Politics and power

Politics and power

In the above section, we reviewed different areas of public policy; we now look more closely at how public policy is decided and implemented. The first char- acteristic of public policy is that it cannot be associated with a single moment, policy-maker, decision or action, as we mentioned earlier. Public policy involves

a course of action and a web of decisions (Hill, 2005). There is no unique ‘policy-maker’ but a multiple set of agents who make policy. For instance, it is not easy to identify who exactly crafts an educational policy. Is it the Minister for Education? Or schools that put pressure on the government to make certain decisions? Or international organizations that determine the education agenda of a country? Who exactly decides on the budget allocated to education? These questions reveal that it is not easy to identify ‘policy-makers’ or policy moments. Public policy is, more than anything else, a process.

Another feature is that policy-making cannot be easily distinguished from implementation. It is difficult to ascertain exactly when a policy was made. Is it at the time when a law is passed in Parliament? If, say, the UK introduces a new employment policy that encourages low-skilled workers to access the labour market by giving tax incentives to their employers, is that policy tantamount to being a law in Parliament? Or does the policy also include its actual implementation? The policy is eventually what actors on the ground are doing, whether or not businesses have made use of the law in order to boost low-skilled employment. By separating policy-making from implementation, one risks ignoring the deeply political nature of policy itself. It is easy to attribute the failure of a policy to a ‘lack of political will’, as if policy were a technical matter that did not depend upon the implementation of those responsible for it.

POLICY

Separating policy-making from policy implementation also ignores the principle that effective implementation planning is part of good policy-making, and that there are policy processes organizations continuously cycle through – policy analysis and design, decision-making, implementation, monitoring and evaluation, and new analysis and design, etc.

Development policy has sometimes fallen into the trap of seeing policy as

a technical issue the implementation of which is separate from its crafting. In an anthropological study of the actions of various development agencies in Lesotho during the 1980s, Ferguson (1990) highlights the dangers of such a depoliticized use of the notion of policy. In such a depoliticized context, he argues that poverty is seen as something that requires technical action from ‘experts’ attached to the government, as opposed to being a larger political problem that could be resolved through politics and negotiating conflicting interests. His study led him to conclude that, ‘development is an “anti-politics machine”, depoliticizing everything it touches’ (1990, pxiv). Politics, along with history, has been swept aside by development actors. In this aseptic universe, the state has become, as Ferguson argues, ‘a machine for imple- menting “development” programmes (and) an apolitical tool for delivering social services and engineering economic growth.’ The state is a ‘machinery (with) policies, but no politics (1990, pp65–66),’ referring to certain groups and interests controlling government action.

That policy is political suggests that the policy process is closely connected to the nature of power itself. A policy is a chaotic process dominated by political, practical and socio-cultural forces. In his pioneering study on power, Stephen Lukes (2004) describes three dimensions of power at play in the policy process (see also Hill, 2005, pp27–34). First, there is the single dimension of power: ‘A has power over B to the extent that s/he can get B to do something that B would not choose to do.’ By virtue of A’s power, B will modify his/her behaviour despite the knowledge that this may be contrary to his/her interests. This entails asking the question: who made B do what s/he would otherwise not have chosen to do? The second dimension of power that Lukes highlights is when ‘A can limit the scope of the political process to considerations of issues that are innocuous to A (and possibly against the interests of B)’. In other words, power is exercised in ‘setting the agenda’ for decision-making, and excluding people from it. This non-decision-making entails two processes: ‘mobilization of bias’ (ensuring that issues of significance to group A never enter the decision-making process, in other words, it is a process which confines decisions to safe issues) and ‘organizing out’ (excluding opposing interest groups from decision-making).

In the two examples above, power is overt. There is however a third, more insidious, face of power. Even when there is no observable conflict of interest or consensus, this does not mean that power has not in fact been exercised. Power can be manifested in the form of (unconscious) preference shaping. Not only could A exercise power over B by prevailing in the resolution of key issues or by preventing B from effectively raising those issues, but A could influence

HUMAN DEVELOPMENT POLICY ANALYSIS

B’s conception of the issues altogether. Consensus could be an indication of the exercise of unequal power relations. For example, when there seems to be a consensus about consumerism as a way of life in the West, and no opposition to the economic policies that encourage it, this does not preclude the possibility that power has been exercised in the form of preference-shaping on the part of the retail industry or capitalist market forces.