First things first: sustaining political will for public governance change

Abstract

This revised text of the Braibant lecture delivered in Helsinki addresses the widely shared difficulty of creating enough political will to reform public institutions, before crisis strikes and not after, and then to sustain the reforms through to completion. There is virtually no incentive for politicians or governments to do this: interests (including the administration itself) will most likely be hostile; meaningful change is only measured in years; few votes can be won. Yet the complex problems faced today by both individual countries and at planetary level, summarized in the beginning of the article, are so serious that it is vital to find ways to alleviate this difficulty without which all public policies and programmes suffer. The principal means must be much sharper and more articulately organized pressures for change so as to make it politically inconvenient to ignore them, and thus provide a genuine incentive to act. Nine propositions are made. Points for practitioners There are no obvious answers to the problem of getting the sustained interest of the political class to prosecute reform of public governance. Can sharper pressures along with the necessary fora and processes be developed? The difficulty is compounded by the trend to cynicism and outright dismissal as regards public authorities. On the other hand, the growing perception of dramatic problems shared across the planet introduces a potential for new institutional initiatives, mobilization of external groupings, incentive structures or attitude changes. As one example, could the trend to independent, more transparent responsibilities in such domains as monetary or fiscal policy be relevant?