Public action, bureaucracy and the implementation of social policies
Arnaldo Provasi Lanzara
(UFF- INCT/PPED)
Abstract
This study highlights the role of bureaucracy in the implementation of social policies, emphasizing the state capacity to implement these policies as part of a public action sociologically informed. For this purpose, they will be addressed three crucial dimensions that constitute this action, namely: the organizational competence of state agencies; its embeddedness and territorial scope; and finally, its results in terms of production of collective action. The case studies reported in this study reinforce the centrality of state capacity for historical and comparative analyzes of social policies, demonstrating how the activism of some bureaucracies in different countries and at different times, as in Germany in the late 19th century and in Brazil in the early 21st century, helped structure the collective mobilization of key social actors through the implementation of redistributive policies.
Keywords: public action; state capacity; social protection; collective action
Public action, bureaucracy and the implementation of social policies
1-Introduction
One of the main challenges of social sciences today is the attempt to understand complexities that surround public action in its multiple interfaces. However, such challenge renders easy solutions, since the transformations in progress in the last decades have multiplied the spaces of public action. The State is no longer the sovereign organizer of such action which, in remote times, had manifested itself through a modernity of its own. This latter is characterized by a definition of political place and, correlated to it, of a defined space of regulation.
Well, these are the spaces that are found radically transformed today. And, for good or bad, the fact is that this transformation redimensioned the role of public action and the material and symbolic meaning of its contents. Thereby, that which is “public” has multiplied not only itself, but also and primarily, spheres of decision making and reproductive actions, ceaselessly: the local experiences of participation and the management of public policies; the regional and inter-regional joint of management; the transnationalization of legal proceedings and instruments of economic regulations by means of “markets” and multilateral, economic agencies. All of these spheres converge into initiative centres for a new type of governance shaped, though, by the complexity, mobility and even by the likely to be regulated activities. The structure of governance that steers this public action has become more fluid, polycentric and less hierarchical, while it dismembers itself in various, disseminating centres of action. Such assertion, however, does not spare the needed acknowledgment of some paradoxes. On the one hand, in a more optimistic view, it is necessary to question whether, due to such transformations, we are before a genuine reconfiguration of the public space, of the decision-making spaces and deliberation, heading towards the consolidation of a more pluralized sphere, or whether, on the contrary, we have only found the advent of governance without government.
The last decades have also been stage for a profound transformation in the field of public policies studies: the object of observation per se and the analysis of the presence of the State in the everyday of social relationships. As a consequence of the most recent changes in the political and decisive environments, the appointed theories in this field, as well as its consequences and methods have suffered a semanthic transformation, while they recognize as an investigative, starting point the role of the relations between the State and society and their conflicts regarding the structuring of public policies.
The growing emphasis of the literature on such relations has enabled a quite promissing fertilization of theories and methods of analysis in the last few years. More and more analyses about public policies have been abandoning certain, unfruitful dichotomies, such as agency versus structure. On the contrary, they end up focusing on methodologies that conjugate macrostructural processes, such as those of the State transformation and institutional change, with strategies of mobilization of social and political actors, highlighting the representations that such actors make of the produced, public policies.
As a theoretical reflection, this paper seeks to stress that the outcome brought up by the analyses has been fundamental for reconsidering the action of the State and of the dynamics of mobilization of social actors in the process of implementation of policies. About this issue, we shall try to demonstrate, under the light of the new sociologically informed perspectives of public action, that the modus operandi of the implementation of such policies by the State as part of a wider and less (multi) constrained public action, is not only territorially negotiated, but also, structured by organizational nets that it tries to control and coordinate, generally, in an imperfect way.
Besides describing the main theoretical contributions brought up by these new perspectives, some studies of national and sectorial cases present in different conjunctures shall be highlighted. These studies attest the protagonism played by some bureaucracies and by public policy´s tools in the implementation of systems of social protection. For such, three crucial dimensions for the understanding of this process will be emphasized: 1) the organizational competence of the state agencies for the implementation of policies of social protection; 2) its rootedness and territorial reachness in societies; and, finally, 3) its results in terms of the production of collective action.
This paper is divided in five sections, apart from this brief introduction. The second section underlines the role of State-society relations in the constitution of bureaucracies and systems of social protection. The third section addresses to the modus operandi of public action in processes of implementation of social policies, highlighting some important dimensions that pervade such processes, which are: the activism of state bureaucracy, the territorialization of policies and the production of collective action. The fourth section seeks to demonstrate the centrality of these dimensions for the historical and compared analyses of public policies, while making explicit how the activism of some public bureaucracies, in diverse countries and in different moments, has either deliberately or accidentally helped structure the collective mobilization of some social actors through the implementation of redistributive policies – for which, Germany, in the end of the XIX century and Brazil, in the beginning of the XXI work as examples.
2- State-society relations, bureaucracy and social development
While analyzing concepts about the nature of the State and bureaucracy, the existence of certain elements that have never been at stake is made evident, even when real experience seems to refute them. Thus, since the XVIII century, abstract generalizations from liberalism have led States to be mere embodiment of a hypothetically, general will, of a hypothetical “adjustment of economic and political interests”.
Such generalizations have also given rise to the thought of bureaucracy as a prescriptive phenomenon towards democratic horizons. According to one of the French political scientist Pierre Rosanvallon´s provocative essays (2008), this form of thinking about bureaucracy came out as a reaction to the idea that the State administrative apparatus was a simple extension of representation legitimated by elections. It was against such idea that a sheerly administrative legitimacy of public action emerged. This new legitimacy was, thus, born with the defilement of a certain schizophrenic desire of simultaneously being both the expression of general interest and the achievement of a governmental technique. Therefore, it intended to identify itself with “social generality”, with general interest – with the “truth revealed by elections” – and, at the same time, apart itself completely from it, keeping itself from “political contamination” (Rosanvallon, 2008: 71).
The finding of such schizophrenia has nurtured a myriad of theories that since the end of the XIX century has been concerned fundamentally with demonstrating the tensions that bureaucratic rationalizations would put on social life. This would include the weberian thesis of the “routinization of charisma” in the bureaucratic controls exercised by the State (Weber, 1994). Indeed, such schizophrenia has extended itself to our days, translating itself in a kind of eagerness to restrain and activate the strength of governments, expressed by two types of belief. On the one hand, the belief on the “glass box” of the “democracy of the people” (Manin, 1997) that would respond to the crisis of political representation and to the new demands of democratic transparency and legitimacy. This would oblige public authorities to communicate their decisions to citizens all the time, within a deliberative rite of eternal search for consensus. On the other, the belief on the “black box” of governmental agencies as a synonym of economic rationality and efficiency.
Moreover, it is worth mentioning that both believes have produced two of the major fetishes that surround the structures of governance in current democracies. The first of these fetishes refers to the demands of enlargement of direct forms of participation in representative democracies: the volunteering (voyeuristic) fetish of the “democracy of audience” that postulates an excess of transparency in its fury to “follow” the governments´ conduct – even though, it proves to be growingly less effective in controlling them (Urbinatti, 2014). The second and mostly widespread one reports itself to the decisive requirements of the new, managerial State whose way of acting transforms its obscurity to the public into a condition for the production of “efficient” and growingly “motorized” policies for the economy.[1]
Nevertheless, it is necessary to demystify these ideas, as one conceives bureaucracies and public policies as phenomena connected to the “relational autonomy of the State” in its interaction with society. The historical construction of the social State typifies such autonomy newly. It is the result of the involvements themselves between public agents and society, in order to make the controls of the process of risk collectivization more effective. Following Norbert Elias´s arguments (1993), all movements towards the narrowing of social interdependence have been carriers of structural tensions and conflicts. In its social genesis and historical relation with processes of democratization, the social State has faced ethical and political conflicts, produced by the introduction of its civilizing standards and values shared by society (Elias, 1993).
Furthermore, it still must be said that by nurturing itself with these conflicts, the social State has only acquired its features in step with the changes in the distribution of power, produced in the interior of its respective societies. When its bureaucratic centralization has extended itself in a sheerly logistic sense or, as highlighted by Michael Mann (1993), has mobilized its “despotic power” to take resources out of society, this latter growingly requires from the State an enlargement of its “infrastructural powers”, which are constituted and mobilized by society itself[2]. In this sense, the sovereign controls exercised by States have always generated resistance, protests and provisional agreements that have themselves constituted democracy. Its consequent society has undermined at least the aforementioned sovereignity known as undisputable and irrevocable, while urging demands for the expansion of the State that, in turn, has promoted the rise of its capacities to generate social policies by means of collective and routinized negotiations (Mann, 1993).
Therefore, far from reflecting coherence, unity or the incarnation of any “general will”, Society-state relations have always been structured by networks of diffuse entanglement. These are the networks that guide public action in the process of implementation of policies, many times, in a contingent and imperfect manner. By taking on a feature of negotiation, such action can also be understood as a process of collective appropriation and ressignification of the public space.
3- Public action and the implementation of social policies
The aforementioned features of the State-society relationship have called the attention of the literature of public policies´implementation, composing a new disciplinary field called by some authors as “political sociology of public action” (Lascoumes and Le Galès, 2007:2014).[3] One of the central aspects highlighted by this new field of studies is about the complexity of current environments that involve the implementation of policies by governmental agencies.
Since now, it is important to emphasize that issues regarding governance matter in this discussion. In its wider understanding, governance represents a modality of coordination, thus, suggesting the existence of a political instance of control (Mayntz, 1998; Pierre and Peters, 2000). Nonetheless, the distrust related to the existence of a centre for political control of this coordination, partially manifested in critical and libertarian (neoliberal) theories of the 1970´s, by means of a generalized attitude of “statephobia”, has nourished hopes of the rise of new forms of governance, grounded on the spontaneity of “horizontal self-organization”. According to a more institutionalist branch, yet faithful to such “spontaneity”, governance is conceived as a mechanism of coordination of economic and individual actions, understood as primary forms of organization. Although “concerned with institutions”, this concept, whose roots date back to the economic theory of transaction costs (North, 1990; Weingast, 1995), reproduces liberalism´s old, teleological fictions of associating governance to the capacity of “self regulation of markets”.
According to literature about “state capacities”, whichever the underlying conditions to the formation of governance arrangements there are, the arguments in favour of the State coordination are strongly applicable to social situations in which structural transformation is on the agenda. In spite of the fact that the concept of state capacity contains in itself some ambiguities and aporias (Cingolani, 2013), it has brought to light three crucial dimensions to the comprehension of the process of implementation of State public policies, which are: 1) the organizational competence of state agencies to implement such policies (Skocpol and Finegold, 1982; Evans et al., 1985); 2) its rootedness and territorial reach in societies (vom Hau, 2012); and, finally 3) the outcome in terms of the production of collective action (Tilly, 2007).
In the case of social policies, the structural transformation above mentioned depends on how the different “public action scales” operate themselves as to generate the redistribution of resources in a given territory, constantly redefining their social, economic and political dimensions. Operating within a scale in the realm of such policies means relieving horizontal and vertical necks that create discouragement to the provision of public goods by governments in different spaces that integrate a territory. This scale is fundamental for the coordination of the different levels of government´s territorial competences that are involved with the implementation of redistributive policies. Moreover, it plays an important role in normatizing the relationships between the diversity of state and non-state actors for providing such policies.
One of the less commented features regarding the literature of the “welfare states” (Esping-Andersen, 1990) is precisely the capacity that some Scandinavian countries have in operating their social policies by means of the aforementioned scale. According to some authors, these countries´specificity in producing more universally social policies comes from a vertical governance kind of structure, which matches local autonomy in providing social services that have centrally established institutional mechanisms of regulation and coordination (Sellers and Lidstrom, 2007; Kasepov and Barberis, 2013). Notwithstanding, there is a far from subtle difference that connotes these countries´s exceptionality as regards the production of their redistributive policies: the existence of a wide public infrastructure of social services at local levels. In this sense, the loss of power of central agencies in the vertical governance dimension, due to the growing autonomy of local instances having to do with the decentralizing management of social policies, is more than redressed in the horizontal dimension. This is due to the weak presence of private providers acting locally in the countries at stake that do not risk the services´universal disposition, once they operate following a reasonable degree of standardization as regards national guidelines (Rauch and Vabo, 2008).
The case of the Scandinavian countries reveals that the decentralized provision of social policies´regulatory effectiveness, in the new governance arrangements that define such policies, is not prefigured simply for being grounded on constitutional rules. More recent theoretical developments in the field of historical institutionalism demonstrate that in spite of the existence of rules, institutions and policies of social protection can be captured by private actors who in many cases work as “virtual”, exclusive providers of such policies, openly or stealthily conspiring against their structural guidelines (Streeck; Thelen, 2005; Palier, 2005; Hacker et al, 2015). These actors have enough resources to exploit gaps and legislative ambiguities, creating a variety of “occult ways” (Hacker and Pierson, 2014) that can disallow public policies´ decisive process, particularly, to do with implemented policies at local level and of redistributive cut.
In fact, decisions about the implementation of policies, far from being unanimous, are contestable and dissolved in a wider set of decisions and “non decisions” (Schattschneider, 1975). Thus, from the construction of public problems to the implementation of policies, what one observes is a process of “appropriation” of means and objectives focused on such policies, which stabilizes through organized and routinized negotiations around controversies (Callon et al., 2001).
As Lascoumes and Le Galès (2014) point out, dissociating policy design (intended public action) from the “collective appropriation” that presides the moment of implementation of policies becomes crucial. This moment expands the margins of discretion of the diverse actors that belong to the different political and administrative levels of a certain territory. This makes of the field of implementation of policies an open and indefinite space (Hill and Hupe, 2002). In the same direction, Kooiman (2003) asserts that implementation evinces the feature of “cogovernance” of a public policy, once national governments rarely show themselves able to prescind other (public and private) actors in order to introduce their decisive rules. Ultimately, implementation is set up by a vast game of negotiated interactions that produce both a “space of action” – induced by the blurleft by many programs- and a “space of appropriation” consequent of the mode by which various, disputing collectivities realize, interpret and constitute repertoires to do with produced, public policies (Lascoumes and Le Galès, 2014:41).