Hendrik Wagenaar

Governance, Complexity, and Democratic Participation How Citizens and Public Officials Harness the Complexities of Neighborhood Decline

This article applies complexity theory to urban governance. It is argued that expert-based, hierarchical-instrumental policy making encounters insurmountable obstacles in modern liberal democracies. One of the root causes of this erosion of output legitimacy is the complexity of social systems. Complexity is defined as the density and dynamism of the interactions between the elements of a system. Complexity makes system outcomes unpredictable and hard to control and, for this reason, defies such well-known policy strategies as coordination from the center, model building, and reduction of the problem to a limited number of controllable variables. It is argued that participatory and deliberative models of governance are more effective in harnessing complexity because they increase interaction within systems and thereby system diversity and creativity. Using empirical data from research on citizen participation in disadvantaged neighborhoods in the Netherlands, the author shows (a) that neighborhoods can fruitfully be seen as complex social systems and (b) the different ways in which citizen participation is effective in harnessing this complexity.

Deliberative Policy Analysis: Understanding policy practices: action, dialectic and deliberation in policy analysis

Introduction: the modernist legacy in policy analysis From its inception in August Comtes positive social philosophy, policy analysis has been a vanguard of the modernist project, the pervasive cultural programme characteristic of the western world, to take rational, scientific control over the social and physical environment and shape it according to a preconceived ideal. One of the cornerstones of the modernist programme in public policy and social reform, specifically, is the opposition between theory and action. From Charles Merriam to Harold Lasswells policy sciences, via the rational choice theorists to the progenitors of the public choice doctrine, the aim of policy analysis has been to bring the unstable, ideology-driven and conflict-ridden world of politics under the rule of rational, scientifically derived knowledge. To see this traditional approach to policy analysis – and the critique that we develop in this chapter – in the intellectual currents of our age, it is important to be aware that the theory/action dichotomy is not just a belief or a doctrine that one can adopt or abandon at will. Instead it is an element of a broad cultural institution; a self-evident, habitual and tenacious understanding of the way we ought to relate to the world around us, that informs our opinions, values and self-image. This stance, as a seemingly self-evident positioning of ourselves as human actors towards the world (and because of its many unexpected intellectual ramifications, there is no avoiding of some philosophical context here), is almost wholly and unrecognizedly couched in epistemological terms.

Navigating the Eternally Unfolding Present: Toward an Epistemology of Practice

The topic of the article is practice theory. Using a detailed example from public administration, we first discus the shortcomings of the model of practice as applied knowledge that we have dubbed the Received View. The first half of the article is a chronology of successive adaptations of the Received View. These adaptations have gradually brought the Received View more in accordance with the practice-oriented critique in social theory and research of recent years. These adaptations fall short, however, of offering a theoretical account that explains the relationships among practice, knowledge, and context. These adaptations do not enable us to show, as we wish to do, how knowledge and context can be explained in terms of—and are evoked within—practice, and not the other way round—and that this transpires within real worlds each of which has its own unique constraints and affordances, histories and futures. In the second half of the article, we pick up on a relational conception of practice, knowledge, and context in which practice is distinct and primary. To develop this aspect of practice theory, we make use of some key concepts from modern Japanese philosophy. The nondualist posture of Japanese philosophy gives rise to a useful conceptualization of the dynamic and fluid relationships among practice, the characteristics of the situation at hand, and the epistemic elements of practice itself. In this final section, we introduce three concepts that help capture this dynamic, relational understanding of practice: “actionable understanding,” “ongoing business,” and “the eternally unfolding present.”

Democracy and Prostitution Deliberating the Legalization of Brothels in the Netherlands

This article discusses democratic deliberation as a core element of public administration in todays decentered world of governance. The juxtaposition of hierarchy and deliberation in policy networks is illustrated with the case of the legalization of brothels in the Netherlands. The case shows that despite distrust and conflict, the actors managed, through deliberative elements in negotiations, to attain the transformation of the prostitution sector into a regular business sector. However, the use of a deliberative implementation strategy did not preclude the emergence of negative, unintended consequences. The success or failure of the deliberative process is sensitive to its design, particularly the issue of who is included and excluded. A deliberative, collaborative approach to policy implementation has the potential to optimize social and cognitive capital. This is seen as a precondition for the constant, painful redesign of policies in the face of conflict and contingency that characterize successful policy implementation.

VALUE PLURALISM IN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

Traditional approaches to administrative ethics lament the absence of a comprehensive framework to guide research and practice. This article argues that the search for such a framework is a chimera. Irresolvable value conflict, a condition that in moral philosophy is called value pluralism, is intrinsic to contemporary political and administrative life in liberal societies. The article argues that value pluralism should be the starting point of administrative ethics. The argument that is developed in the article is: 1) genuine value conflict in public administration is unavoidable. 2) Most of the public administration or policy literature dealing with ethical issues, frames value conflict in emotive, non-rational terms, and consequently opts for a deliberative approach to the resolution of value conflict. 3) This assumption is wrong and blinds us to the practical, interactive, discourse based conflict resolution that occurs in everyday administrative practice. Building on concrete examples of administrative value conflict, the author suggests a practice-oriented approach to value pluralism in public administration

Using health status measures with the seriously mentally ill in health services research.

Changes in the delivery of mental health care have prompted interest in using generic health status measures to test the effect of system change on those receiving treatment. Of special concern are those with serious and persistent mental illness who may be neglected when cost containment efforts reduce the availability of treatment services. This population may be affected by these changes, which might go undetected if investigators use scales that measure only pathology and not the full spectrum of well-being. The purpose of this study was to test the feasibility of using self-report health status measures with this population, to describe the psychometric properties of the scales, and to report the health status scores of a random sample of the Medicaid psychiatrically disabled population. We found that the four health status scales had adequate psychometric properties, that score variability was high, the distributions normal, and that patterns of association with more traditional clinical measures were of the expected size and direction. One scale, General Health Perceptions, had reliability and item-to-score correlation below acceptable levels.

Evaluating mental health care reform: including the clinician, client, and family perspective.

This article suggests one direction that theory building might take to develop a stronger conceptual foundation needed to test the effect on clients of reforms in the financing and organization of mental health care delivery systems. The authors recommend that health status outcomes be measured from three perspectives: the client, who can best report his or her own subjective experience of illness; the clinician, who is the best source of information about the client’s disease; and the family, which is the best source of information about the effects on members’ health status of caring for a mentally ill family member. The authors also recommend that measurement of health status should be multidimensional.

Philosophical hermeneutics and policy analysis: Theory and effectuations

1. Variety in Interpretive Policy Analysis. The last three decades saw the increasing popularity of interpretive approaches in policy analysis. Policy hermeneutics, narrative analysis, analysis of policy discourse, and the analytics of government, can now all be found in mainstream policy journals (Rose and Miller 1992; Fischer and Forester 1993; Roe 1994;Hajer 1995;Yanow 1996; Wagenaar 1997; Bevir and Rhodes 2003; Wagenaar 2007). Methods books, always a sign of professional selfconfidence, arebeing published in ever larger numbers (Yanow 2000; Clarke 2005; Torfing 2005; Charmaz 2006). Professional conferences now regularly schedule panels on policy interpretation. Various summer schools offerinstiuction in interpretive policy analysis to graduate students. Interpretive policy analysis self-consciously positioned itself as an alternative to rational, empiricist policy analysis. Empiricist political inquiry operates on two strong assumptions: methodological monism, the belief that the methods appropriate to the study of social reality are the same as those used for the study of the natural world, and philosophical realism, the assumption that the objects of study exist independently of the methods used to observe them (Gibbons 1987). From these two assumptions follow the well-known empiricist desiderata that empirical data are independent from theoretical frameworks, that the knowledge obtained by social science research must be objective, and that events are explained when the researcher has established a causal relationship between them (Bohman, Hiley et al. 1991). hi terms of

Book Review: John Forester. Deliberative Practitioner: Encouraging Participatory Planning Processes. MA: The MIT Press, 1999

There is little doubt that the terms “participation” and “deliberation”, and, somewhat removed yet conceptually related, “governance” are much in vogue these days in a host of disciplines that directly or indirectly have government or public policy as their subject matter. Political theory, policy analysis, planning theory, and European studies have all been more than superficially touched in the last decade by a participatory, deliberative vocabulary (Dryzek, 2000, p. 140; Hajer, in press; Healy, 1997, p. 146; Innes & Booher, in press; Rhodes, 2000). Public Administration is no exception to this trend. European Public Administration has been discussing networks and “interactive” policy making since the early 1990s (Kooiman, 1993; Marks & Scharpf et al., 1996; Mayntz, 1993; Rhodes, 1996). The 1998 volume by King and Stivers is a conscious attempt to reframe public administration in terms of citizen participation (1998). And, as evidence of the accelerating speed with which citizen participation and deliberation are being discussed, at the recent Public Administration Theory Network annual conference in Leiden, no less than eight panels and one keynote address, (out of a total of thirty six panels) were wholly or partially devoted to issues of citizen engagement, participation or deliberation. What does this shift in language signify, apart from the usual academic mass psychology and the politics of getting published and securing grants? Is it mere rhetoric or does it signal deeper changes in the organization and mutual relation of state and society? And, finally, and for this journal most significantly, what can Public Administration learn from fields, such as