地方治理中的新管理主义

The New Managerialism in Local Governance: North-South Dimensions Author(s): Vandana Desai and Rob Imrie Source: Third World Quarterly, Vol. 19, No. 4, Rethinking Geographies: North: South Development (1998), pp. 635-650 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3993248 Accessed: 03/03/2010 20:37 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=taylorfrancis. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Taylor & Francis, Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Third World Quarterly. http://www.jstor.org Third World Quarterly, Vol 19, No 4, pp 635-650, 1998 [ I CARFAX The new managerialism in local governance: North-South dimensions VANDANA DESAI & ROB IMRIE ABSTRACT In recent times, a wave of public sector reforms has swept through developed, developing and transitional countries, prompting observers to herald the emergence of a 'new public management revolution'. However, this ten- dency, while evident across a range of nations, both North and South, is a complex, highly uneven and contradictory process. Indeed, we concur with, and seek to develop, the point by Polidano, who notes that it can 'be argued that such a thing as a unified coherent new public management model exists only in concept'. Subsequently, the paper is divided into two main parts. The first provides a brief overview of the broader purported changes in local governance by outlining aspects of Clarke and Newman's thesis concerning the managerial- isation of local government. ThereaJfter, we consider some of the key determi- nants of, and contradictions within, transitions to the new managerialism in two contrasting contexts, the UK and India. In doing so, we seek to highlight the importance of transitions in governance structures not as some end state but as a complex of interrelated processes which interconnect, as Dicken et al. suggest, 'in a complex and contingent fashion with extant (historically and geographi- cally specific)' socio-institutional, economic, and political structures. Over the last 20 years or so, a wave of public sector reforms has swept through developed, developing and transitional countries, prompting a range of observers to herald the emergence of a 'new public management revolution'.' This alleged revolution has sparked unprecedented interest in attempts to reshape systems of local governance, defined as an array of ways in which the interplay between the state, market and society is ordered. In practice, this shift has produced an active agenda to slim down the state, arrest high levels of public expenditure, increase efficiency in the provision of public services and extend the role of the private sector in service provision. For Clarke and Newman, such processes signify 'the remaking of the state in terms of a shift from a regime dominated by bureau- professionalism to one dominated by managerialism, embedded in processes of both the dispersal and concentration of power'.2 In particular, a consensus has emerged concerning the efficacy of capitalism as the primary mode of production and economic development.3 The claim is that capitalism can be made to work for all if significant shifts take place from the 'old order' of welfare states towards a 'new order' premised on the 'managerially based process of modernisation of state institutions'.4 The dimen- Vandana Desai and Rob Imrie are in the Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey TW20 OEX, UK; e-mail < v.desai@rhbnc.ac.uk >; < r.imrie@rhbnc.ac.uk > . 0143-6597/98/040635-16 $7.00 ? 1998 Third World Quarterly 635 VANDANA DESAI & ROB IMRIE sions of this 'new order' include the pursuit of procedural efficiency over other objectives, the division and dispersal of functions with the focus on intra-or- ganisational goals, and the propagation of perspectives which regard social and political issues as technical and/or procedural matters, that is, matters to be 'managed'. Managerialist ideologies are being reaffirmed in many quarters with the UK's Prime Minister, Tony Blair, for example, noting that 'in a modem welfare state the role of government is not necessarily to provide all social provision but to organise and regulate it most efficiently and fairly'.5 Such processes seem more or less ubiquitous across social and political divides in a context where wider global regulatory forces are one of the keys to understanding the shifting contours of governance systems at a range of spatial scales. Indeed, while the new managerialist agenda has received initial impetus in places like the UK, the USA and New Zealand, where policy programmes have sought to eradicate inefficiency and waste, and to promote value-for-money in local government, it rapidly acquired global dimensions in the early 1990s with the diffusion of new management reforms through foreign and aid policies of Northern governments, mainly through multilateral and bilateral aid mechanisms. Part of this increasingly global agenda is a concern among Western nations to promote 'good governance' through democratisation, rule of law, respect for human rights, participation and decentralisation.6 Politi- cal conditions have often been attached to development aid to these ends in what some regard as a broader, deep-seated neoliberal agenda seeking to remake the institutions and practices of (nation) states.7 Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPS) were based on the notion of limited government intervention, while seeking to propagate development as 'a single process of technical policy making'. 8 In most developing countries, although public subsidies were maintained for political reasons, expenditure on investment and the maintenance of public services and infrastructure diminished.9 In particular, the IMF and World Bank saw states as inefficient economic actors, and sought to induce 'sound manage- ment practices' or what the World Bank defined as 'not just less government but better government-government that concentrates its efforts less on direct intervention and more on enabling others to be productive'.10 For the World Bank, then, this meant that countries of the South should adopt policies to facilitate the liberalisation of external trade and exchange rate policies, to eliminate governmental control of internal prices and to reduce the scale of the public sector and its role as a producer of goods and services. However, we would argue that transformations in local governance struc- tures are more complex than simply being the effects of global forces and what Clarke and Newman refer to as 'trans-national economic retrenchment."' In particular, we concur with Clarke and Newman in acknowledging that the nature of change in local governance structures cannot be read off, as some seek to do, 'as the local effect of a global set of ideas about how to run public organisations'.12 As Clarke and Newman also suggest: 'it is possible to overread the logic of change, seeing forces such as globalisation, institu- tional fragmentation, the adoption of business ideas and practices in public service delivery, as cascading down from the global level of new economic 636 THE NEW MANAGERIALISM IN LOCAL GOVERNANCE pressures to the world of individual experience and action in a way which suggests simple and linear sequences of cause and effect'.13 In this sense, the ways in which such (global) structural realignments play out in specific places is, we would argue, contingent on a complexity of sociocultural and political relations and formations. In developing these, and related, ideas, we consider the argument that the move towards managerial states, while evident across a range of nations, both North and South, is a complex, highly uneven and contradictory process. In particular, we concur with, and seek to develop, the point by Polidano who notes that it can 'be argued that such a thing as a unified coherent new public management model exists only in concept'.'4 Subsequently, the paper is divided into two main parts. First, we provide a brief overview of the broader purported changes in local governance by outlining aspects of Clarke and Newman's thesis concerning the managerialisation of local government.15 Thereafter, we consider some of the key determinants of, and contradictions within, transitions to the new managerialism in two contrasting contexts, the UK and India. In doing so, we seek to highlight the importance of transitions in governance structures not as some end state but as a complex of interrelated processes which interconnect, as Dicken et al. suggest, 'in a complex and contingent fashion with extant (historically and geographically specific)' [socio-institutional, economic, and political] structures.'6 Re-regulating welfare and the managerialisation of the local state The making and remaking of state formations is a constant dynamic in societies, North and South. The increasing levels of sociopolitical and economic interde- pendence between nation-states is connected to what Cox refers to as the 'internationalisation of the state'."7 This process is described by 0 Tuathail et al as one whereby 'national institutions, policies, and practices become adjusted to the evolving structures and dynamics of a world economy of capitalist pro- duction'.'8 These adjustments, or transitions, have been occurring within a broad-based neoliberal agenda, with states submitting sovereign powers to quasi-governmental and private transnational institutions and actors. In particu- lar, states are being pressurised to internalise what 0 Tuathail et al refer to as the 'transnational consensus',19 or to open up their economies to free flows of trade in a context of market and fiscal deregulation. In turn, states are 're-invent- ing' government, although this varies widely from those seeking mere survival to those, like India, with some capacity to compete in global markets. The emergence of managerial states is part of what Gramsci conceived of 'as a continuous process of formation and superseding of unstable equilibria'. 20 Such instability, we would argue, is a systemic aspect of governance systems. In particular, the development of managerial states, globally, is connected to the re-regulation of welfare programmes, in a context where fiscal stability is seen as paramount.2' Systemic policy reform has been packaged around the broader objective of seeking to develop new delivery and/or managerial systems for welfare services, orientated around privatisation, deregulation and decentralis- ation. The emergent view is that local government should enable and regulate 637 VANDANA DESAI & ROB IMRIE the private and community sectors or public agencies rather than directly provide services. In turn, local government is, so some argue, being transformed into local governance structures, characterised by a shift in policy development and implementation from elected agencies and/or institutions of the state, to non- elected, quasi-governmental organisations. While there is a plethora of evidence indicating a general trend towards the managerialisation of states, the pattern is highly uneven. In particular, the UK, New Zealand and Australia have gone furthest in moving towards a managerial state yet, as Polidano notes, most developing countries have typically retrenched their civil services and decentralised a range of peripheral service functions 'but have stopped short of the rest of the agenda'.22 Thus, in nations as different as Ghana and Kenya, there is little evidence of significant changes to the contours of their local government/governance systems. Larbi, for instance, argues that a new public management in Ghana is difficult to develop and implement 'because of the multiplicity of central control agencies which are reluctant to liberalise and release control' ,.23 Indeed, for Larbi, the Ghanaian case highlights personal and institutional rigidities to change in a culture where 'bureaucratic and managerial behaviour is such that officials tend to pursue personal rather than organisational goals'. 24 Moreover, as Bubba and Lamba note, in Kenya for example, 'local govern- ment is characterised by corruption and financial mismanagement'25 which mitigates against any easy transition to the types of state structures envisaged by the World Bank. Contrasts in political and market conditions also stifle the possibilities for state reform. Thus, while Kenya has the economic capacity to pursue the pivotal part of the new managerialism-that is, privatisation-politi- cal resistance is inhibiting change. In contrast, Sri Lanka has the political will yet lacks the economic capacity to pursue significant privatisation programmes because market conditions do not favour competition.26 Privatisation has also been abrupt and imposed on many nations by external sources, with little prior analysis of market conditions and the importation of inappropriate models and practices. Local problems have emerged, such as technical problems of valu- ation, legal procedures and debt disposal, market conditions not favouring competition leading to the likelihood of replacing public with private monopoly and foreign ownership, and political conditions antagonistic to loss of opportuni- ties for patronage and loss of national control.27 In developing these, and related, ideas we compare and contrast the emerg- ence of managerial states in the UK and India.28 We make the comparison in order to highlight some of the (geographical) contingencies involved in the development of managerial state structures, but also some of their common features too. In particular, the UK and India, like other places, are bound together by what we might term 'a political paralysis' in which political differences have seemingly disappeared into a consensus between political parties on the necessity for social and welfare reform. Hay, for instance, refers to the emergence of a single vision democracy in Britain, with the main political parties competing with each other to see who can best consolidate the post- Thatcher settlement.29 Likewise, in India, reform programmes have been consol- idated through widely based cross-party consensus and are politically secure, 638 THE NEW MANAGERIALISM IN LOCAL GOVERNANCE even irreversible. Indeed, unfounded fears were expressed that reform may be reversed with the defeat of Congress, so too with the Conservatives in Britain.30 Paradoxes and contradictions in the new public management: North-South dimensions. The UK is often held up as the exemplar of the neoliberal managerialist state.3' From the early 1980s, it embarked on a range of well documented transforma- tions aimed at restructuring the contours of local government and its wider systems of state welfare. In particular, Cochrane and Jessop refer to transitions in the British state as shifts from welfare to workfare, with governments seeking to reduce taxation, diminish public expenditure, while encouraging self-support systems by facilitating greater participation in the labour market.32 In addition, local government functions have increasingly been contracted out to private operators, while non-elected institutions have expanded to take charge of a range of service and/or welfare functions. By the early 1990s, the UK was character- ised by a range of such quasi-governmental organisations, like Urban Develop- ment Corporations (UDCS), Training and Enterprise Councils (TECs) and National Health Service Trusts, variously charged with economic, health and welfare policies previously the preserve of local government. While the UK was, arguably, a forerunner in the emergence of neoliberal state structures, India was (and some say still is) a classic case of a bureaucratic and protectionist regime of a type which neoliberal structural adjustment lending policies were seeking to overturn.33 Indeed, even from a left-wing perspective, it was seen as a rent-seeking arrangement for vested interests.34 However, India was able to avoid adjustment until the abrupt collapse of its trade links with the USSR which, together with the loss of Gulf remittances, precipitated an acute balance of payments crisis in 1991.35 Since then, welfare retrenchment has primarily affected basic services, such as preventive and primary health care, primary education and capital over recurrent expenditure, with the incremental development of individual and community alternatives.36 Within the framework of planned adjustment, user charges for public services have also been intro- duced or raised, while services have been formally privatised or Nongovernmen- tal Organisation (NGO) alternatives developed.37 While the experiences of managerialism in each country are diverse and different, they are, we would argue, interconnected by a series of contradictory and problematic tendencies. First, managerialism has seen a proliferation of government and extra-governance agencies, generating a potential crisis of governance in terms of accountability, re-bureaucratisation, and the coordination and control of policy development and implementation. Indeed, far from the promises of streamlined, efficient services, some evidence suggests the reverse.38 Second, the efficiency ethos of managerialism is implicated in trends towards a 'cultivated' consumer, or one where democratisation is, so some argue, more apparent than real.39 In particular, far from the new managerialism necessarily opening up systems of government, evidence from both countries, and else- where, suggests the closure of aspects of governance systems to popular or civil accountability. 40 639 VANDANA DESAI & ROB IMRIE In discussing these interrelated themes, we draw on empirical material largely generated through a range of research projects directed by the authors. In particular, our empirical referents are governmental and quasi-governmental organisations, such as health and education trusts and urban renewal agencies in Britain, and NGOS in India. While not directly comparable, the contrasting institutions exhibit structural features of aspects of the managerial state. Central-local relations and the shift towards the procedural state At the heart of the managerial state, particularly in the UK, is the fragmentation of state structures into a myriad of service providers operating as cost centres often on a contract basis. Clarke and Newman refer to the managerialist logic as focusing on a core business with the 'effect of narrowing frameworks for the evaluation of public services to assessments of their performance and efficiency as a business'. 41 Increasing