Governance in the face of sabotage and bricolage: policy making in the age of the Internet.

• Author: Paquet, Gilles

Governance can be defined as effective co-ordination when power, information and resources are widely distributed. Collaborative governance (rather than top-down government) is required when citizens are faced with situations where no single institution or stakeholder can lay claim to all the power, information and resources necessary to resolve the problems confronting them. The new information and communication technologies are a source both of disturbance in this environment, and of new ways to foster collaboration in harnessing that turbulence. This article looks at the problems and challenges of public policy making in such a situation.

Governance, as defined above, is a subversive concept. It challenges not only the view held by many in government circles around the world that government has all the information, power, and resources to deal with any problem it wishes to tackle, but also the presumption that it has the authority and legitimacy to support such unilateral action.

On these matters, one may surmise that the members of the present federal Cabinet are split in two camps: "les anciens" -- not the oldest members of the team necessarily -- those who believe strongly in such hegemonic views; and "les modernes" those who recognize that the federal government is only one of the meaningful stakeholders in most situations, and that its public policy making responses to the problems facing Canadians require collaboration with partners from the private, public and civic sectors.

Tension necessarily ensues between the two camps as those imbued with a centralizing mind set, and intent on imposing their world view, (whatever the consequences) are confronted by those who see the role of the federal government as one of a more modest sort: an animateur in a game without a master, a broker capable at best of creative bricolage.

For the "modernes", the governance of the policy making process is of necessity collaborative. But collaboration is not simple: it demands a sharing of power by the stakeholders who resist it; it requires effective mobilization of the wit, imagination, and commitment of partners, while at the same time avoiding the perils of partnership: shirking of responsibility, abuse of power, etc. This in turn calls for the development of effective social technologies of collaboration.(1)

The impact of new information and communication technologies on this more diffuse public policy making process has been both disruptive and enabling: they have created a great deal of disturbance, but they can also be used to facilitate collaboration, and thereby help to shape more efficient responses to these new circumstances.

The disturbance factor is ascribable to a dematerialization and de-territorialization of the socio-economy generated by the new technologies that have made it more footloose, and therefore more volatile and less stable. The new technologies have freed individuals from the constraints of matter and space, making possible a greater autonomy of individuals and groups, and providing them with a much greater capacity to use these degrees of freedom to weave alliances and partnerships across borders of all sorts, or even to disengage altogether, to switch off. This new capacity to switch on and off increases both the degree of relevant uncertainty and the fragility of all national and territorial arrangements.

But these technologies also provide a means of improving communication, of reducing the transaction costs among partners, of fostering accelerated social learning, and of helping to make better use of collective intelligence.(2)

What remains unclear in this high-speed, high-risk society is whether the new technologies (of which the Internet is the most obvious) will tend to increase the complexity of the issues tackled by public policy more rapidly and dramatically than they can help improve the potency of the technologies of collaboration to help cope with these problems. There are two schools of thought on these issues -- the optimists and the pessimists -- but neither of these groups has succeeded in putting forward an entirely persuasive argument in support of their elation or gloom.

Our core argument might be stated in three propositions: First, the new information and communication technologies are not a factor that can be analysed in isolation: one needs to consider their impact in the context of the revolution in policy-making that is in progress -- a revolution that has affected both the form and content of public policy making; Second, a certain cautious pessimism is in order in the short run, because it appears that the new technologies are mainly used to sabotage public policy processes, and have not been yet of much help in ensuring the new required participation by all the relevant stakeholders in such processes; and Third, a certain cautious optimism in the longer run may be warranted, however, since the new technologies are likely to help the public policy makers to operationalize more effectively and quickly the sort of participation that would seem to be required in the new collaborative governance that underpins the process of creative public policy making bricolage. This is what e-governance promises.

The Old and the New Approach to Public Policy Making

From the 1870s to the 1970s, the two assumptions on which public policy making was built in Canada were the widely held beliefs (1) that the public sector could do things better than the private sector; and (2) that governments had an almost unlimited capacity to engineer a redistribution of the benefits of sound policies throughout the population.(3) So, when Canadians were faced with major challenges or crises, they turned to governments -- whether it be for constructing a railroad or putting a broadcasting system in place. These government interventions obviously generated winners and losers, but all unease about such potential inequities was put to rest by the belief that government would subsequently interfere with the redistribution of income and wealth so as to ensure that those who might feel maligned would be generously compensated.

This was the glorious era of "government knows best", and of "the emergence of absolute social rights" bestowed on the population by benevolent government diktats. Despite many failures in the management of such interventions, until the 1980s, tolerant citizens allowed governments to continue to claim technocratic omniscience as policy-makers, and boundless benevolence as benefits equalizers.

In this old world of public policy making, one did not sense any requirement for wide consultation. For instance, a case study of the 1970s revamping of the Unemployment Insurance scheme would provide ample evidence of the top-down way of crafting policy that was still in good currency. It was a policy designed by a handful of people, under the leadership of Guy Cousineau, sold to Cabinet by the good offices of Bryce Mackasey, and pushed through the House of Commons as an enlightened way to fix the scheme in the face of the challenges posed by the massive...