and flats towards the national airport at Congonhas. The second is more mixed and starts more or less at the airport and moves on to cover what used to be part of the municipality of Santo Amaro, founded some 400 years ago and annexed to São Paulo in 1935. The rest of the old municipality moves on south and crosses the Pinheiros River where it splits into two parts, one on either side of the Guarapiranga water reservoir. As it crosses the river (over three different bridges) it materializes expressions that are often heard when discussing the differences in distribution and quality of public services and the way in which the police act: this side of the bridge; the other side of the bridge. For the planners in the city hall, some 25 kilometres away and in the centre of town, this is part of the periphery (periferia) of São Paulo; an expression that is used to talk about the outer zone of the city, towards its limits with adjoining municipalities. But it is also an expression that

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positions people as being working class, which in Brazil is often synonymous with having low incomes, with substandard housing, with a poor education, with a higher percentage of Afro-descendants, and often being seen as problematic. On the western side of the Guarapiranga reservoir are two districts – Jardim Ângela and Jardim São Luís – that make up the regional sub-prefecture of M’Boi Mirim with a population of over 600,000. If they were in fact a municipality they would be the ninth largest municipality in the state of São Paulo. Even though the sub-prefectures are meant to assume a role in local-level coordination, they are basically involved in local-level street and drainage maintenance, with a very low budget and little authority. The two districts together are like an invisible city, similar to a number of others in the municipality. São Paulo has a single municipal chamber for its 11 million population, with 55 members voted on at large lists. The two districts went through a housing explosion from the 1960s onwards, fuelled by the industrial boom in São Paulo which brought many thousands in search of work to a city without any plans for the necessary housing. The introduction of restrictive legislation on agriculture, including a ban on pesticides in water catchment areas, led to small farmers selling out and moving away. The new arrivals, as well as those pushed out of downtown squatter areas by a housing boom, bought formal or semi-formal small plots of land carved out of the former agricultural properties or, in the impossibility of payment, occupied the leftover public land alongside rivers or on hillsides. When people tell their histories, they describe very similar processes: ‘We first dug a well to get down to the water, then we built a room and then bit by bit we carried on, when we had the money, the time and as the family expanded.’2 The landscape of Jardim Ângela and its co-district Jardim Luís is highly undulated and today it is marked by high-density housing that seems to occupy all available possibilities – and impossibilities – of location. Despite the heavy subtropical rainfall in summer months, there are no sloped roofs. The tops are flat and unfinished and are very key parts of the property: either for holding social gatherings or for, when necessary, building more rooms: (social) space is indeed a (social) product. Self-building did not apply only to housing3 but also to most everything else. These were areas of the outskirts of São Paulo that were largely ignored by the municipal government in the 1970s, part of the period of military rule, and those present had to fend for themselves. Many of them were religious people – Brazil has a large Catholic population – and were used to the Church playing an important role as a

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community institution. They built their own chapels for worship that in turn served as meeting points which in its turn strengthened the communities and became key elements in the São Paulo Catholic Church’s 1970s’ option for liberation theology. With municipal government absent, social mobilization, through the ecclesiastical base communities and trade unions, was the route to providing basic services and pressuring for place-based public investment. Water, electricity, sewage, schools, health and transport amongst others were many of the themes that people recall fighting for and which were put in not before, as planners would prefer, but after the houses had been built. Little by little the state and its organizations began arriving, but the communities in their different ways had already been active and as well as mobilizing had also been creating various social services which in turn were supported by the municipality. A document published by the Municipal Secretary for Social Assistance and Development (SMADS, 2013), which analysed the different regions of the municipality of São Paulo stated that in the region of M’Boi Mirim, some 36 per cent of the population can be classified as being in high and very high vulnerability, which rises to 50 per cent in Jardim Ângela. The description continues with an appraisal of social services: In relation to the network of social services, the area of the sub prefecture has 79 different service units capable of attending together 16,610 clients and is the most well equipped of the southern zone 1. Of these units, the Municipality directly runs three (2 CRAS and 1 CREAS). Amongst the services that are contracted, the major part is focused on children and adolescents (…). (p.105)4

The three service units that are run directly by the municipality are the coordinating units for social welfare (known as reference centres in the terminology of the Unified Social Service System). A simple calculation shows that the remainder – 76 – are run by other organizations in the region; many of them faith based and many of which were there long before the effective arrival of the local state and the new social welfare system as a result of the 1988 Constitution. Despite the many positive aspects of community mobilization, this remains an area that is faced with very complicated social, material and institutional issues. The two districts and their near neighbour (Capão Redondo) were classified during the 1990s as being the most dangerous places on the planet. Even today police violence and the violent death of young, mainly black, males are still at a frightening level. There are over 50 areas that have been identified as being in serious risk of land slippage and flooding and probably many others still to be identified. Most of the

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formal and semi-formal plots that were sold back in the 1960s and 1970s do not have officially registered land title deeds and while there are a number of public services there is very little inter-agency coordination and the different scales of internal agency coordination can be very different.

THE MYSTERY OF THE ABSENT STATE When the research began and those involved in the research projects started to move around the area and take part in forums and meetings, they were frequently told that the big problem that communities faced was that ‘the state was absent’. This seemed a bit strange given that although the region was big, there were services around. Indeed, one of the reasons for seeking to work in the area were contacts made previously with some of the originally community-based social service organizations. In order to discuss this better with residents in different settings, simple 60 cm × 90 cm maps were made out from street guides which were then photocopied and along with coloured markers served as a simple and mobile instrument to locate and discuss services. The maps showed that there were services spread around the region and, yes, they could be better distributed. The tendency was to find more services in the top northern half closer to the river, the first area to be settled, and some territorial distribution problems in parts of the more southern part, moving towards the outer limits of the municipality. In taking the maps to meetings and forums to discuss the findings, the reason for the apparent contradiction began to become clearer – more so when different studies began to get closer to the day to day of street-level service workers, and clearer still in the different thematic forums where local community leaders and activists would talk about specific issues. Coordination in the different service areas was upwards and downwards, not sideways, and the languages in use were also different. While most services used the districts as a basis for initial organization, the way these were combined into regions varied. In some critical areas, for example policing, an entirely different approach was adopted. In terms of social languages, education follows a federal law that sets directives, norms, requirements and a National Education Plan that determines directives, guidelines, goals and strategies for ‘educational policy’ for a rolling ten years. Within this, individual states and municipalities will also develop policies and plans that are consonant with the National Plan. Health, which constitutionally is a right of all and a duty of the state to

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provide, is seen as a universal health system which is very much influenced by its principles (universal care, equity in care, integrity in care) and its organizational principles: regionalization and hierarchy of complexity; decentralization and a single command; participation of society through councils and conferences. Within this, systems, rights and plans are a common theme. Social assistance uses a more normative framework of types of service and types of problem, with social policy and public policy very present. Interesting here is to note that education has a longer public history with previous federal laws of directives and foundations (Lei de Diretrizes e Bases) in 1961 and 1971. Health was very active in the constitutional congress in the 1980s which was marked by the theme of rights. Social assistance, present in the constitution, was only finally implemented as a unified social assistance system in 2005 when public policy as an expression was much more visible. Housing and urbanism tend to talk about plans and instruments, culture about incentives and programmes, and there will also be talk about public policies. Many of the social organizations which are contracted to work in different areas of welfare provision, and also in child care day centres, were originally faith-based organizations and, while no longer religious in practice, tend to share key values of solidarity and care. It was then that the term connectivity began to emerge, along with the idea that simply doing the basic job in settings of vulnerability was not enough, for the issues are not single issues but complicated issues involving different services. If health services don’t connect to education, or education to social services, or any other of a myriad of connections that are necessary to deal with everyday issues, this can seriously limit what people can do on their own, especially when they are trying to hold together very fragile livelihoods. Transport is very complicated in areas with a highly undulating terrain, where side roads have to go back and forth up the hillsides and bus access is very scarce. The huge concrete stairways that can cut corners are not safe at certain times of day and some are never safe. Connection however was not just a question of walking a few blocks to a neighbourhood health centre or a quick drive to a school, for the different services were not that far away from each other. It was about services turned in on themselves. As a community leader commented, ‘we can do a lot, but if the state doesn’t do its part there is a tendency to give up’. The state, in other words, is not the services but the connective presence of being together in a supportive manner; connection is not just about organizational decisions or additional elements on a job description, but very much about the many different social languages in use.

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THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STREET AND A FLAT SOCIAL There are various ways of thinking about what is emerging from these different projects, but certainly one of them has to do with the way in which social and material vulnerabilities are considerably affected by institutional vulnerabilities. Merkel (2004) in his discussion of embedded and defective democracies is concerned with the comparative studies of countries. Indeed, if it hadn’t been for Loach and Desmond, amongst others, those involved in the vulnerability studies might well have put their initial conclusions into his ‘defective’ country democracy category. But given that neither the USA nor the UK are ‘defective democracies’ and similar events are taking place, perhaps it is worth thinking about how, not as a whole, but in parts and fragments, even the most democratic of countries can also be highly defective. Here is his definition: In intact democracies, legitimate representatives are bound to constitutional principles. In an illiberal democracy, with its incomplete and damaged constitutional state, the executive and legislative control of the state are only weakly limited by the judiciary. Additionally, constitutional norms have little binding impact on government actions and individual civil rights are either partially suspended or not yet established. In illiberal democracies, the principle of the rule of law is damaged, affecting the actual core of liberal self-understanding, namely the equal freedom of all individuals. This is the most common type of ‘defective democracy’, and it can be found all over the world. (Merkel, 2004, p. 49)

It took a long time to get to the other side of the street, for it wasn’t a question of crossing the road. It required moving away from some very ubiquitous state-centred and implicitly hierarchical presumptions, of which perhaps the most difficult was that of a world of action organized from the general to the specific. Also present is a strong normative belief that public issue resolution in democracies is guided by some form of participation, if not also deliberation. There will be controversies, but these should lead to consensus or at least acceptance and where, for example, policy or planning or budget fields are not level, attempts should be made to make up the differences. Translated into public sector service provision and governmental action, this leads to the further assumption of overall service provision as seeking to build a good fit between the many different ways of providing and or regulating services and the different demands present in society.

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Seeking to build a good fit does not mean the search for a perfect match for, as Beer pointed out in his cybernetic approach to service provision,5 demands change as societies and services themselves change. Nor does it imply that there will be widespread agreement about what is being offered and what is being required. Indeed elections, polls, newspapers, processes of open and continuing consultation and protest marches are all examples of disagreements in terms of issue, scale and focus. However, when talking about consolidated democracies, the reference is usually to polities in which some kind of middle ground has been established and through which a minimum balance is possible. This is also the case when the discussion turns to implementation; adjustment may be necessary, it may be an incremental learning process, but it will work out in the end. Overall, the many social languages discussed in previous chapters which are found around governments in action and which play a major role in performing public affairs tend to follow the view that there should be a ‘general’ or ‘overall’ plan (policy, budget, programme, decision, directive, etc.) that will later be adapted to ‘specific’ circumstances; that is, the route is from the former to the latter. At the same time, those involved will recognize that governments may develop programmes that affect a wide range of issues and territories, but their results do not happen in a place called ‘everywhere’; they will always be applied by ‘someone somewhere’. While planners, programme managers and policy analysts may be concerned about the implications, the sheer weight of expressions that flow through the different ways of doing government, the organization of data in tables and diagrams, the reports and diagnosis will all favour the normal procedure of assuming that the variety of somewhere can be accommodated by the flexibility of a well-designed everywhere. Is this a logical conclusion, or a proposition that has limits? What about the implications of the reverse relationship, from the specific to the general? After all, everything happens in places. Here, there is important work in human geography and social theory about place (Hubbard and Kitchin, 2011), and in economics about development as locally situated (Boisier, 2005); or arguments by Latour about the flat social (1996) and by Marston et al. (2005) about non-scalar geography and a flat ontology. Whether it is intentional or not, the general to the specific – present in policy, plans and many other bits of soft and hard technology – leads to the notions of different levels of structure as being higher up, in the centre, instead of recognizing that they are: ‘not at some level once removed, “up there” in a vertical imagery, but on the ground, in practice, the result of marking territories horizontally through boundaries and enclosures, documents and rules, enforcing agents and their

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authoritative resources’ (Marston et al., 2005, p. 420). Take, as a further example, expressions such as ‘frontline worker’, ‘first time responder’ or ‘direct service provider’. If these are read within a hierarchical organizational format of decisions and implementation, the result is one kind of impression. If these are read as from the specifics of each one, what it means to be first, the impression changes.6 If you set yourself the task of following practices, objects and instruments, you never again cross that abrupt threshold that should appear, according to earlier theory, between the level of ‘face-to-face’ interaction and that of social structure; between the ‘micro’ and the ‘macro’ (…) Social worlds remain flat at all points, without there being any folding that might permit a passage from the ‘micro’ to the ‘macro’. For example the traffic control room for Paris buses does indeed dominate the multiplicity of buses, but it would not know how to constitute a structure ‘above’ the interactions of the bus drivers. It is added on to those interactions. The old difference of levels comes merely from overlooking the material connections that permit one place to be linked to others and from belief in purely face-to-face interactions. (Latour, 1996, p. 240)

To Latour’s practices, objects and instruments could be added the different social languages that connect and disconnect the bus drivers and the traffic control room; equally so, the social languages of passengers for whom a bus is not an end in and of itself but part of a daily, weekly or eventual pattern of movement necessary to help things happen. Indeed, very little attention is paid to the fact that patterns of mobility of women can often be radically different from those of men.7 The tension between the everywhere and the somewhere, between the general and the specific, was well described by Friend (1977a) in studies on regional and local government coordination in the UK. He pointed to the differences between the government-centred view of community service provisions (the ‘government policy space’) and the citizencentred view of people in their ‘life spaces’. In the former, where concern is with the implementation of programmes and policies, the different services are like the different parts of a fan; each of which spreads out towards different groups or populations, often with different levels of intersection within national, regional or local authorities and agencies. When ministers, secretaries and programme managers gather together, concern is with the coherence of these different activities as part of a government platform or action agenda; which will also require negotiating possibilities between the different social action languages present. For the citizen in the day to day, the situation is the reverse. Her, his and, more often, their social reality is made up of very concrete questions

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and issues linked to different demands and rights: a single mother with a young baby who needs to work; an elderly person who needs to move around; a youngster looking for books that aren’t in the school library. Think also of a community association fighting to stop commercial property development on land that is urgently needed for communitybased resources, such as a park and a community centre. For them, the day to day in relation to state action is made up of bits of different questions and social and material solutions, which are treated and delivered by different bits of the various organizations whose actions fan outwards towards everyday life. The executive or cabinet or policy committee is concerned with implementation; the citizen, family, friends and neighbours are concerned with where things are, how to get to them and how to put the bits together to solve very specific issues. If the image of the fan is translated into the image of a left hand and a right hand, then the key point becomes how can the hands get together. Can the fingers of the left hand ‘policy space’ connect with the fingers of the right hand ‘life space’? Friend was concerned with the implications for coordination and in doing so provided an important and earlier questioning of the tendency to fall back to the ‘general’ rather than the ‘specific’. Whenever the provision of services to the public seems to be becoming fragmented among too many specialized departments or agencies, people tend to seek better co-ordination by moving to another level where things can be seen in a more rounded, less blinkered way. But should this [level] mean moving closer to the level of the individual citizen for whom the service is intended or towards the heart of the government system through which control is exercised, or are there ways of making progress in both directions at once? (1977a, p. 4)

Friedmann (1992) used a similar approach in referring to those aspects of the day to day that are key to social power in overcoming poverty and the important role played by state agencies in helping or hindering their acquisition. These he identified as financial resources; social networks; appropriate information; surplus time over subsistence requirements; instruments of work or livelihood; social organization; knowledge and skills; and a defensible life space. As he argued, all of these are areas in which governments and public services can make significant impacts, both positively and negatively, not just to individuals but to the various connections present in a household economy. Here again the theme of institutional vulnerability is present; the impacts can be positive or negative. As was pointed out in one of the discussions in Jardim Ângela, ‘if you are not helping than you are hindering – there is no neutral zone’.

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Taking this a step further, it seems reasonable to argue that when the variety of somewhere(s) is limited and the mismatch between the general and the specific can be adjusted in one way or another through resources, opportunities or social and organizational innovations (such as participatory planning or budgeting or community debates and implementation monitoring), the principle of adaptation in implementation may hold good for all practical purposes – even though it might be questionable on logical or theoretical grounds, as discussed in Chapter 5. But what happens when the mismatch becomes too much for the fragile settings in which households may be seeking to sustain some kind of livelihood, to make it through, get by, hold the bits together? When social vulnerability is not only aggravated by material vulnerability but also by the institutional vulnerability produced by the holes in the safety nets, the lack of connection between territorially-based services, or between national and regional plans and directives; all performed in the many social languages that don’t necessarily ‘make sense’ to each other. In the different conversations and studies, sometimes the two ‘hands’ would connect and sometimes they would end up being so limited in their interconnections that it is as if they were worlds apart, talking a different language. Sometimes it can work – and citizens and public officials can put the different bits of solutions together and find a way through as, for example, in the discussion by Wagenaar (2007) of citizen initiatives in disadvantaged neighbourhoods in the Netherlands – but sometimes not. Here is one of Desmond’s graphic descriptions: If Arleen and Vanetta didn’t have to dedicate 70 or 80 percent of their income to rent, they could keep their kids fed and clothed and off the streets. They could settle down in one neighborhood and enrol their children in one school, providing them the opportunity to form long-lasting relationships with friends, role models and teachers. They could start a savings account or buy their children toys and books, even a home computer. The time and energy they spent making rent, delaying eviction, or finding another place to live when homeless could instead be spent on things that enriched their lives: community colleges, classes, exercise, finding a good job, maybe a good man too. (2016, p. 295)

While these examples come from settings where there are obvious disadvantages present, the very same issues can be around in many other places. Factories can close down, putting whole neighbourhoods out of work, including the local commerce. As Desmond also comments, for a long time in the USA a rental payment of no more than 30 per cent of household income was a consensus goal that most people could meet. Almost overnight, this became more impossible for more people and

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evictions began to rise. Complexities are not easy to understand and even more difficult to do something about, especially many of those in the broader social field, as Rittel and Webber pointed out in their discussion of wicked problems as essentially unique: ‘There are no classes of wicked problems in the sense that principles of solution can be developed to fit all members of a class (…) In the more complex world of social policy planning, every situation is likely to be one-of-a-kind’ (1973, pp. 164–165). Here is one of many tales that tend to confirm the dilemma of the specifics. It is from a meeting of local residents in the very southern part of the district of Jardim Ângela, at one of the few multipurpose schools in the region, to discuss the tensions between housing and water management. The title was: The waters and the community: what should we be doing? (The waters, plural, referred to the Guarapiranga reservoir, the streams and the natural springs that are still very visible in some areas.) In the morning there were presentations of some final-year studies by students of architecture who had been working in the area, and in the afternoon there were other experiences by local groups and a debate on possible actions. The final year architecture students and their tutors started off their different presentations by first discussing the southern region of the city as a whole. This included the broad south zone on both sides of the reservoir and the rural area of its southern catchment zones. They emphasized the importance of the water catchment issues versus housing, as had the professor from the other university’s water resources program who had talked before. They then, as they put it, scaled down to the M’Boi region running beside the reservoir on the west bank. It was a very good analysis with data and maps, but the maps looked like those of the municipal planners with linear parks running along the reservoir, when everybody there knew that those areas are currently being invaded and the parks don’t exist. They had picked up the issues of mobility but tended to see this as a question of getting people out of the region to work in the morning and back at the end of the day. It included using cable cars – echoes of Rio de Janeiro and Medellin – but they hadn’t picked up everyday mobility in and around services, shops and schools. If you see something as a dormitory region you will treat it as a dormitory region, an empty territory that is only filled at night. Then they moved again to little pieces of neighbourhoods with a few streets, different houses mapped out, with streams and what few green mini-areas existed, or at least mini-squares. Then they moved to their individual projects of specific individual installations and it seemed like the rest suddenly all faded away into a background blur. I turned to a colleague who said, why didn’t they start with the little pieces of neighbourhoods and remembered the architects from the “cities in movement” group who worked on the importance of the walkways and stairways that go up and down the hills and which people use as a way of cutting kilometres off

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their routes to the buses along the roads that zigzag up the hillside like a mini version of the roads up to an alpine pass. (Diary notes from an open forum meeting on housing and the waters held in the southern part of Jardim Ângela PKS, May 2017)

WILL PUBLIC POLICY SURVIVE OR HAS IT OUTGROWN ITS USEFULNESS? Looking back over the preceding chapters, the immediate answer to the question about the survival of policy would seem to be yes; but not in its currently imagined form and certainly not in the precise view of all the different attempts at definitions. Here are some examples from documents in active circulation that are designed to help people get on with actions in key areas and with discussing expectations about what governments can do. They are written to be practically useful and result from social processes of debate and discussion. The first example comes from the current worldwide United Nations initiative around the Sustainable Development Goals. The Sustainable Development Goals are a call for action by all countries – poor, rich and middle-income – to promote prosperity while protecting the planet. They recognize that ending poverty must go hand-in-hand with strategies that build economic growth and address a range of social needs including education, health, social protection, and job opportunities, while tackling climate change and environmental protection.8 Goal 1 No poverty: While global poverty rates have been cut by more than half since 2000, one in ten people in developing regions are still living with their families on less than the international poverty line of US$1.90 a day, and there are millions more who make little more than this daily amount. Significant progress has been made in many countries within Eastern and Southeastern Asia, but up to 42% of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa continues to live below the poverty line. Poverty is more than the lack of income and resources to ensure a sustainable livelihood. Its manifestations include hunger and malnutrition, limited access to education and other basic services, social discrimination and exclusion as well as the lack of participation in decision-making. Economic growth must be inclusive to provide sustainable jobs and promote equality. Social protection systems need to be implemented to help alleviate the suffering of disaster-prone countries and provide support in the face of great economic risks. These systems will help strengthen responses by afflicted populations to unexpected economic losses during disasters and will eventually help to end extreme poverty in the most impoverished areas.9

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The Sustainable Development Goals are targets to be reached by the year 2030; they are not policies to be implemented. They may seem similar, but they are very different. How countries and peoples reach these targets and the social languages they use for this will vary considerably, similar to the very early discussion about directives. The description of the poverty goal includes a comment on ‘social protection systems’ which links to another area of United Nations activity that has grown a lot in recent years: disaster relief. Here, other social languages play an important role including the term vulnerability which has a history of meanings not unlike policy, with the major difference being that despite being used in a wide variety of areas and themes, it has remained fairly close to the latin vulnerare (to wound). In March 2016, the British Library registered some 38,096 items in its catalogue under vulnerability. Of these, less than 0.1 per cent were from before 1980 and are concerned with, amongst other things, fortifications, atomic bomb explosions, civil defence from attacks, economics, genetic vulnerability of crops, early childhood. In 1980, the report of the Office of the United Nations Disaster Relief Coordinator (UNDRO) on natural disasters and vulnerability analysis from the 1979 Expert Group Meeting was published; itself a result of previous studies. From this period, the different fields that adopt the expression grow significantly and the number of publications form a steeply rising curve. To what extent this is a direct influence of the UNDRO report would require a separate study but, to recall Weick’s sensemaking (1995), it is more likely that such events are used as justifiers. It is always convenient to have an imaginary starting point but, in practice, terms tend to drift in and out of popularity in a variety of ways. Today, one of the leading references for disaster-based work on vulnerability is the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, especially through its vulnerability and capacity assessment approach. Yet when the Red Cross produced its commentaries on the Geneva Conventions of August 1949 there was only one use of the term in some 466 pages, and that referred to the concern that with a broader use of the red cross symbol beyond strict military control to include civilian hospitals, staff and certain means of transport, the ‘emblem is thus rendered more vulnerable than before and there is a vital need for its protection to be reinforced and the vigilance against misuse increased’ (ICRC, 1952, pp. 393–394). Barnardo’s, discussed in Chapter 2, is one of the UK’s leading NGOs in the field of children and adolescents and it will proudly, with all reason, state that ‘for 150 years we’ve been supporting the UK’s most vulnerable children’, but that was not a term that its founder would have used, when he wrote out the sign

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‘no destitute child ever refused permission’. In 1924, the League of Nations adopted the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child, which had been drafted by Eglantyne Jebb, one of the founders of Save the Children also mentioned in Chapter 2. When reading the Declaration today the implicit reference to what is currently understood as vulnerability is very clear, but it is difficult to understand that this ‘clarity’ is a recent phenomenon. There is no answer to the question of why vulnerability, despite its constant presence over the centuries, should take such a long time to move into public affairs; but when it does, it rapidly becomes a key word. Systems are described as vulnerable; populations become vulnerable to climate change. Vulnerability is not synonymous with poverty, for the rich too are vulnerable in many areas, but being poor especially within current multi-dimensional approaches to poverty can increase vulnerability. People well integrated in their communities can rapidly become vulnerable in the face of unstable labour markets and precarious work contracts. Women and girls are more vulnerable than men and boys in certain areas of violence and sexual discrimination, while black male youths can be, as in Brazil, more vulnerable than their white colleagues in relation to death from violent causes. While it is certainly not unusual for a word to find itself in a variety of settings, as various examples throughout the book have shown, what is interesting about vulnerability is that the basic relational idea has remained constant. It has gained new dimensions such as risk and resilience, but the central idea remains that people are potentially vulnerable as a result of (a) what can happen externally and (b) how they protect themselves. They can protect themselves as much as they like, but that won’t stop them being vulnerable; however, if they don’t protect themselves or are not protected by others, they will be highly vulnerable in situations where those – better protected – won’t be. As a result, in both cases, there is much that can be done by a number of different agencies and actors that can tilt the scales one way or another. The 2014 UN Human Development Report provides a similar example: Much of the early work on vulnerability focused on natural disasters in the 1970s. A landmark study showed that the incidence of natural disasters and fatalities was increasing and the burden of death fell disproportionately on developing countries. One of the authors developed the concept of vulnerability as both external (exposure to risks) and internal (people’s capacity to cope). More recent frameworks, such as the World Risk Report, have added a third component, adaptation (capacities for long-term societal changes). (UNDP, 2014, p. 28)

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The Third UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction (2015) created a series of global targets and priorities of action known as the Sendai Framework,10 from the Japanese city where the meeting was held. Policy and policies play a role but not as the guiding hand of the framework. When they appear, it is usually in relation to some other activity, or action language: policy and planning; policies and measures; policies and practices; policies and plans; policies and strategies. Here is a citation from the preamble and another from the section on guiding principles: 2. During the World Conference, States also reiterated their commitment to address disaster risk reduction and the building of resilience to disasters with a renewed sense of urgency within the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication, and to integrate, as appropriate, both disaster risk reduction and the building of resilience into policies, plans, programmes and budgets at all levels and to consider both within relevant frameworks. (UNISDR/Sendai Framework, p. 9) h) The development, strengthening and implementation of relevant policies, plans, practices and mechanisms need to aim at coherence, as appropriate, across sustainable development and growth, food security, health and safety, climate change and variability, environmental management and disaster risk reduction agendas. Disaster risk reduction is essential to achieve sustainable development. (p. 13)

Policy as can be seen, does have a role and a contribution, but what is it actually? Here, a companion United Nations document, post-Sendai, is helpful in that it deals specifically with disaster risk reduction terminology.11 A global, agreed policy of disaster risk reduction is set out in the United Nations endorsed Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030, adopted in March 2015, whose expected outcome over the next 15 years is: ‘The substantial reduction of disaster risk and losses in lives, livelihoods and health and in the economic, physical, social, cultural and environmental assets of persons, businesses, communities and countries’. (p.16)

Policy here is more like a midfield notion that brings together positions, priorities and stances from the one side and outcomes from the others. It has more of a sense of mission than of directives and there are moral undertones that this is important. In other parts of the same text, policy is seen as offering guidance and usually can be found together with plans and strategies. Guidance, again, is also a midfield notion; partly technical, partly experience and partly stance and position. But it is part of dealing with disaster; one of many bits and pieces. Public policy, as

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practice, may be part of governing, but so are budgeting, planning, programming, directives, decisions, laws, bills and a host of other social languages that can be found in use both generally and also, as it were, with specific versions or dialects in individual thematic areas. To imagine a middle manager in a public agency or a programme coordinator faced with objectives, a budget constraint, a court order and a plea on rights: which route will be more ‘just’? This is where guidance comes in and as an expression it shares a lot of the midfield sense of policy as priority or position. Some may talk of policy guidance, but others will dispense the policy. The issue is, in looking at these different arenas of discussion and returning to Chapter 3, to move away from the debate on how an expression should be defined and follow the path of how it is practically being defined in use. The route is not from the definition to the use, but from the use to the definition. The question becomes: with what words are things being done? In the disaster-risk area, and despite its critics, governance seems to be useful: this is from the same document on disaster risk terminology. Disaster risk governance: The system of institutions, mechanisms, policy and legal frameworks and other arrangements to guide, coordinate and oversee risk reduction and related areas of policy. (Annotation: Good governance needs to be transparent, inclusive, collective and efficient to reduce existing disaster risks and avoid creating new ones). (p.16)

A CHALLENGE FOR POLICY – BUT ALSO FOR GOVERNANCE There are a number of different lines that could be pursued in order to think more about how policy got itself into its current position. There is still a sense of its usefulness, but scholars are increasingly lost as to what it is and why. Unfortunately, different to rights and objectives, it does not have universal appeal. You don’t need to be a lawyer to talk about rights, at least nowadays, and most people have no problems with the question ‘what are you trying to do?’ – which can come with the intonation on the what, the you and the trying, making at least three different utterances. Social movements will ask for action, community leaders will discuss a plan for the protest and most people know that, in today’s world, if you don’t have it you can’t spend it. In other words, many of the social languages from the governing arena of public action have drifted, in Nash’s sense (1993), into the vernacular, or into some hybrid field where

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they are mutually accessible, even though they may be adapted into different settings and dialects. There may be questions about whether this leads to a ‘managerialization’ of social life but being more widely available they also can be more collectively controlled. The same applies to the inversion of the general and the specific. General ideas, in whatever social language, need to be implemented in specific places and, even when implementation is changed to translation and the idea is translated, there is still a question of direction, because frequently who makes the general statements is in a different place from those who are involved in the translation. But if action begins with a problem, a decision to do something and some ‘why not’ experimentation in a specific place (because that is where the problem is), then nothing is implemented, rather it is done. Implementation is, as it were, inverted. The posture is there, because something is seen as a problem that it is important to do something about; there is some guidance, but the social technologies are quite soft. The different welfare states, of which only two were looked at in Chapter 4 and then only partially, got to where they did without policy in its later sense. But they produced a version of society as a caring government with an increasingly expansive agenda. Here, there was clearly a role for the professions as was seen in Chapter 4, but there was also the persisting separation of politics from administration that can even be found today. Planners help to make plans, that is quite technical; but how to discuss the broader issues, to provide advice to government without being political? Policy sciences, as conceived by Laswell (1970) and the broad network of scholars from different countries who talked the idea into prominence, were interdisciplinary and concerned about the big issues; those questions that were key to society. Their way of talking about policy, as the initial number of Policy Sciences well illustrates, were the conceptual and quantitative approaches of what today would be called ‘soft’ operations research as an interdisciplinary field. That is, the analysis of decision and action processes in complex settings. Political science in the 1970s, however, was anything but quantitative; that move was to happen later. Could that have been one of the problems? That one part of the argument, providing advice to government on what to do about issues, was accepted and, although this was by no means a new practice, it received the new expressions ‘policy advisor’ and ‘policy analysis’. However, the other half of the package, the study of the policy process, went in many different directions, involving many academic or professional disciplines, few of them with interdisciplinary traditions. With each discipline doing its own studies of the practical side of government, with its own concepts and its own specific interests, there

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was no way that some accepted view of policy could be held together. To play with words: there were no checks and balances. As a result, perhaps, policy just drifted away by itself to mean many things to many people and became a taken-for-granted. Using ‘policy’ as a way of providing advice is, to return to Chapter 3, not just something that involves the advice giver, but the whole evolving narrative of advice itself: givers, listeners, users, takers and the way in which they frame their conversations. It involves a multiplicity of voices for whom policy, as a reference to what is taking place, seems to be useful. Nash (1993) used the expression ‘sales talk’ to look at the way in which jargon is used to plead acceptance for some kind of product, ‘whether in the form of goods, or ideas, or political policies, and which seek to control the potential consumer’s response to the product’ (p.12). Perhaps it might be added, even the idea of policies. The current UK government website (www.gov.uk) has thousands of references to policy, and policies is one of its principal categories. There are policies in all areas of government work and also details of policy professional standards, and development goals. But it is very difficult to find out what actually is meant by a policy. It is presumed as obvious. Planning, on the contrary, is clearer as it is very much linked to the production of ‘plans’, which are clear statements of restrictions, incentives and of what is going to happen. This is the opening part of the ‘Plan making’ section of the UK Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s National Planning Policy Framework.12 15. The planning system should be genuinely plan-led. Succinct and up-todate plans should provide a positive vision for the future of each area; a framework for addressing housing needs and other economic, social and environmental priorities; and a platform for local people to shape their surroundings. 16. Plans should: a) be prepared with the objective of contributing to the achievement of sustainable development; b) be prepared positively, in a way that is aspirational but deliverable; c) be shaped by early, proportionate and effective engagement between plan-makers and communities, local organisations, businesses, infrastructure providers and operators and statutory consultees; d) contain policies that are clearly written and unambiguous, so it is evident how a decision maker should react to development proposals; e) be accessible through the use of digital tools to assist public involvement and policy presentation; and f) serve a clear purpose, avoiding unnecessary duplication of policies that apply to a particular area (including policies in this Framework, where relevant). (UK Housing, 2018, p. 8)

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In addition to the close relationship between planning and policy which has appeared in various places throughout the book, item 16(d) above expresses a relationship between policy and decision which also goes back to notions of guidance and even earlier foreign policies: ‘so it is evident how a decision maker should react’. The document also introduces, on page 5, the idea of ‘presumptions’: ‘So that sustainable development is pursued in a positive way, at the heart of the Framework is a presumption in favour of sustainable development’ (UK Housing, 2018, p. 5; emphasis in the original). But, it could be argued, these are ways of working that are specific to urban and regional planning; where actions take place both by government and by many other different parts of society that apply for permission to do things. Planning, indeed, has the advantage of a long history of being part of the soft technologies of the administrative tool kit: at least back to POSDCORB in Chapter 4. Perhaps because of this, it is more easily kept in check by its colleagues in the administrative ideas’ arena. Policy too can be found in different ways in different professional areas, but here there is very little to hold it in check or to stop it drifting back into the policy of stance or posture; which is not what current analysts of policy processes seem to want and certainly wasn’t the idea of the Policy Sciences. Here is an example from the area of education: Policies do not normally tell you what to do: they create circumstances in which the range of options available in deciding what to do are narrowed or changed. A response must still be put together, constructed in context, off-set against other expectations. All of this involves creative social action not robotic reactivity. Thus, the enactment of texts relies on things like commitment, understanding, capability, resources, practical limitations, cooperation and (importantly) intertextual compatibility. Furthermore, sometimes when we focus analytically on one policy or one text we forget that other policies and texts are in circulation and the enactment of one may inhibit or contradict or influence the possibility of the enactment of others. (Ball, 1993, pp. 12–13)

Ball’s description may be in part general, but it is much easier to imagine a school administrator or a teacher trying to deal with these circumstances than a nurse in the neighbourhood health centre or a policeman on her or his rounds. That this should be so is by no means problematic; it only becomes a problem if social languages are treated as reductive, homogeneous and not heterogeneous. While policy is only one amongst many social languages to be found amongst the many different fields and places of state action, it is a timely reminder that the absorption of policy as part of the ‘woodwork’ of government takes place in late modernity. There is government, there are

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the governed, there are representatives, the governed elect the representatives who guard the government and somehow policy seems to hold this together as a serious and reasoned approach to improving society. It allows new concepts of social issues to emerge, for example the sustainable development agenda or the even more recent notion of well-being,13 all of which are important but, as an equal number of chapters have shown, are only half the story of how, collectively, questions are raised and resolved. Here it is necessary, even in a brief way, to turn to the discussion on governance. Could or does governance offer a better angle, as some suggest, on the complexities of public affairs?

LEARNING FROM GOVERNANCE Most of the social languages that can be found around the different dimensions of public action reached visibility in moments and periods before the present; that odd mix of yesterday, today and tomorrow that forms the lived-in horizon of most readers of this book. Some, such as vulnerability, have relatively bounded trajectories and have remained relatively contained. The vulnerability of the late 1970s in disaster affairs, or the 1980s in relation to AIDS, is something to which most can relate. Policy, public policy and policies have gone in a different direction, often with many different and at times contradictory meanings. What then can be said about governance? To begin with, following the overall approach of the book, there is the simple observation that people seem to find that it helps discussion about aspects of ‘governing’ that can’t be resolved by government alone. To be repetitive, they use it because it is useful. As has been commented in the previous chapters, these themes, key words, ideas, narrative forms and practices that make up social languages do not drop out of the sky. There will certainly be interests around, but the heterogeneity of different languages present makes imposition unlikely. Mainly, as has been seen, they move slowly, from one conversation to another, gradually spreading out as more and more people, then forums and organizations, find them useful as a way of bringing certain questions into talk. Governance is very much part of today’s lived-in horizon, even though the basis of the expression has a long, and at times, very material history. The current Governor of the Bank of England can look back on over 400 years and 119 predecessors, but it was only in 1997 that the Bank became independent and was allowed to set monetary policy; however, during all this time the notion of someone who keeps ‘the house in order’ was a constant part of the vernacular. Most people who have been to a

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science museum or have looked at a steam engine have seen a centrifugal governor. A gadget with arms and large brass balls at the end that rotates and rises as the velocity of the shaft increases. When the arms get beyond a specific level, the ring that holds the arms acts to cut off power to the engine, in the early cases steam, and in doing so maintained the speed within limits. The centrifugal governor had been around as an idea since the seventeenth century; but it would take until the following century before Boulton and Watt transferred the idea into Watt’s steam engine. From that materiality came many socialities, including the use of the notion of its dynamic balance mechanism in early evolutionary theory and later cybernetics. Schools had boards of governors, there were governors of territories and many other governors and governesses whose role was the same: to keep the balance and maintain the house in order. Very much like vulnerability, it had been around for a long time before it was suddenly catapulted into public affairs. (Whether it is relevant that this happens in the same period as the emergence of vulnerability is an interesting question.) Governance appeared in the discussion of international organizations such as the United Nations, which are not government but are not just an association. It appeared in discussing the changing forms of the European Community, again not a government but no longer a simple consortium. It appeared in the self-regulation of openly quoted capitalist enterprises and the creation of mechanisms for local development in the international aid community, amongst others. Governance may have found its way into public affairs from a variety of different angles, but usually has in common the notion of multiple, public, private, community-based actors and organizations that are linked together as part of a problem and its resolution but are neither hierarchically or institutionally related.14 Dynamic balance, maintaining limits, negotiating agreements, hybrid forums, networked governance are all evoked as a way of saying these are mechanisms that have public accountability, are useful, involve governments but aren’t government. But does that mean that government is giving way to governance, as some authors suggest, or that, similar to policy, other bits are being added on?15 Like policy, there are those who see the discussion of governance as moving away from the balancing approach to being normative, as in the criticisms of good governance in the development and aid arenas.16 Offe has commented on the unresolved polysemy of the concept that:

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… enables its protagonists to connect it to all kinds of positive adjectives and to embed it in a harmonizing rhetoric. The attributes used to describe governance are adjectives such as non-corrupt, transparent, informal, citizenfriendly (“bürgernah”), legitimate, efficient, responsible, collective goods producing, effective, common good oriented, horizontal, problem-adequate and participatory; and nouns such as interplay, collaboration, participation, informal governing, agreement, interaction, consensus, mutual learning, cooperation, convergence of viewpoints, adaptation, leadership through consensus, etc. (…) Governance, according to the prevailing use of the concept, is a limine, a game without losers, leading to the achievement of ‘good results’. (Offe, 2009, p. 557)

While this demonstrates very well the way in which the adjectives and nouns gravitate around social languages with various intentions and, as such, applies to other social languages as well, it also is a warning about the way that ‘good’, ‘neutral’, ‘non-political’ meanings can get attached to, and weaken, very useful terms. The image of Boulton and Watt’s strange contraption holds a very clear notion of adjustment and selfcontrol, but the different parts are designed to work together – they didn’t assemble themselves. There is no a priori reason to assume that talking about governance means mutual adjustment and success. It took a lot of time and effort to get to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, back in 1948, and much more time, decades of time, before most parts of the world recognized it as a very useful and practical idea. Governance also, as with policy, can lead to a certain depoliticization of what is in debate. Here there are at least two linked lines of discussion. In one, as Offe continues: ‘Participants in the discourse on governance tend to adopt the perspectives of negotiating organizational elites without taking into account the significance of conflicts of interests and values that take place in the public outside the negotiating room’ (2009, p. 558). In the other line of discussion, also as with policy, the depoliticization needs to be thought of in terms of what Foucault called the dispositif. Despite the many discussions on how to translate the term, and the fact that it wanders in and out of Foucault’s teachings and is rarely defined, it remains a very powerful analytic notion. The usual description comes from an interview in 1977: What I’m seeking to characterize with this name is, first of all, an absolutely heterogeneous assembly which involves discourses, institutions, architectural structures, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific enunciation, philosophical, moral, and philanthropic propositions; in short: as much the said and the un-said, these are the elements of the dispositive. The dispositive is the network which is arranged between these elements (…)

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I said that the dispositive is by nature essentially strategic, which indicates that it deals with a certain manipulation of forces, of a rational and concerted intervention in the relations of force, to orient them in a certain direction, to block them or to fix and utilize them. The dispositive is always inscribed in a game of power and, at the same time, always tied to the limits of knowledge, which derive from it and, in the same measure, condition it. (Foucault, 1977, in Bussolini, 2010 pp. 91–92)17

It is here, perhaps, where policy and a number of other social action languages can learn from governance, for while helping to make democracy more effective they also can create a setting in which the obvious is not so obvious as it seems. Returning to the example at the beginning of the chapter, governance arrangements can look and feel very different for those who are within them than they can for those who are outside. Similarly, policy can seem a naturally positive contribution from the viewpoint of the serious analyst who is concerned with the public good, or the cooperative service coordinator, but can be very different for the person who is running to get to the queue to be attended before the local government office shuts for the night. Both share the same working hours, but one is an hour away from the other. Foucault’s dispositif was coined as part of his wider discussion of society, within which the earlier question as to the importance of policy as a product of the welfare state and more open democracies certainly has a part. He made a distinction between this and the more specific apparatus (appareil) of the state, almost as a subset of the dispositif, which brings in a much wider set of power relations that are multifaceted, may change or may persist in new forms. It is – once more – heterogeneous, and draws attention to many other bits and pieces, materialities and socialities that are around. Despite what may happen to governance or to policy – whether they will go on growing in use or be relocated on more specific, firmer ground as part of the many social languages found around governing – they will all only be part of the story. As has been seen in the previous chapters, there are many publics, many approaches to the public good and many concerns around about what government does or does not do and what local communities, movements, churches and wider associations assume for themselves. All of these are also bits and pieces of materiality and sociality, from the charity shops on the high street to the angry protests and cracked windows, tear gas and police on horseback. They are put together, assembled, in particular places, and are performed in talk. They are also part of the story: but does the story need to have a name? Is the state taken too seriously? In 1977 Abrams commented: ‘The state is not the reality which stands behind the mask of political practice.

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It is itself the mask which prevents our seeing political practice as it is’ (1977/1988, p. 76). Here it is helpful to borrow from the discussion by Sassen (2005) about citizenship and the national state in the global arena, in relation to international human rights and the emergence of multiple actors and communities that no longer automatically identify with a nation as represented by the state. It is quite possible to posit that at the most abstract or formal level not much has changed over the last century in the essential features of citizenship. The theoretical ground from which I address the issue is that of the historicity and the embeddedness of both categories, citizenship and the national state, rather than their purely formal features. Each of these has been constructed in elaborate and formal ways. And each has evolved historically as a tightly packaged bundle of what were in fact rather diverse elements. The dynamics at work today are destabilizing these particular bundlings and bringing to the fore the fact itself of that bundling and its peculiarity. Through their destabilizing effects, these dynamics are producing operational and rhetorical openings for the emergence of new types of political subjects and new spatialities for politics. (p.80)

Unbundling the neatly packaged units not only of citizen, rights and state, but also of the various bits that hold this together in terms of social languages for governing and ordering everyday life, also calls attention to the ways in which these bits and pieces become partially put together. Latour (2005) refers to this as assembling, and Sassen – when discussing new cross-border systems – as assemblages: ‘These cross-border systems amount to particularized assemblages of bits of territory, authority and rights that used to be part of more diffuse institutional domains within the nation-state or, at times the supranational system’ (Sassen and Wennerhag, 2006, p. 8). Transferring these observations to the spaces and places where different social languages may come together provides a key to the everyday of social activity as reflected in what each person was doing, thinking, performing or involved in, yesterday, today and tomorrow. This is no longer the neatly nested and hierarchical whole reflected in many public administration texts that may discuss different kinds of service but assume that this happens in the same language. Nor is it a space of totally fragmented and disconnected anomie, to remember Durkheim. It is the flat social (Latour, 1996), where a variety of partially linked bits and pieces come together side by side. After all the president or prime minister may be in the capital city, but that is not somewhere up in the sky floating around like a space station looking out on public affairs; indeed, often, many other millions of people are also living there.

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PUBLIC ACTION LANGUAGES AND THE NEGOTIATION OF POSSIBILITIES The proposal developed throughout the previous chapters is that public action as a fairly straightforward expression provides a practical way of approaching this dispersed, heterogeneous, connected and disconnected terrain. It may not be the most elegant of concepts, but it recognizes that there will be conflict and that different bits and pieces are not neatly nested inside each other nor can they be isolated to form discrete bundles. It is a reference to areas of superposition, areas of independence and also hybrid connections. It can be called public affairs, in that it is ‘of’ the people and ‘concerns’ the people but, as has been pointed out, concerns and people(s) may at times be stable, are more usually dynamic but can change radically. Modern liberal democracies may be more or less social and may have arrangements for issue-based plebiscites that are more or less direct in form. But for most of the time, the formal institutional relationship between people and government is through some form of representation. People may choose their representatives in a variety of ways or decide not to choose. What the public action approach suggests is that while this is an important part of the way in which public affairs are conducted, it is only a part. There are many other ways in which the public takes part in defining issues and deciding on actions, alongside and with governments. Moreover, there is an equally large, if not larger, arena in which can be found themes being talked into becoming public issues; themes which are public but are not on government agendas and are subject to pressure and protest and those which public(s) take(s) care of by themselves. To return to Thoenig (2005): ‘As a first approximation one can characterize public action as the way in which a society builds and qualifies collective problems, elaborates replies, contents and processes to deal with them. The emphasis is placed on the wider society and no longer on the single institutional sphere of the state’ (p.300). While different authors place emphasis on different parts of assuming, being and doing public affairs, the idea of the public as active for, in and of itself is always present. For example, the concern of Dreze and Sen was with questions of famine and hunger, where: The collaboration of the public is an indispensable ingredient of public health campaigns, literacy drives, land reforms, famine relief operations, and other endeavours that call for cooperative efforts for their successful completion. On the other hand for the initiation of these endeavours and for the government to act appropriately, adversarial pressures from the public demanding such action can be quite crucial. (Dreze and Sen, 1989, p. 259)

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Other authors have focused on the way that alternative economies and solidarity movements have sprung up to create new kinds of non-market relations, social banks and cooperatives (França Filho et al., 2006). In the development studies area, questions about the possibilities of democratic governance have helped to make visible many different experiences that are embedded within the specificities of places, with their own political history and socio-cultural logic. In an eight-country study of different cases of local democratic governance and poverty reduction (Spink et al., 2009) it was possible to focus on another part of this vast arena of possibilities, that of the way that those involved created and negotiated relationships that involved co-production and co-governance in often hybrid formats. The results are always imperfect with ‘messy storylines that never quite reach resolution; of actors that fail to fit the tidy categories required of development policy analysis; of ambiguous political position’ (Hossain, 2009, p. 87). What is important in all the uses of public action is the common thread of action and public service not only through different kinds of public institutions but, more broadly, as all activities that are being articulated in the public sphere and being carried out in reference to a common good. Moving away from a governing-centred perspective does not imply that government is weakening in any way, or that these are the new times of third-party contracts and a shrinking state, about steering rather than rowing. On the contrary, none of the authors involved with public action has any doubt that government agencies and public services are part and parcel of the everyday. It is rather, as Thoenig put it so well, ‘the empirical recognition that the public powers do not have the monopoly on political life nor the work of public affairs, their treatment and management’ (1997, p. 22). Public action is a concept that may have emerged in French sociology, especially amongst those concerned with the actions of different organizations and the different levels and forms of relationship of a state that is both centralized and decentralized but with very important territoriallybased arrangements. But it is not a school of thought nor a theory. Ideas always emerge from somewhere and move around, as the various chapters and examples in the book have shown. If this hadn’t happened, the Northern European countries would still be presenting their accounts in Roman numerals, and only politicians in the USA and the UK would be making a fuss about policies. Delvaux, in a literature review for a European research programme in knowledge and policy in education and health, was to point out that, while in 2007 the use of public action was largely limited to the French-speaking world, ‘the events contributing to its formation are not limited to one country, but rather are the result of a

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wider process which first emerged in English language literature’ (2007, p. 63). Here the reference is to the implications of implementation studies, of policy networks, of actor-centred analysis and a more bottom-up type of approach. Ideas, fortunately, move backwards and forwards. The result, as has been shown over the various chapters, is a move away from an oversimplified linear and hierarchical model of what governments may or may not do, towards an approach that is more horizontal, with a variety of actors who are ‘public’ for a variety of reasons. In this sense, as Delvaux argues: Its supporters advocate moving beyond the traditional tools of political science and applying concepts and theories taken primarily from sociology, but in their work they make use of all sorts of concepts and theories. Effectively, they all want to move away from an over-simplified model, but have not been able to – or have not wanted to – agree on a standard conceptual framework. (2007, p. 61)

Public action and public action languages, the book has argued, are an approach: a way of looking at, trying to get closer to and addressing the field of public affairs. There are those who might use the expression public action on a tighter rein, where government or the state is more present, and those who work with looser reins and work with the many different ways of relating the governmental public with the various other publics. There are also those, like the author, who conclude that there is no point in reins because heterogeneity is precisely that: there are connections and disconnections, cooperation and conflict, some social languages form part of each other and others remain quite independent. Power is often very unequal and at times indeed the issue is about this inequality. There is a role for policy and for governance, but also for the other social languages that are around on all sides of the street, the rivers and the fields. There will be disciplinary differences, but there are also differences in the types of settings in which people are working and talking as activists, advisors, practitioners, public(s), researchers and service providers of all types. In their study of scientists’ discourses, Gilbert and Mulkay (1984) would say: ‘The ability of social actors to characterize a given set of activities in various different, and sometimes apparently incompatible, ways becomes understandable if we accept that social activities are the repositories of multiple meanings’ (p.7). Sometimes these settings will be relatively harmonious and the different languages present will connect, but at times it will be as if, following Williams’ comment at the beginning of his study of key words, ‘they just

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don’t speak the same language’ (2015, p.xxiii). Sometimes this will lead to a breakdown in discussion and the unfortunate failure of hybrid relations can also lead to disasters.18 Finally, there are also the times in which other elements are present, including the different spoken languages and mother tongues. Many countries in which social languages used to take place in a single ‘national’ language, albeit with their dialects, are now recognizing the many other spoken languages that are present amongst established majorities, minorities and newly arriving migrant groups. All of which, like any spoken language, are key performers of culture and everyday life and have put a new turn on the notion of diversity.19 In all these cases, the public action languages approach provides a stimulus to look for and recognize the multiplicity of what is taking place. It takes heterogeneity as a starting point and doesn’t assume that all these different bits and pieces are neatly held together by some common performative notion. It does not pretend that this is easy but does suggest that it forms a different basis on which to take on the challenge of building links between repertoires – of negotiating possibilities.

NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

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Sommer (1990). M.J.P Spink (2017). Holston (2009). SMADS (2013). Another social action language, Beer (1975). Maynard-Moody and Musheno (2000), see also Scott (1998), Seeing like a State. Guasch (1998), Martinez and Santibañez (2015), Iñiguez-Rueda and de Oliveira (2017). UN – Sustainable Development Goals, accessed on 6 September 2018 at https://www.un. org/sustainabledevelopment/ UN – Sustainable Development Goals, accessed on 6 September 2018 at https://www.un. org/sustainabledevelopment/poverty/ UNISDR, accessed 11 September 2018 at https://www.unisdr.org/files/43291_sendai frameworkfordrren.pdf Report of the open-ended inter-governmental expert working group on indicators and terminology relating to disaster risk reduction. United Nations General Assembly A/71/ 644 1 December 2016. UK Government (2018). Bache and Reardon (2016). See Frederickson (2005) for a discussion of governance in relation to public administration. Goodin et al. (2006, p. 12). Sundaram and Chowdhury (2012). Dispositif has often been translated as an apparatus, similar to a device, but in the Latin languages dispositivo is used. The major study is by Giorgio Agambem (2006) in Che cos’è un dispositivo?

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Public action languages and the negotiation of possibilities 18. 19.

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See the study by Herndl et al. (1991) on the accident at Three Mile Island and the Shuttle Challenger Disaster. See the study on healthcare access and superdiversity by Phillimore et al. (2018).

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Index Abrams, Philip 195 accounting 88–9 accounts 16, 20, 22–3, 29, 44, 79, 87–9, 124, 134, 148, 182, 194, 198 actantes 32, 56 action languages 2, 4, 6, 8, 11, 13, 25, 27–9, 31, 33, 35, 40, 47, 55, 56, 57, 67, 72, 78, 80, 87, 90, 92, 104, 105, 107–8, 115, 142, 145, 147, 151, 159, 161, 163–4, 172, 180, 187, 195, 197–200 action publique 10 actor network 78 advocacy coalition 77 advocate(s) 32, 199 Agambem, Giorgio 83, 200 The Age of Rights 144 Albigensian Crusade 59 Alinsky, Saul D. 155–6, 159 Alliance for Progress (1961) 128 Allied Control Council 11 Almond, Gabriel A. 53–5 Amalric, Abbot Arnaud 60 anglophone 67, 75 Anglo-Saxon 153 anthropology 72 Appleby, Paul H. 101 Arato, Andrew 56, 170 Argentina 37, 126, 173 assemblage 196 assembling 110, 196 Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management 120 Attlee 86, 95–9 post-war government 86 Austin, John L. 68–9 Australia 125, 154

authoritative instrumentalism 22, 23, 171 Bache, Ian 57, 200 Bagehot, Walter 15 Bakhtin, Mikhail 7, 64–5, 130 Bank of England 192 Barnardo, T.J. 49–50, 185 Barrett, Susan 117–18 Basedow, Johann 48 Battle of Solferino 51 Belgium 88, 142 Bendix, Reinhard 82, 90 Benedict XV 51 Berger, Peter L. 71 Bevan, Aneurin 96 Beveridge Report 27, 86, 95–8, 114 Billis, David 57 Blockson, Charles, L. 38 Bobbio, Norberto 144, 146 Bolivia 36 Bolivian Revolution 36 Bouckaert, Geert 123, 125, 131, 133 Bourdieu, Pierre 77, 79 Brandião, Hugo, J. 137 Brazil 3, 26–7, 35–7, 56, 74, 83, 90, 92, 120, 126, 133–40, 147, 151, 155, 165–7, 172, 174, 186 Brazilian Interdisciplinary Association for AIDS (ABIA) 139 Brazilian School of Public Administration (EBAP) 136 Bretton woods 126 British 11, 12, 14, 16–17, 21, 31, 39, 54, 75, 80, 83, 87, 95, 97, 117 British Civil Service 110 British Colonial Policy 17 British Housing and Town Planning Act 90

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British Parliament 86 British Psychological Society 21 British Zone WWII 11, 12 Brownlow Committee (Report 1937) 81, 86–7, 90 Brownlow, Louis 85, 113 budget(s)(ing) 2–4, 7, 9, 27, 52, 66, 70, 72, 75, 84, 86–92, 99, 105–6, 108–9, 112, 122, 124–5, 127–9, 133, 136, 141, 146–7, 152, 164–6, 174, 178–9, 182, 187–8, bureaucratic authoritarianism 128 Burke, Peter 15, 29, 39, 82 Bussolini, Jeffrey 83 Butler, Judith 72 Caiden, Gerald E. 126, 129, 133 Callon, Michel 169 Calvert, Peter 128 Calvert, Susan 128 Cambridge History of British Foreign Policy 17 Cambridge University Library 17 Campos, Luiz C. 141 Canada 32, 125, 154 CAPES 134–5 Carlos III 36 Carpenter, Mary 50 case studies 27, 29 category-mistake 83 Cathars 59, 108 Catholic Church 44, 50, 138, 158, 168, 175 Catlaw, Thomas J. 83 Central Banks 126–30, 132 centrality 4–5, 21, 28, 60, 171 Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS) 111 Centre for Public Administration and Government 138 charities 47–52 Charlton, James I. 163 Charter of the Forest 1–2 Chicago Sun-Times newspaper 155 Christianity and Social Service in Modern Britain 99 Church of England 45, 50, 57

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citizen(ship) 4, 10–11, 24, 32, 43, 54–6, 60–61, 72–3, 82, 90–91, 98, 101, 103, 130, 143, 147, 149, 150–52, 154, 158, 164, 166–7, 180–82, 194, 196 Citizen Organising Foundation 158 civic(s) 10, 20, 25, 27, 28, 33, 43–4, 99, 106, 150–53, 157, 159, 169, 170, 173 action 152, 169 arena 25 collective 150–51 culture 53–5 driven change 152 engagement 27, 53–6 Civil Code 67, 88, 126 civil disobedience 27, 149–54, 169 civil parishes 44 civil rights 42–3, 102–3, 143, 178 Civil Rights Act of 1964 103 Civil Service Department (CSD) 111 civil society 9, 10, 25, 26, 33, 41–8, 54–5, 63, 82, 92, 132, 140, 150–52, 159, 162, 172 Clarke, John 152 classification(s) 70–73 clients 72, 130, 133, 166, 175 Cnaan, Ram 46–7, 57 co-governance 198 Cohen, Jean L. 56, 170 Cold War 143 Colebatch, Hal K. 22, 171 collective vocabularies 69 collectives 7, 151 collectivist organizations 40 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) 13, 116, 121–2, 142 Common Law 67 communicative action 69 communicative rationality 154 communities of discourse 124 community-based action 25, 173 community organization 27, 157 complexity(ies) 3, 56, 64, 71, 77, 96, 113, 172, 177, 183, 192 The Condition of the Working Class in England (Engels) 147 congregation(s) 43–7, 57, 155–8

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Index Congress of Westphalia 61 consumers 13, 72, 76, 102, 130, 190 controversy(ies) 103, 149–55, 162, 169, 178 Cooke, Alistair 81, 83 cooperative(s) 26, 39–40, 64, 94, 195, 197–8 COPS (Communities Organized for Public Service) 157–8 Coram, Thomas 48 Cortes, Ernesto Jr 156, 157 Council of Clermont (1095) 58–9 ‘Cours de Comptes’ 88 critical policy studies 115 The Crowd (Le Bon) 161 crowd psychology 160 Croxton, Derek 60–61 crusade(s) 26, 43, 57, 58–9, 88 Curtis Report 49 customers 73, 130 Customs in Common (Thompson) 159 Dagnino, Evelina 151 Dahrendorf, Ralf 47 Dallek, Robert 102–3 decision(s) 4, 5, 11, 18, 20–23, 27, 32, 40, 45, 66–8, 72, 83, 90, 92, 101, 103, 105–6, 109–12, 116, 118–19, 124, 136, 147, 156, 161–2, 164, 169, 177, 179–80, 184, 188–91, 194 decision process 20, 112, 124 Decline of Redemptive Truth and the Rise of a Literary Culture 79 Delvaux, Bernard 198–9 Democracy on the March Lilienthal 94 democratic 4, 26–7, 45, 53, 57, 70, 76, 85–92, 94, 102, 131, 133, 137–8, 142, 147, 157, 164–5, 178, 198 Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) 47, 104 Desmond, Matthew 178, 182 development planning 91, 127 Dewey, John 32–4, 38, 122, 152–3 dialogical 73

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dignity 9, 41, 144–50, 159, 170 Dikeç, Mustafa 161 diplomacy 4, 17, 26, 60–61, 64, 87 diplomats 37, 73, 80, 127, 131, 142 directives 4, 11–13, 68, 99, 116, 176–7, 179, 182, 185, 187–8 disability rights 163 discourse 10, 55, 64–5, 73, 116, 124, 194, 199 discourse analysis 7, 29 discursive democracy 55 discursive genres 130 discursive practices 7, 65 dispositive (dispositif) 83, 194–5, 200 Dorsey, Ellen 143, 147 double entry book keeping 89 Dreze, Jean 10, 197 Drury, John 161 Dryzek, John S. 123, 162, 164 Dunant, Jean Henri 51 Earl of Chatham 14 Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) 127 Economic Opportunity Act (1964) 108 Edwards, George C (III) 23 efficiency 9, 76, 84, 86–7, 90, 127, 129–30 Ehrenberg, John 54 Elazar, Daniel 57 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965) 107 enactment 7, 72, 191 Engels, Friedrich 147 The English Constitution 15 English Press 161 Enlightenment 47, 92, 151 An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Ferguson) 47 ethnomethodology 69 European Economic Community (EEC) 121 European Union (EU) 11, 116, 121, 142 evaluation 20, 105, 107–9, 116–17, 129, 132

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Expert Group Meeting (1979) 185 faith based organizations 9, 46–7, 177 Federal Housing and Community Development Act (1974) 157 Ferguson, Adam 9, 47–8 Fibonacci 88–9 field theory 77 Finland 125 First World War 13, 51 Fischer, Frank 76 flat social 79, 178, 179, 196 Fleck, Ludvik 7, 71 Ford Foundation 41, 109, 138, 141, 166 foreign policy 15, 17, 95, 98, 102–3, 105, 122 Forester, John 76 Foucault, Michel 83, 194–5 foundling hospital 48 France 3, 16, 29, 39, 44, 48, 59–61, 64, 66, 72, 88, 93, 111, 120, 125–6, 128, 142, 160 Francis, Kimberly 109 Frederickson, H. George 83, 130, 147 freedom 8, 12, 38, 42, 97, 99, 102, 144, 146, 178 Freire, Paulo 155 French Civil Code 67, 126 French Colonial Policy 17 French Revolution 161 Friedmann, John 55, 92, 181 Friedrich, Carl J. 100 Friend, John 180–81 friendly societies 40 Frumkin, Peter 109 Fudge, Colin 117–18 Fuller, Steve W. 30, 71, 142 Fulton Report 27, 110–11, 114 Fung, Archon 164–5 Garfinkel, Harold 69 Geneva Conventions 51, 185 Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child 52, 186 Genro, Tarso 166 George V 80

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Germany 11–12, 48, 90, 121, 125, 128, 154 Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV) 134, 138, 166 Giddens, Anthony 70 Gilbert, Nigel G. 30, 73, 83, 199 Glennerster, Howard 97 Glickman, Norman 102 Gorham, W. 105 Goodin, Robert E. 164 Goodnow, Frank J. 16 governability 118 governance 5, 22–4, 28, 45, 66, 70, 91, 99, 133, 164–5, 168, 171, 188, 192–5, 198–9 governing 2–6, 11, 22, 24, 25, 28, 96, 102, 115, 118, 157, 171, 188, 192, 194–6, 198 government(s) 2–6, 8–9, 11–12, 14–16, 18–20, 22–8, 31–4, 36, 38, 42–8, 52–3, 55–6, 62, 66–7, 71, 80–1, 84–90, 92–5, 97–112, 115, 117–26, 128–43, 150–53, 155–7, 159, 162–3, 167–8, 171–2, 174–5, 178–81, 184, 189–93, 195, 197–9, 200 governmentality 23 governor(s) 12, 49, 138–9, 192–3 Graham, Billy 59 Gramsci, Antonio 54, 151 Great Depression 85, 93 Great Society 105–6 Guarani 36, 37 Gulick, Luther 85 Gutmann, Amy 146 Habermas, Jürgen 56, 69, 82, 154 Hacking, Ian 32, 72, 78 Hale, Dennis 24 Hall, David D. 44 Halpern, Charlotte 120, 125 Hammond, J.L. Le Breton 17 Handel, George Friedrich 49 Hans, Nicholas 17 Hanseatic League 26, 61–2 Harris, Joseph P. 85 Haussmann, Baron 91

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Heclo, Hugh 153 heterogeneous social languages 25 Highlander Folk School 155 Hirschman, Albert O. 10, 170 history 1, 3, 5, 9, 15, 17, 22, 24, 26, 28, 35–6, 45, 48, 54, 57, 62–3, 74, 84, 87, 96–7, 113, 119, 126, 136, 142, 177, 185, 191–2, 198 history of concepts 62 History of the Policy of the Church of Rome in Ireland (Phelan) 17 History of Russian Educational Policy (Hans) 17 HIV/AIDS 27, 134, 138–42 Hogarth, William 49 Holquist, Michael 64 Holy Innocents’ Day 51 Holy Land 58–9 Holy See 145 Horton, Myles 155 House of Commons 15 housing 5, 12, 13, 31, 102, 108, 147–8, 158, 174, 177, 183–4, 190 Housing and Town Planning Act (1909) 90 How to Do Things with Words 68 Human Rights Commission 145 hybrid 25, 47, 57, 188, 197–8, 200 arenas 28 forums 166–70, 193

international associations 26 International Committee of the Red Cross/Red Crescent 51, 53 185 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights 143 International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights 143 International Political Science Association (IPSA) 24 International Working Men’s Association 39 interpretive repertoires 7, 73–6 issue networks 153 issues 4, 6, 9, 13, 15, 17, 19–21, 24–6, 32, 34, 38, 42–4, 50, 53, 56, 57, 72, 74, 95, 99, 102, 104, 109, 114, 125, 135, 139–40, 149, 153–4, 156–9, 161–2, 165, 171, 175–7, 179, 181–3, 189, 192, 197 Italy 61, 66, 89–90, 142

I, Daniel Blake (film) 172 implementation 13, 23–4, 27, 55, 92, 97, 100, 107, 109, 116–19, 129, 169, 179–82, 187, 189 Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) 154–7, 170 Inspection Générale de Finances 88 Institute of Social Studies 152 institutional vulnerability 28, 181, 182 institutionalization 63, 70, 129 Inter-American Development Bank (BID) 103 interest groups 23, 130 interfaith 6, 43, 154, 156, 158, 162

Kemmerer, Edwin Walter 126, 132 Kennedy, John F. 42, 103, 105 Keynes, John Maynard 51, 93 Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Williams) 69 King, Luther Jr 41, 43, 57 Kipling, Rudyard 81 Knowles, Chris 11–13 Koselleck, Reinhart 62–3 Kötz, Hein 66 Kynaston, David 96

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Jackson, Mahalia 42 jargon(ing) 9, 21, 74, 190 Jebb, Eglantyne 51, 186 Jefferson, Thomas 59, 82, 96 Jesuit missions 26, 37 Johnson Administration 27, 56, 86, 102 Johnson, Lyndon B. 102–8, 156 La Jornada 163

Laborier, Pascal 10 Labour Government (1945) 27 Labour Party 95

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language(s) action 2, 4, 6, 8, 11, 13, 25, 27–9, 31, 33, 35, 40, 47, 55–7, 67, 72, 78, 80, 87, 90, 92, 104, 105, 107–8, 115, 142, 145, 147, 151, 159, 161, 163–4, 172, 180, 187, 195, 197–200 heterogeneous social 25 social action 4, 13, 25, 33, 57, 72, 95, 159, 161, 180, 195 Lasswell, Harold D. 18–20, 99, 120 Latin 37, 55, 59, 61–2, 64, 87, 89, 163, 185, 200 Latin America 26–7, 29, 44, 67, 106, 113, 120, 126–34, 158 Latin American Centre for Administrative Development (CLAD) 128, 132–3 Latour, Bruno 32, 77–9, 179–80, 196 law 4–5, 23–4, 32, 40, 44, 66–7, 70, 76–8, 81, 83, 102, 113, 118–19, 125–7, 129, 137, 146, 150, 152, 161, 163, 165, 176–8, 188, 194 Law, John 78 Le Bon, Gustave 160 Lectures on History and General Policy (Priestley) 17 legal families 66, 74 Legislative History of America’s Economic Policy towards the Philippines (Reyes) 17 Leonardo da Pisa see Fibonacci Lerner, Daniel 99 Letter from America 81 liberation theology 44, 138, 158, 175 lifeworld 152 Lilienthal, David 94–5 Lincoln Memorial 42 Lindblom, Charles E. 92, 112, 124 linguistic turn 7 Lipsky, Michael 57, 57, 130 livelihood 52, 172, 177, 181–2, 184, 187 Loach, Ken 172, 178 London Citizens 43, 158 London Docks 75 London Living Wage 159 London School of Economics 99, 118

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Luckmann, Thomas 71 Macy, John 105 magic concepts 73 Magna Carta 1–2 Mahatma Gandhi (Father of Modern India) 149 Majone, Giandomenico 117 managerialization 189 Mandela, Nelson 8 Maritain, Jacques 145 The Marquis of Pombal 91 Marres, Noortje 152, 153 Marshall, Thomas H. 143 Marston, Sallie A. 179 Mason, Edward S. 100 materia(lity) (ies) 3, 14, 17–18, 26, 28–9, 32, 39–40, 52, 59, 62, 65, 77–8, 95, 101, 117, 120, 153, 172–3, 175, 178, 180–82, 192–3, 195 matrix 32 McKeon, Richard 145–6 McLaughlin, Hugh 83, 130 Medeiros, Antonio C. de 137 medieval 2, 26, 54, 55, 61, 76 Merkel, Wolfgang 178 Merriam, Charles E. 85 Messiah 49 Mexico 128, 163 military developmentalism 128 mini publics 164, 170 mission 37, 109, 125, 187 mobilization 27, 33, 139–40, 175 Mol, Annemarie 78 moral arena 151 moral assumptions 3 moral community 41 ‘Moral Economy’ 160 moral high ground 52, 59 moral universe 150 Mosher, Frederick C. 76 muddling through 124 Mulkay, Michael 30, 73, 83, 199 municipal(ities) 35–6, 44–5, 56, 89, 137–8, 140, 166–8, 173–6, 183

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Index Municipal Secretary for Social Assistance and Development (SMADS) 175 Murrow, Edward R. 82 Myrdal, Gunnar 107 Napoleon 67, 88 Nash, E. Gee 188, 190 Nash, Walter 74–6 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) 75 National AIDS Commission (CNAIDS) 141 National Education Plan 176 National Health Service (NHS) 85, 96–100 National Health Service Act of 1946 96 National Planning Policy Framework 5, 190 National Public Health School 139 National School of Administration (ENA) 125 naturalize(ation) 76, 151–2 negotiating possibilities 28, 172, 180, 200 Nelson, Paul 143, 147 Netherlands 120, 121, 125, 182 networks 6, 16, 21, 23, 37, 48, 51, 55, 74, 77–9, 82, 83, 153, 168, 175, 181, 189, 193, 194, 199 New Deal 44, 86, 93 New International Dictionary of the English Language 18 New Public Management 66, 123, 133 A New Public Management for Latin America 133 New Society 31 New World 35, 48, 56, 60, 91 New Zealand 125 Newbold, Stephanie P. 84 NGOs (non-governmental organizations) 52, 71, 103, 132, 138–41, 155, 167–8, 185 non-profit 41, 44, 52, 109 North, Douglass C. 132

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Northcote–Trevelyan Report (1854) 86, 110 notion of rights 143 Nucleus for Public Policy (NEPP) 135 Nunca Mas Sin Nosotros (Never again without us) 163 O’Donnell, Guillermo 128 Offe, Claus 193–4 Office of Economic Opportunity 104 Office of Research Plans, Programs and Evaluation (ORPPE) 109 Old World 60 operational decision 18 Organization for Economic Cooperation and development (OECD) 27, 123, 129, 133 orphanage(s) 26, 39, 47–53 Orren, Karen 22 Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) 139 Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (OED) 59 Oxford Handbook of Public Policy 119 Pacioli, Luca 89 package phrases 75 Paine, Thomas 151 Pallares-Burke, Maria Lúcia 15 Paraguay 37, 173 Paris Commune 26, 38, 160 parish(es) 6, 9, 12, 26, 41–7, 50–51, 91 parish council 12, 57 parish hall(s) 9 participative budgeting 27, 90 Particulars of Reckonings and Writings 89 patients 73, 96–7, 130 Patterson, Annabel 69, 83 performance (measurement) 124 performatic(s) 80–81 performative(s) 4, 6–8, 24, 26, 67–9, 72, 75, 77, 80, 86, 88, 112, 129–30, 137, 146, 151, 161 performative turn 70

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The Peripheral Cultural Movement 151 persona 81 Phelan, William 17 philanthropy 26, 41, 48, 57 philantropines 48 Philippines 17, 127 pilgrimage 58–9 place 4, 7–9, 11–13, 17–18, 21–4, 27, 29, 34–7, 39, 43–4, 46–9, 51, 54, 57–67, 70, 72, 73, 75–7, 79, 81, 83, 84, 86, 87, 89, 91–2, 100–104, 108–9, 111–12, 116–17, 120, 124–5, 128, 131–4, 138–41, 145–9, 153, 155, 158, 160, 164, 167–9, 171, 175, 179–80, 182, 189–91, 194–8, 200 plan(s) 5, 9, 16, 66–8, 72, 78, 90–91, 93–5, 97–9, 105, 110, 126, 141, 147, 152, 165, 174, 176–7, 179, 182, 187–90 planning 4–5, 7, 18, 20, 27, 55, 62, 76, 84, 86–7, 89–95, 99, 105–12, 113, 116, 127–9, 136–7, 164–5, 178, 182–3, 187–8, 190–91 planning policy 5, 190 Planning Units 111 policy advisors 3, 7, 27, 112, 115, 189 analysis 22, 24, 76, 77, 92, 112, 119–20, 123, 125, 136, 189, 198 community(ies) 77 documents 3, 7, 52, 98, 119 domestic 95, 98, 102, 105, 106, 108 economic 17, 93, 95, 122, 131, 136 foreign 17, 95, 102, 103, 105, 122 health 98 planning 5, 187, 190 policy-making 19, 20, 101, 111, 113 public 2–13, 17–18, 21, 23–4, 27–9, 46, 57, 72, 100, 102–9, 115–20, 129, 134–8, 143, 166, 172, 177, 184–8, 192 science(s) 13–20, 109, 112, 189

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social 9, 17, 27, 97–9, 102, 113, 122, 136, 137, 177, 183 space 180–81 state 22 talk 100 UK National Planning Policy 5, 190 Policy and Administration (Appleby) 101 Policy Planning Staff 106 Policy Schools 109 The Policy Sciences 18, 19, 60, 76, 109, 189, 191 Policy State 22 Politics and Administration (Goodnow) Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (Lasswell) 18 Pollitt, Christopher 123, 125, 131, 133 polysemic 119, 123 Pope Paul III 144 Pope Urban II 58 Portugal 67, 83, 91, 116, 142 POSDCORB 86, 127, 191 post-empiricism 7 postmodernism 7 PPBS (Planning, Programing and Budgeting Systems) 89, 105, 108, 112, 114, 136, 137 Pressman, Jeffrey L. 97, 116–17, 129 pressure groups 6, 21, 32 Priestley, Joseph 17 Prochaska, Frank 50, 99 professional state 76 professions 26, 28, 73, 77, 189 program(me)(s) 24, 84–6, 93, 103–4, 106–9, 112, 122, 128–9, 133, 138–41, 153, 156, 166–7, 179–80, 183, 188, 198 Programme Analysis Review 112 protests 6, 8–9, 27, 33, 43, 51, 60, 160, 149, 151, 158, 160–61, 179, 188, 195, 197 public action 6–11, 25–6, 28–9, 35, 38, 47, 67, 75, 77–8, 87, 92, 96, 115, 147, 151, 162–4, 172, 188, 192, 197–200 public action languages 171–200 challenge for policy 188–92

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Index and governance 192–6 negotiation of possibilities 197–200 overview 171–2 public policy survival 184–8 and state 176–7 street and flat social 178–84 and urban vulnerability 172–6 public administration 4, 24, 28, 35, 66, 76–7, 84, 86, 90, 100, 105, 113, 119, 121, 123, 126–8, 130, 132, 136–8, 147, 167, 196, 200 public affairs 2–3, 6–7, 9–11, 13, 22–3, 25–9, 31, 35, 37–8, 40, 45, 48, 57, 59, 70, 73–4, 80, 85–6, 91–2, 107, 109, 123–4, 152–3, 159, 172, 179, 186, 192–3, 196–9 public domain documents 29 The Public and its Problems (Dewey) 33 public health 31, 138–40, 197 Public Management and Citizenship Program 138, 166 public management reform 123–4, 128 public planning 27, 92, 109 public policy 2–13, 17–18, 21, 23–4, 27–9, 46, 57, 72, 100, 102–9, 115–20, 129, 134–8, 143, 166, 172, 177, 184–8, 192 Putnam, Robert D. 53 quilombo(s) 35–6 Reardon, Louise 57, 200 ragged school movement 49 reform 17, 27, 32, 45, 102, 123–33, 136–40, 158, 165, 197 refugee(s) 12, 32–3, 78 women 32 Reicher, Stephen D. 161 relational materiality 78 Renaissance 26 repertories 28 representation 3, 6, 8, 36, 45, 156, 162, 164, 197 resistance 9, 14, 26, 37–40, 137, 149

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‘Resistance to Civil Government’ 149 Reveille for Radicals 155 Revista de Administração Pública 135 Reyes, J. S. 17 rhetoric(al) structure 5, 15, 42, 81, 96, 132, 160, 194, 196 Richter, Melvin 63 The Right to the City: Bridging the Urban Divide 147–8 rights age of 144–9 civil 42–3, 102–3, 143, 178 controversies/issues/struggles 149–54 cooperation, alliances and hybrid forums 166–70 overview 143 political 143 social 99, 143 Rights of the child (1924) 47–53, 186 Rio de Janeiro State University (UERJ) 139 risk 12, 14, 91, 98, 153, 175, 184, 186–8, 200 Robertson, Brian 12 Rochdale 40, 64 cooperative store 26 Rome(an) 27, 37, 51, 60, 113, 121 Roosevelt (Administration) 17, 26, 44, 81–2, 84–6, 93, 95, 99–101, 105, 113, 145, 170 Roosevelt, Eleanor 84–5, 93, 144 Rorty, Richard 7, 79, 83 Rosanvallon, Pierre 9, 10, 25 Rosenbloom, David 84 Rothschild-Witt, Joyce 40–41 Rothwell, Charles E. 18–20 Rules for Radicals (Alinsky) 155, 159 Ryle, Gilbert 83, 123 San Antonio Community Development Block Grant 157 São Paulo State AIDS Program 139 Sassen, Saskia 196 Saussure, Ferdinand de 79 Save the Children Fund 51 Schlesinger, Robert 103

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Schmidt, Vivien A. 83 school district 45–6 Schulkind, Eugene 39 Schultze, Charles 108 Science of Muddling Through (Lindblom) 92 Sea Change 75–6, 121 Searle, John 71 Second World War 11, 17, 53, 81, 85 Sharkansky, Ira 23 self-building 174 Selznick, Philip 70, 113 semiotic(s) 32, 56, 78 Sen, Amartya 10, 197 Sendai Framework 187 sensemaking 14, 51, 71, 185 Shaw, George Bernard 162 Shorter Oxford English Dictionary 97 Shriver, R. Sargent 106 Skowronek, Stephen 22 slave(s)(ry) 26, 35–8, 42, 144, 149 Sloan Foundation 120 slums 31, 42 social(ity)(ies) 32, 62, 78, 153, 193, 195 social action languages 4, 13, 25, 33, 57, 72, 95, 159, 161, 180, 195 social administration 118 social assistance 177 social capital 132, 159 social construction 53, 132, 159 social epistemology 71 social language 4–9, 24–8, 35, 70–71, 73, 86, 88–91, 106, 147, 152, 154–5, 160, 162–4, 170–72, 176–7, 179–80, 182, 185, 188–9, 191–2, 194–6, 199–200 and fields 76–9 and interpretive repertoires 73–6 and speech genres 62–7 social movements 6, 27, 44, 55, 63, 92, 132, 138, 150–51, 158, 188 social organizations 14, 26, 32, 36, 139, 141, 177, 181 social policy 9, 17, 27, 97–9, 102, 113, 122, 136–7, 177, 183 social reality 71, 180

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social science 5–6, 28, 31, 62, 65, 85, 164 social scientist(s) 3, 18, 46, 54, 57 Social Security and Social Policy 98 Social Security Bill of 1935 17 society 2, 4, 6–7, 9–10, 14, 19–22, 25–6, 31, 33, 38, 40–48, 50–1, 54–5, 63, 65, 69–70, 81, 82, 83, 87, 91–2, 94, 103–6, 118, 125, 132, 134, 140, 150–52, 156, 159, 161–2, 171–2, 177–9, 185–6, 189, 191–2, 195, 197 socio-technical 8 ‘soft’ operations research 189 Spain 3, 15, 37, 52, 60, 67, 91, 120, 142 Spanish civil war 38 speech genres 7, 62–7, 73 making 80–81 writers 26, 80 writing 80–82 Spink, M.J.P. 73 Spruyt, Hendrik 61 staff 18, 39, 43, 81, 82, 85–6, 90, 102–3, 106, 108–9, 111–12, 127–8, 132, 139, 158, 185 state action 162, 181, 191 State Health Secretariat 139 state planning 92 state reform 130–33 statutory requirement 5 steering 24, 198 Stillman, Richard J. II 125 Stott, Clifford C. 161 street and flat social 178–84 street level workers 130 structuration 7, 70, 133 Sublimus Dei (1537) 56, 144 Sustainable Development Goals 184–5 Sweden 61, 88, 111, 125 synagogue(s) 9, 43–4, 47 system(s) 4–5, 7, 20, 34, 53, 65–7, 73, 75, 82, 84, 88–9, 98, 110, 118, 124, 128, 133, 136–7, 140, 148, 153, 167, 175, 177, 181, 184–6, 188, 190, 196

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Index Taine, Hippolyte 160–61 TELCO (The East London Communities Organisation) 158 Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) 86, 93–5, 100 Territorial Base Organizations 36, 168 territory 32, 36, 42, 44, 60–62, 130, 168, 173, 176, 179, 182, 183, 193, 196, 198 Texas Industrial Areas Foundation 157 Theodoulou, Stella Z. 23 Third Sector 159 The Third UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction 187 Third World 152 Thoenig, Jean-Claude 10, 197–8 Thomas Coram Foundation for Children 49 Thoreau, Henry David 149–50 thought collective(s) 7, 71 Titmuss, Richard M. 123 Towards a Social Policy (Hammond) 17 Trafalgar Square London 51 transparency 9, 66, 74, 124 Treaty of Lisbon 11–13 Treaty of Rome 27, 121 Treaty of Westphalia (1648) 26, 60 Trom, Dany 10 underground railroad 37–8 UK 3, 5, 14, 16, 27, 29, 31, 44, 46, 49–50, 55, 57, 80, 85–6, 88, 95, 97, 99–100, 104–5, 109, 112, 117–20, 125, 127–8, 142, 154, 158–9, 161, 164, 172, 178, 180, 185, 190, 198, 200 UK Deposit Libraries 16 UK Ministry of Housing 190 UK National Planning Policy 5, 190 UK Parliament 14 UN HABITAT 147 UN Human Development Report 186 Unified Health System 136, 137, 140 United Nations (UN) 27, 52, 127, 132, 143, 148, 184, 185, 187, 193

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United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (1992) 136 United Nations Declaration 148 United Nations Disaster Relief Coordinator (UNDRO) 185 United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) 27, 121–2, 145, 149 United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) 33 United Nations Organization 52 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights 194 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) 143–5, 194 urban poverty 31 urban vulnerability 172–6 Uruguay 173 USA 3, 16–17, 20, 22, 26–7, 29, 37, 41, 45–6, 57, 86, 88, 90, 97, 100, 102, 106–7, 112, 117, 120, 125–6, 128, 136, 143, 149, 154–5, 172, 178, 182, 198 USA–Mexican War 149 US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) 57, 104 US General Accounting Office 127 users 41, 45, 55, 72–3, 130, 139, 190 utterances 7, 65–6, 68, 73, 188 van Ginneken, Jap 161 Venezuela 126 Venice 48, 61, 88, 89 Verba, Sidney 53–5 Vidda, Pela 139 Vietnam War 85 voluntary action 34, 41, 129 volunteering 41 voters 102, 130 vulnerability 49, 177, 185–6, 192, 193 institutional 28, 178, 181, 182 material 178, 182 social 182 urban 172–6

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Wagenaar, Hendrik 182 Waldo, Dwight 76, 90 War on Poverty 103, 106–8, 156 Washington Consensus 131 Webber, Carolyn 88, 89, 93, 113, 183 Wedel, Janine E. 83 Weick, Karl E. 71, 185 welfare state(s) 6, 24, 26, 31, 34, 46, 85, 99, 108, 195 White House Ghosts (Schlesinger) 103 wicked problems 113, 183 Wildavsky, Aaron 88, 89, 92, 112, 116–17 William Pitt the Elder 14 Williams, Raymond 69 Williamson, John 131

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Wilson, Harold 110, 112 Wilson, Richard 119 Wilson, Robert H. 157 Wilson, Woodrow 16 women refugees 32 Workers’ Party 137 World Bank 130, 132, 140 World Risk Report 186 World Series 74 World Urban Forum (2010) 147 Young, Iris M. 154 zero based budgeting 89 Zumbi (dos Palmares) 35, 36 Zweigert, Konrad 66

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