The Principal’s September 2021 opinion piece for The Bridge set in context the challenges our young century poses and asks what the implications might be for institutional learning and the future role of academia. These implications include nothing less than enabling us to address existential threats to aspirations for democratic life and to the health of the planet itself.
My own career experience of over thirty years working on governance for sustainable development in the UK and internationally has also led me to question the relevance of the inherited ways in which our democratic institutions work, and how and what they value and prioritize. Over the past five years, I have been fortunate to reflect on this thanks to an honorary position at Cardiff University. This led me to consider how the barriers I faced when working in sustainability also speak to the fading promises of democratic governance and our notions of freedom and equality.
Examining my career experience in pandemic lockdown in the United States, I looked through the lens of historic thought and theories of the role of governance and bureaucracy to explore the mismatch of the inherited approach with our current times. Our basic organizational model continues to be the industrial world described by Max Weber of specialization, hierarchy and technocracy. Here it is the technical expertise and the authority drawn from dispassionately obeying the government of the day which gives bureaucracy its legitimacy. This model’s bureaucratic focus is primarily on economic efficiency and the competitiveness of the State.
While the Weberian model has been challenged and modified over the last century, its focus and tools remain little changed. We use almost exclusively economic and financial tests to shape policy. We continue a distant technocracy in decision-making. What we have done over the last half century is added managerialism to the Weberian model, trying to steer the performance of the system through targets, indicators and controls. Following the financial crisis of the mid 2000s, governance goals largely reasserted the primacy of the market and economic growth in the face of an alternative narrative of unsustainability and inequality. We have also come to a politics of austerity and small government where public bureaucracy is seen as a, or even the problem, rather than something integral to the ‘contract’ of citizenship and civic life. Many of these issues have been mirrored in academia, recalling Weber’s view that academia, in its divisions and technocracy, was a facet of the bureaucratic machine.
The distant technocracy and elite economic focus of our inherited model has left space for right populism to question the value of the democratic state and denigrate its expertise and civic values. As I found in my practice, technocratic governance does not work well with communities or places. It is a poor listener. It demands standardized approaches and controls. It seeks certainty rather than acknowledging doubt. This approach has served to reinforce the partisan competitive democracy that we see today in the place of civic dialogue.
The book which emerged from my exploration is ‘Towards a New Civic Bureaucracy’ (Policy Press, 2022). In it I juxtapose my career experiences with Michel Foucault’s notion of governmentality and with civic republican notions of freedom as non-domination. In a post-truth politics, Foucault’s idea of ‘knowledge-power’ loses its bureaucratic legitimacy. In a politics of hate, domination, not non-domination, is lauded.
If we are to address our crisis of democratic governance and make academia part of the solution rather than part of the problem, we will need to embrace richer understandings of the complex interrelationships of society and ecology and the potential role of public bureaucracy as an enabling civic force. Above all, we must cast off the technocratic control undertaken in the name of economic efficiency and in the disciplinary isolation of Weber’s ‘iron cage’. Drawing on international examples we need to forge new bureaucratic tools and practice whose main aim is to foster deep civic dialogue on how we can live well both with one another and with the planet.
Hannah Arendt memorably posited that we need to engage with ‘different others’ if we are to reflect on our own understandings and challenge our assumptions, and that evil is an echo chamber of those lacking an inner reflective voice. One of the great pleasures of my career and academic work has been to work with people across sectors and disciplines on difficult issues and to engage with people in their places to share, understand and test differing views and values. Initiatives such as Hertford’s new Porter Centre for Diplomacy and its programmes provide an exciting platform to embrace new ways of thinking and working, to push beyond the often banal slogans of competitive democracy, and ultimately to reconsider what the purpose and practice of governance – and in turn academia – should truly be in the 21st century.
Matthew J. Quinn (Lit. Hum., 1982).
Matthew is the former Director for Environment and Sustainable Development in Welsh Government where he oversaw the Well-being of Future Generations and Environment Acts and the creation of Natural Resources Wales. He holds a Distinguished Visiting Fellowship at Cardiff University. Towards a new civic bureaucracy: lessons from sustainable development for the crisis of governance was published by Policy Press in February 2020. Policy Press | Towards a New Civic Bureaucracy – Lessons from Sustainable Development for the Crisis of Governance, By Matthew J. Quinn (bristoluniversitypress.co.uk)
