Understanding Policy Fiascoes by Paul 't Hart

Author:Paul 't Hart [Hart, Paul 't]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Public Policy, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781351293228
Google: 7qo0DwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 36704725
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusion: The Realm of Misfortune as a Social Construction

Claims about misfortune will continue to play an important role in debates about controversial policy episodes. At the same time, it becomes apparent that the salience of misfortune, and the validity of misfortune claims, will decrease when policy issues are manifestedly moving from the realm of "wicked problems," "impossible jobs," and "fuzzy gambling" into the domain of human and organizational control, routinized technology, and intelligent public decision making. Gaining ground upon fortune is, however, a gradual and seldom an irreversible process. Sometimes policymakers have to accept that they are, temporarily or more fundamentally, losing rather than gaining control. This implies that there is no stable and universal dividing line between misfortune and mismanagement. The line shifts in part as technology develops, knowledge expands, and situations change, but also when cultural and political norms about the scope of virtue in public policymaking evolve.

Value judgments will always be necessary in identifying agents of policy failure. These will take different forms. They can be epistemological (what could policymakers have known?), technical (what was feasible?) or moral (what was reasonable?). They can depend on the level of analysis (what is unforeseeable or uncontrollable for individual actors might be within the realm of the organization as a whole) and they depend upon the standards for scrutiny and thoroughness that are applied. Judgments about which agents determine the course and outcomes of public policy making can and will not be made in a void. Politics, ideology, and culture all play a major role in the identification and evaluation of environmental contingencies as misfortunes. The very act of identifying what is controllable by government, and therefore the notion of misfortune itself, is inherently normative and imbued with ideological predispositions. Consequently, there is no ultimate, in the sense of objective, answer to the question where mismanagement stops and misfortune begins.

This can be illustrated by the different evaluations of Great Hunger in Ireland in the nineteenth century, as discussed by Shklar.38 To most of the English rulers this was a tragic event, given their firm beliefs that the system of landholding was sacred and that government should not interfere in the economy. From their libertarian point of view the famine was an economic necessity which could not and should not be remedied by public policy. For Shklar on the other hand, and for many of the descendants of the Irish victims, the Great Hunger "is as good an example as any of the uses of ideology in treating passive injustice as misfortune by imposing a sense of tragic inevitability upon events that are in fact entirely amendable to purposive human alteration."39 Interestingly though, Shklar also makes it clear that the Irish peasants themselves, being deeply devout, in their turn also "'tended to look upon their suffering as a divine visitation and punishment."40

This points to an unmistakable cultural and ideological element in the labelling and appreciation of policy failures. Misfortunes are also, and probably foremost, collective constructions. Cultural frames determine whether and which contingencies are construed as fate.

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