Government 2.0 - a longer perspective

This was originally going to be a comment on Martin’s “An Intractable Challenge!” piece where he takes a look at some recent thoughts from Don Tapscott. However, it got a bit too long for a comment, so instead ended up here.

As Martin notes, it is quite an understatement for Don to say that the idea of government 2.0 has profound implications for the public sector. He then points to the idea of an emerging “public purpose sector” as perhaps crystallising some of the change we are seeing or urging in government, and concludes by noting that interesting discussions can be had around the often seemingly intractable nature of the challenges that surround this change.

Processes of public sector change are frequently slow, tortuous and prone to be more limited, partial or fragile than one might wish. However, maybe they’re not so intractable if we take a longer perspective and don't regard the state as a concrete entity instead of an abstract idea or concept. If the state is simply a reflection of the social contract under which people surrender certain rights to governments, and the public sector is something they get in return, then it is interesting to ask whether real, profound, change depends upon a change in the will of the people?

At least in the west, the development of government throughout the 20th century closely mirrored the development of modern business in the 19th; both in terms of what drove it and what forms it took. Western institutions of representative democracy, public governance and public service very much reflected the ideas of specialisation of labour and economies of scale. The ‘machine bureaucracy’ was the public manifestation of this revolution in economic ideas and, given the capabilities governments had available, was the (perhaps) inevitable and obvious response to the realities of governing emerging nation states. Whether this really reflected the will of the people or not is an interesting question, given that they really did not have that great a say in things. Any ‘voice’ they had was largely subsumed and mediated by their new-found representatives. But it could be argued that simply because people generally went along with this process of change it did, implicitly, reflect their will.

From say the French Revolution onwards what we see is increasing scale of the populations and geographies to be governed as nation states, the complexity of interests to be addressed and challenges to be faced, the physical resources required to be effective, and the information required to make it all work. At the same time economies developed in ways that required the majority of populations to either persist in working in agriculture or switch into the new occupations brought about by industrialisation. Again, they did not have any great say in this process driven by political and business elites.

During this time there has also developed an increased capacity to create models and categorise things in ways that allowed the complex and messy world to be reduced down to simpler elements that seemed predictable and open to rational influence (or so we thought). And so the ideas and techniques that would eventually inform ‘modern’ public administration (and later public management) were slowly born, used, refined and popularised.

While the public was able to influence some of this huge change (e.g. the idea of workers rights and the 40 hour week) there was no mass demand for a new social contract that in turn would have led to some redefinition of the state and its institutions and organisations. People had other things on their minds, and change occurred at the margin. During the 20^th century, when people weren’t coping with the Great Depression, falling victim to ‘isms (communism, fascism etc) or being made to fight world wars they were enjoying the benefits of an unprecedented 60 years of economic expansion off the back of WW2.

A rising tide lifts all boats doesn’t it? In the west we felt we were doing pretty darned well thank you. We had more of all the good things in life and little visibility of the costs – the alarmist Club of Rome really just wanted to rain on the parade! The latter part of the 20^th century simply did not generate any great popular wave of interest in things such as participation or engagement in government (merely achieving universal suffrage was a huge advance in western countries even as late as the 1970s) or more effective provision of public services. And even if there had been significant demand it could not have been expressed effectively. The mass media was privately owned, broadcast in nature, and inaccessible to the general public. Costs of inter-personal communication were high, so expressing a view in public was much more difficult compared to today.

So the will of the people did not really change in any fundamental way and government wasn’t interested anyway. Politicians did not generally see merit in greater public involvement in public life - as Churchill said “the best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter”. Public officials were no better – their ability to monopolise voice and information bestowed great advantages in terms of power, prestige, and material and psychological well-being that they would never willingly allow the unruly mob of citizens out there to diminish. Of course many just wanted to be good public servants.

This was all very well, and by the 1990s western society was in possession of some of the best expressions of ‘industrial age government’ possible. People didn’t complain too much - most were just busy trying to live their lives - and seemed to hold little desire or expectation of ‘transformational change’. Instead of really reflecting the will of the people, which largely had to express itself except through crude mechanisms such as voting and the occasional bout of civil unrest, government just got better and better at deciding for itself what the people wanted and then delivering it to (or inflicting it on) them.

In many ways the first wave of e-government just added to this, giving government new tools with which to do the same old thing. Of course, in many cases ideas of improved participation, openness or transparency were bolted on to e-government but public officials neither knew what that really meant nor welcomed it, and their political masters did not seem very interested anyway (why would they be – they had a monopoly to protect). On the outside, citizens who had access to the Internet were too busy learning about the joys of e‑commerce and new media content to have time to think about how they might use the Internet to change their world. And anyway, getting content onto the web took time and skills that most did not possess and once it was there it was all pretty flat anyway – all that reading took time.

And so by the beginning of this century what had the public got in the end from their social contracts? I believe that, as we are now beginning to see, the public was poorly served. Governments made remarkably crude decisions of their behalf in every sphere from foreign affairs through to economic development and social and environmental policy. They permitted themselves to think that their monopoly on voice and information also bestowed a monopoly on wisdom and that decision‑making at the level of broad aggregates (labour markets, geographical regions, gender, ethnicity, age cohorts etc) was appropriate. Treating the public as a largely undifferentiated mass was quite alright in an era of mass production and consumption. In an environment where the public had little voice, and governments had macro economies (again an abstract concept, not a reality) to run, complexity and variety were easily enough extracted away so that tough decisions could be made relatively efficiently. Too bad it didn’t work.

Now we live in the era of Web 2.0 which we also call the participative Internet. I think this is the real information revolution (unlike Web 1.0) and that it is doing two very big things. First, it is amplifying our individual and collective awareness and cognitive capabilities, allowing us to see and understand more explicitly what we’ve always implicitly known (or should have known): everything is local, there is a fundamental connection of everything to everything else, people are all different, not the same, and the world is really complex. We can now see the chickens borne of our crude public decisions coming home to roost – the environment is in peril, our traditional energy supplies are dwindling, our societies are fragmenting and our economies look like they are collapsing etc.

The fact that we can see all this more clearly is not because it is just now beginning to happen. Instead, now that we are increasingly able to access, use and participate in the “human network” that the Internet enables we simply have vastly more information available in real time to show us what is happening around us. We also have the potential to (re)gain our voice. Politicians and public officials cannot prohibit, monopolise or control information or voice as they once could (some say a major contributor to the fall of the Soviet Union was the handycam and the VCR) and people know it. And out of this new awareness is emerging an understanding, especially among the young, that our institutions of government are failing us and that change must happen. So perhaps the will of the people is now changing, and a new social contract may be in the offing.

The other big thing is that the network is empowering people to make those changes in so many different ways, from creating and sharing their own information about what is happening in their worlds with anyone who cares to listen (and many who do not), to taking responsibility and addressing issues in their own lives and communities in ways that are so much more reflective of and responsive to their situation and needs than industrial era government could ever hope to be. The old requirement for economies of scale is breaking down in the face of Moore’s law and the shift of capital intensive activities from the public to the private sector.

So to me, the “human network” is like a genie that a new technology has let out of a bottle. We often ask ourselves what is it about the network that means governments should support its continued extension and adoption in the public sphere. Surely it isn’t just because it can make government 1.0 run better, faster and cheaper with a bit more openness - a good but not compelling story. The best answer for government may be that an unstoppable change has already started. The public is unconsciously moving toward a new and more dynamic social contract where the state plays a different role in a different and more flexible way (i.e. it is transformed). People still need government, and they need it to be legitimate. For government to remain legitimate it must embrace and support this change, which I guess is one of the key ideas of the Connected Republic 2.0.

So I don’t regard the types of challenges Tapscott sets out as intractable - especially if we take a historical view of change and don’t expect that government should or will drive change its own. What they are is very difficult to deal with for those who currently sit inside the old paradigm of industrial age government. They are also big and complex, and need government leadership – it is in nobody’s interest for those responsible for government 1.0 to simply surrender and say “do it your way, what do we know?”. We don’t want babies thrown out with the bathwater – there is no need or time for that. However, if today’s public leaders are open to the idea that change is already underway, that there are new players in the game (i.e. the public, and also the younger people within own institutions), that they do not to entirely own and control the processes and that things could get better, not worse, then anything could happen. Couldn’t it?