Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figures
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- one Forty years of public management reform in UK central government: promises, promises …
- two Political anthropology and civil service reform: prospects and limits
- three Just do it differently? Everyday making, Marxism and the struggle against neoliberalism
- four Performing new worlds? Policy, politics and creative labour in hard times
- five Weathering the perfect storm? Austerity and institutional resilience in local government
- six Complex causality in improving underperforming schools: a complex adaptive systems approach
- seven Toward policy coordination: alternatives to hierarchy
- eight Governing local partnerships: does external steering help local agencies address wicked problems?
- nine All tools are informational now: how information and persuasion define the tools of government
- ten The politics of engaged scholarship: impact, relevance and imagination
- eleven Reflections on contemporary debates in policy studies
- Index
four - Performing new worlds? Policy, politics and creative labour in hard times
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 March 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figures
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- one Forty years of public management reform in UK central government: promises, promises …
- two Political anthropology and civil service reform: prospects and limits
- three Just do it differently? Everyday making, Marxism and the struggle against neoliberalism
- four Performing new worlds? Policy, politics and creative labour in hard times
- five Weathering the perfect storm? Austerity and institutional resilience in local government
- six Complex causality in improving underperforming schools: a complex adaptive systems approach
- seven Toward policy coordination: alternatives to hierarchy
- eight Governing local partnerships: does external steering help local agencies address wicked problems?
- nine All tools are informational now: how information and persuasion define the tools of government
- ten The politics of engaged scholarship: impact, relevance and imagination
- eleven Reflections on contemporary debates in policy studies
- Index
Summary
Introduction
This chapter addresses the problem of how to engage with the politics of public policy in the current period of cuts, austerity and retrenchment. As Hay and Wincott (2012) argue, the slow pace of economic recovery in Britain and beyond means that hard times are likely to continue, with further pressure on welfare provision and public services. But what does this mean for our understanding of public policy? Can the theoretical frameworks developed for analysing the New Labour years in the UK suffice? The chapter takes up the challenge of this book by offering critical reflections on the implications of austerity governance for the politics of the policy process. But it also argues that critical reflections are insufficient, and goes on to explore the potential of new methods, new actors, and new framings of the policy process to generate new solutions, and to suggest how far actors with ‘progressive’ social or political commitments are able to enact new worlds within the confines of the present.
The policy reforms traced in this chapter refer to the UK Coalition government in 2011/12, but the chapter traces what I consider to be underlying logics that are likely to be longstanding. These are discussed in a series of short sections whose aim is to provoke ideas and critical dialogue rather than to offer a full account (or critique) of the topic concerned. By bringing them together in a single chapter I hope to suggest both potential synergies and important disjunctures. The chapter then assesses how alternative rationalities and scripts might be performed against this backdrop. As established institutional pathways are fractured there may be some space for ‘progressive’ interventions to take shape. A final section revisits the vexed question of how far new and emergent performances might be considered as sites of governmentalisation and neoliberal appropriation, and how far they might constitute new terrains of political engagement.
Reframing the policy process
Austerity is not of course a new topic in the political and policy literatures (see for example Clarke and Newman, 2012; Farnsworth, 2011; Jordan and Drakeford, 2012; Lowndes and Pratchett, 2012; Richardson, 2010, Taylor-Gooby and Stoker, 2011; and special issue of Critical Social Policy, 2012, 32, 3).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Rethinking Policy and PoliticsReflections on Contemporary Debates in Policy Studies, pp. 71 - 94Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2014