Public Policy and Administration

This article has two aims: to qualify the UK government’s ‘problem’ of governance in a comparison with Scotland and Wales, and to use implementation studies (the ancestors of the new governance literature) to explore policy developments since devolution in Britain. It presents a puzzling finding from extensive interview research: that while we may expect UK government policy to suffer a bigger ‘implementation gap’ based on distinctive governance problems (such as greater service delivery fragmentation and the unintended consequences of top-down policy styles), pressure participants in Scotland and Wales are more likely to report implementation failures. Using a ‘top-down’ framework, it explores three main explanations for this finding: that the size of the implementation gap in England is exaggerated by a focus on particular governance problems; that pressure participant dissatisfaction follows unrealistic expectations in the devolved territories; and that the UK government undermines devolved policy implementation, by retaining control of key policy instruments and setting the agenda on measures of implementation success.

A particularly prominent feature of contemporary politics appears to be an increasing concern with how risk, science and politics collide. To some, it reveals a political order that has become risk averse. This article challenges this view and argues that we need to appreciate the impact of the New Right on the reconfiguration of risk in politics. Influenced by a conservative view of individual responsibility and a liberal distaste for state regulation of the market, the New Right argues that risk is not to be feared, but embraced, that it should be viewed in a positive light; it stimulates both innovation and creativity. Here, the role of expert advice is to sustain the view that risks are an attendant feature of day-to-day life, that what matters is how, as individuals, we make judgements about those risks. Rather than perform the task of sustaining order through responsible government, science participates in (re)constituting order through the market. It articulates the extent to which individuals are exposed to risk, or defines more clearly where no risk can be proven. And if no risk can be proven, intervention cannot be warranted.

In the complex cobweb of public sector organizational structures, the need to tackle intricate societal problems set the context for a new direction in leadership studies, one that enables the achievement of policy goals by creating collaborative capabilities. In the policy area of children and young people, Local Safeguarding Children Boards (LSCBs) can allow leadership to manifest itself through a number of media. First, the local authority is the statutory designated leader of this partnership in the local community. Second, the representatives of agencies with a duty to cooperate on children’s issues are themselves leaders of their organizations’ resources and commitment to the partnership’s goal. Third, in the light of unprecedented complexity in policy making, getting things done often depends on the leadership capabilities of people and of organizations to work with the tension between multiple sets of professional, organizational and sectoral values. Although, in theory, leadership should be an important element of inter-agency working, essentially being about making things happen beyond usual institutional constraints, in reality however, empirical findings have shown that leadership in LSCBs is systematically inhibited, hence endangering the outcomes of collaborative, inter-professional and inter-organizational work. The article concludes with the paradox of public servants demonstrating leadership in inter-organizational settings while remaining an impersonal administrator subjected to tight public scrutiny. The article seeks to make a contribution to the public policy and management field in general and to that of collaborative management in particular. To this end, the existing developments in the leadership literature have been used to shed light on one case study of one of the more controversial partnerships in the British public sector: LSCBs.

This article explores the relationship between leadership as adaptive work and different forms of social consciousness, and between leadership and alternate facets of imagination. It argues that nongovernmental and government leaders typically are enjoined either to support or to challenge existing imaginaries at different levels of analytic aggregation — social, community, interorganizational and organizational — and that they routinely employ different dimensions of imagination to do so. These include aesthetic, cognitive, affective and moral imagination. The essay concludes with a brief overview of the implications of the argument for leadership practice.

This article argues for research grounded in interpretive theory, or the beliefs and practices of actors, and observational fieldwork, or thick descriptions of what the actors think they are doing. However, discussions of theory and method only come to life when they are grounded in fieldwork. So, at the heart of the article is an account of the Private Offices of British central government departments. I argue that the focus on beliefs and practices enables me to tell a new story. The existing literature does not explore how the individuals who comprise the department’s core executive coordinate the department’s tasks and resolve conflicts. There is a ‘departmental court’ that dare not speak its name. By describing the court ‘at work’, I focus not on individual Private Offices but on the tasks of coordination and conflict resolution at the top of the department. I conclude that any approach that provides new evidence and a novel interpretation makes a strong case for inclusion in the armoury of every student of public administration.