Jacob Torfing

Enhancing Collaborative Innovation in the Public Sector

Encouraged by the proliferation of governance networks and the growing demands for public innovation, this article aims to advance “collaborative innovation” as a cross-disciplinary approach to studying and enhancing public innovation. The article explains the special conditions and the growing demand for public innovation, and demonstrates how it can be enhanced through multiactor collaboration. The case for collaborative innovation is supported by insights from three different social science theories. The theoretical discussion leads to the formulation of an analytical model that can be used in future studies of collaborative innovation in the public sector.

Workfare With Welfare: Recent Reforms of the Danish Welfare State

Denmark has recently seen a significant drop in unemployment that has not been matched by any corresponding increase in inflation. This article assumes that this remarkable achievement is rooted in the ongoing transition from the Keynesian welfare state (KWS) to a Schumpeterian workfare regime (SWR). The article compares the main features of the KWS with those of the SWR. It analyses the economic and political pressures behind the transition from the KWS to a SWR, and argues that we need to focus on the discursive construction of these pressures in order to avoid the dangers associated with functionalist explanations of societal changes. It then goes on to analyse the introduction of workfare policies in Denmark. The central claim is that Denmark has adopted an offensive workfare strategy. Hence, in Denmark workfare is disarticulated from the neo-liberal context within which it is located in the UK and the US and rearticulated with the social-democratic and universalistic welfare model. This disarticulation and rearticulation has produced significant emphases on activation rather than benefit and minimum wage reductions; on improving the skills and work experience of the unemployed rather than merely increasing their mobility and job-searching efficiency; on training and education rather than work-for-benefit (quid pro quo); on empowerment rather than control and punishment; and on broad workfare programmes rather than programmes which only target the unemployed. In addition, although it contains strong neocorporatist elements, the Danish workfare strategy can be characterized as a neo-statist strategy. The article concludes with some tentative remarks about the mix of political and institutional factors that contribute to explaining the particular Danish variant of the SWR, and about what we can learn from the Danish case.

Discourse Theory: Achievements, Arguments, and Challenges

During the last decade there has been mounting interest in various kinds of discourse theory and discourse analysis within what we can broadly define as the social sciences. This is evidenced by the growing number of publications, workshops, conference panels, university courses, and dissertations that draw on the intellectual resources of discourse theory. Some countries and subdisciplines have been more susceptible than others to the influence of the new theories of discourse. In some places, discourse theory has almost become the dominant paradigm, while in other places it has remained marginal. However, very few areas of research have been able to withstand the impact of its new ideas.

Network Governance and Post-Liberal Democracy

Governance networks are here to stay. They have become a necessary ingredient in the production of efficient public governance in our complex, fragmented and multi-layered societies. The big question has become the extent to which governance networks also contribute to democratic decision-making. Governance networks that take active part in determining the content of public policy making have traditionally been regarded as a threat to democracy on the grounds that they undermine the sovereign position of elected politicians and the autonomy of civil society; however, the liberal democratic model of parliamentary democracy no longer provides an adequate understanding of what democracy is and how it can be properly institutionalized. Fortunately, we witness the emergence of a new post-liberal theory of democracy that expands and redefines the concept of democracy in a way that facilitates the envisioning of both the positive and negative implications of the new forms of interactive network governance.

Path‐Dependent Danish Welfare Reforms: The Contribution of the New Institutionalisms to Understanding Evolutionary Change

Political attempts to reform existing policies often fail to bring about substantial change. When they succeed, the new policy is heavily influenced by the pre-existing policy path. This is confirmed by the story of Danish welfare reforms in the 1980s and 1990s, which can be explained in terms of their path dependency. In order to understand better the mechanisms of path dependency I draw on the fundamental insights of the new institutionalisms: rational choice institutionalism, historical institutionalism, and social constructivist institutionalism. The article begins with a brief presentation and comparison of the three new institutionalisms. It then discusses the dialectics of path shaping and path dependency before seeking to explicate the mechanisms of path dependency. Finally, the various accounts of path dependency are applied in an empirical study of the failure of welfare retrenchment in the 1980s and the relatively successful restructuring of the welfare state in the 1990s.

Introduction Governance Network Research: Towards a Second Generation

The structures and processes of public policy-making and societal governance are rapidly changing. The many reports about the failure of national and local governments to solve concrete policy problems and exploit new opportunities through hierarchical command and control have triggered an increasing use of market regulation in the provision of public goods and services. Hence, privatization of public enterprises, construction of quasi-markets, contracting out of public services, competitive deregulation and commercialization of the remaining public sector in accordance with the principles of the New Public Management doctrine have been in fashion since the early 1980s. The limits to the neo-liberal quest for ‘less state, more market’ not only include the standard problems of imperfect competition, unstable and insufficient market supply, unchecked externalities and growing inequality. The marketization strategy also fails to reduce the need for state regulation which seems to grow rather than diminish in the face of increased marketization. Last but not least, it fails to facilitate collectively oriented and pro-active governance on the basis of joint objectives and mutual trust. Despite of the many problems of the neo-liberal marketization strategy, political decision makers around the world continue to worship the market forces, mainly out of an ideological concern for the facilitation of free choice and the promotion of incentive-driven individual action.

WHAT'S IN A NAME? GRASPING NEW PUBLIC GOVERNANCE AS A POLITICAL- ADMINISTRATIVE SYSTEM

New participatory, interactive, and less direct forms of governing seem currently to be unfolding in many liberal democracies. Some scholars have tried to conceptualize these forms of governing by using the notion of new public governance (NPG). While promising, the notion remains conceptually underdeveloped. This article first aims to develop NPG from an empirical to an analytical concept that enables categorization and evaluation of new forms of governing. In order to gauge the full scope of the current transformations we draw on David Easton’s system theoretical model to identify the constitutive elements of NPG and show how they differ from those elements underpinning classical public administration and new public management. The second aim of the article is to delineate the main challenges that NPG poses for public management and policymaking in a complex and fragmented world. We conclude by reflecting on the need for metagovernance in order to handle the challenges and bring out the positive impact of NPG on normative performance goals such as efficiency, democracy, and innovation.

Democratic Anchorage of Infrastructural Governance Networks: the Case of the Femern Belt Forum

Governance networks are often praised for their contribution to making public governance and spatial planning more effective. However, the democratic performance of governance networks is heavily disputed. In order to make a more precise assessment of the democratic quality of governance networks, we need to develop normative criteria that permit us to measure the democratic quality of governance networks on different dimensions. Such criteria are developed and brought together in our model for the democratic anchorage of governance networks. This article aims to improve the democratic anchorage model in two different ways: by offering operational definitions of the basic dimensions of the model and by demonstrating how the assessment criteria can be applied in an empirical case study of a long-lasting, multilevel governance network involved in the recent decision to build a bridge between Denmark and Germany. The democratic anchorage model helps to assess the democratic performance of specific governance networks and to gain knowledge about the critical factors determining their degree of democratic anchorage. Such knowledge is crucial for developing pro-active strategies for enhancing the democratic performance of specific governance networks.

Theoretical Approaches to Metagovernance

An increasingly important issue for governance network theory is how and to what extent it is possible for governors to regulate self-regulating networks. It is generally recognized that governance networks must be regulated if they are to contribute to the efficient governing of society. But since a constitutive feature of governance networks is self-regulation, it is not possible to regulate governance networks by means of traditional sovereign forms of detailed, hierarchical and bureaucratic regulation. Sovereign forms of regulation would inevitably undermine the self-regulating capacity of the networks. Governance network theory describes how efforts to harvest the governing capacity of self-regulating networks, while still being able to ensure an overall societal governance, has brought with it a growth in new forms of governance, and suggest ways in which such forms of regulation can be developed further (Mayntz & Marin 1991; Kooiman 1993; Scharpf 1997; Pierre & Peters 2000, 2005; Rhodes 2000b; Milward & Provan 2000b; Richardson 2000; O’Toole & Meier 2000; Van Heffen, et al. 2000; Goss 2001).

Collaborative Innovation in the Public Sector

This special issue focuses on collaborative innovation in the public sector (Bommert, 2010; Sorensen and Torfing, 2011). It aims to explore how networks, partnerships and other forms of interaction between relevant and affected actors can accommodate the development and implementation of new and bold ideas in ways that reinvigorate public policies and services (Eggers and Singh, 2009). There has been a growing interest in public innovation (Newman, Raine and Skelcher, 2001; Borins, 2008; Hartley, 2005) and there is a burgeoning literature on the role of interactive forms of governance such as partnerships and networks (Kickert, Klijn and Koppenjan, 1997; Rhodes, 1997; Sorensen and Torfing, 2007). However, so far there have been few attempts to relate these fields of interests and bodies of literature by analyzing how interactive arenas can facilitate multi-actor collaboration that in turn may foster innovation by bringing together public and private actors with relevant innovation assets, facilitating knowledge sharing and transformative learning, and building joint ownership to new innovative visions and practices.