Who is the modern state?
Why a new relationship between representatives, administrators and citizens is urgent.
If you’ve spent any time in a strategy meeting then you’ll know how the conversation goes. In response to a given issue, problem or long-term challenge everything seems to start with “what should we do?” After a while, someone will say “how shall we do it?” Inevitably, then comes the step-back moment: “why are we doing this?” And then as the session draws to a close and everyone wants to see action rather than contemplation, it then moves on to “who is going to do it?” In the modern state there are only three possible doers: what I will call “representatives”, “administrators” or “citizens”. And currently, they aren’t able to pull strongly in the same direction.
Trust in Government is at historic lows. Both parties have explicit political strategies to respond to the trust crisis. For Kemi Badenoch the problem is one of overload (the state trying to do too much), colonisation (dangerous ideas taking hold), and incompetence (public servants doing the wrong activities, badly). Her speech in Washington DC this week touched on these themes and I have previously discussed the philosophies underpinning her thinking.
The Government’s thinking also has state failure in mind but it contends that the modern state is in a more pre-overloaded state, down but not out. Ultimately, delivery, through a set of missions and targets, is the way to move it away from the overload zone and regain trust. And whilst it is difficult to discern a working theory of Government there are some identifiable strands. Starmer articulates the extrinsic push of targets and mobilisation. This week, Pat McFadden outlined something innovative in a series of experimental “test and learn” collaborations to resolve specific challenges like utilisation of family hubs and the cost of emergency housing. A few weeks ago, again as discussed here at the time, Wes Streeting outlined a triple reform of the NHS with acute care overseen from the centre, public and health and community care more about local collaborative action, and a strong strand of patients’ rights.
When you add in the public engagement exercise currently supporting the creation of a new NHS Plan as outlined by Sally Warren in a blog this week, you can see lots of different directions and forces of change: deliverism, focused innovation, local collaboration, and citizen engagement. That’s good; given the scale of the challenge you want to see a range of different reform forces at play. And yet, there is a sense that what is still missing is an over-arching theory of Government: ie in the modern context, defined by complexity, how do the different actors in the system come together most effectively to pursue common goals? What are the mechanisms by which we can move from antagonism between representatives and administrators (“the tepid bath of managed decline”) and citizen frustration with both? How do we energise dynamic change?
Now, you may well argue this is all pretty humdrum and only of interest to the technocratic few. But this ignores the degree of attention given to state capacity in recent times. Politics was often framed around reform of the state both in the Thatcher and Major Governments and the Blair and Brown Governments - Ruth Puttick discusses the role of capability reviews in the latter. Even under Cameron there was a half-hearted attempt at reform under the Big Society banner which formed the centrepiece of his 2010 manifesto. The Clinton presidency had efficient, continuously improving Government, helped by the internet which will encourage AI evangelicals, at its core under the National Partnership for Reinventing Government led by Al Gore. Of course, the new Musk/Ramaswamy led Department of Government Efficiency may be less edifying.
Elaine Kamarck recounts in a discussion with Simon Rosenberg how this mission became part of Clinton’s key stump speech in 1996. The theory of Government wasn’t just how you delivered change, it was also how you told the story of change. We’ve lost the art of modernising Government and, here we are, low in trust and at risk of overload.
A new story, a new theory, lies in rethinking the interplay of citizens, administrators and representatives. It is about the people within the system and that includes us. One trick the Government can afford to lean more heavily upon is mobilising citizens for the mission. We are not going to become healthier unless we adopt healthier lifestyles. The green transition will be stunted and antagonistic unless we all do our part. Educational outcomes will not improve unless we can enlist and support parents. Community life and neighbourhood tranquility suffer unless we engage. Employers as citizens can improve local economies and opportunities by devoting more effort into training and better work. Surely, what we can do together is far more powerful, and ultimately more effective, than task-and-finish Government?
This requires a more relational way of seeing the interaction between representatives in Government, public administrators, and citizens. State redemption becomes about evolving the roles of each. Representatives must be more prepared to engage with systems and complexity and, without diluting the responsibility of public administrators, at least row with them on more of the change journey. This means articulating not just aims but to co-design and tell the story of the mission.
Public administrators for their part should be given the support to reach beyond organisational silos and boundaries - “liberating” public services as Ben Glover of Demos has outlined with reference to Gateshead where citizens who need help are seen as a whole person with strengths as well as needs as opposed to through siloed lenses. This model gets them the help they need - for example, debt advice or support for home adaptation - rather than just whatever the system has been set up to deliver.
It’s worth saying something about the administrators and reform because they are very important. By administrator, I am referring to anyone who is involved in management of state activities: from frontline local supervisor to Cabinet Secretary. Firstly, they are fundamental to the successful operation of a functional democracy. In fact, Francis Fukuyama in his classic trilogy, political order and political decay, sees them as crucial to successfully functioning states, alongside the rule of law and accountability. Secondly, there are often likely to be the type of ethically driven managers that management theorists such as Peter Drucker and W.Edwards Deming see as a feature of successful organisations. Drucker and Deming emphasise ethics, long-termism, aligning public and private goals and motivations. We should expect to see these values in administrators and we do.
Most crucially, from the perspective of a change programme, administrators have access to the answers. The closer you are to the problem the more likely you are to see something that can improve things. Alan Robinson and Dean Schroeder find that an astonishing 80% of potential improving innovations come from frontline staff. They are mainly discussing the types of service improvements that the Government in its efficiency drive is seeking to secure so worth noting. And we should go further. By really pushing the change dynamic down to the frontline, and bringing citizens in directly, we could see efficiency, innovation and engagement and then we are in a world that might combine the best of deliverism (focus, coordination of resources, institutional unblocking) with the best of human learning systems (trust, responsivity, continuous innovation).*
Where we are currently is just emerging from a bit of a rut and we have been for some time. The good news is that there is now plenty of Government energy and a wider determination to dislodge us from the moment. The early stages of change feel a bit antagonistic- representatives and administrators look at each other with suspicion and citizens look on in frustration. Now, a task of leadership is to both enlist and encourage them all to unlock a greater sense of collective mission. That will require spelling out the capabilities and supports each will need to create a state more ready for these complex times. And results can be felt well before the end of the decade.
*There are so many variants of this broad approach of human-centred learning. For example, see the “new problem solving skills” from Bloomberg Philanthropies, Kania/Kramer on Collective Impact, “public problem solving” from New America, a new ethos for the civil service from Demos Helsinki and public entrepreneurship from the RSA of a few years back. There’s lots more!