Networks are the hot concept in the fields of public policy and public management today. The recent annual conference of the Institute of Public Administration of Canada in Winnipeg was based on the theme “Making Connections.” The opening keynote speaker was William D. Eggers, co-author of the widely praised book Governing by Network: The New Shape of the Public Sector. Many other academics and consultants have adopted the concept of networks to analyze the changing contours of the public sector and forecast fundamental changes for public sector leaders, both elected politicians and career public servants. Governments are also jumping on the network bandwagon by incorporating the concept into descriptions of their roles and the practices they follow. The premise for all of this talk, and, to a lesser extent action, is that new networked organizational forms are supposedly supplanting traditional, administrative hierarchies and that improved governance, enhanced performance, and even a better quality of life will be the result.
This article sounds a cautionary note. Our breathless enthusiasm for networks is leading to rampant speculation about the transformational potential of the concept without a careful definition and reliable knowledge about what has actually happened up to now. Not for the first time, the field of public management is being swept along by a fashionable idea and by predictions that it will have revolutionary impacts on how governments envisage and conduct their activities.
The fact that previous fads have not lived up to the hype that preceded them is being ignored. Instead, celebrity authors, consultants and some government spokespersons are rushing to the premature conclusion that networks are rapidly displacing economic markets and administrative hierarchies as the two main bases for interaction, direction setting and organizing for change within society.
I am not rejecting the network concept. It clearly has both theoretical and practical value. Rather I am calling for more clarity and precision in its use, more modesty about the advantages of networks and greater acknowledgement of the potential drawbacks of these types of arrangements for improving governance and the quality of service provided to citizens.
Adoption of the network metaphor refers to the growing interaction and collaborative problem solving between governments and other sectors in society, including businesses, not-for-profits, social enterprises and community-based organizations. There is no disputing that governments today are involved in a wider range of outside relationships with other parties. These patterns reflect the greater insistence within a more pluralistic and less deferential society that governments consult more widely on policy initiatives and generally demonstrate greater responsiveness to changing conditions and demands arising from their external environments. Doubtful about their own democratic credentials, governments have increasingly sought public input into policy formulation. Criticisms of large, public bureaucracies as inefficient and ineffective have also pushed governments into the wider use of third parties to deliver programs and services.
The cumulative impact of these trends is to find governments relying less upon top-down policy-making and program delivery through the traditional integrated department. Instead, they are involved in a more extensive, kaleidoscopic web of horizontal, inter-organizational relationships involving shared power, shared risks and shared accountability.
Use of the network metaphor to describe these new arrangements is popular for a number of reasons. First, the network idea sounds modern and positive compared to the old bureaucratic paradigm, which sounds negative and outdated. Second, the network metaphor reflects the prevailing and future reliance upon information and communications technologies (ICTs) to generate and distribute information and knowledge needed to enhance organizational productivity and performance. In contrast, the bureaucratic model is said to belong to a bygone industrial age.
Supposedly, ICTs enable governments to draw instantaneously on the expertise of other sectors of society, to engage citizens more extensively and more meaningfully and to improve their own operations, including monitoring the performance of third parties who have been delegated public authority and public money to deliver public programs. The glittering potential of the ICT revolution has clearly changed the thinking, vocabulary and the practices of governments.
Recognizing the public relations value of positive words, governments have adopted phases like integrated governance, joined-up government, horizontal policy-making and management, collaboration and public-private partnerships. “Governance,” which is a decentralized process of dispersed power, is said to be in tension with, and increasingly replacing, traditional “governing” in which power is concentrated in the office of the prime minister. In the governance model, governments are no longer seen at the apex of society controlling the change process on the basis of a top-down approach. Instead, more often they react to the initiatives of others, orchestrate the interaction of various stakeholders to seek a consensus and depend increasingly on outside organizations to actually deliver programs. In working with others on the basis of shifting networked relationships, governments are no longer in charge like they used to be. They rely less on legislation, regulations, and binding administrative actions. Instead, they provide “soft guidance” to other actors within society.
I want to challenge the growing pervasiveness of the network model on both theoretical and empirical grounds. First, by suggesting that networks are rapidly displacing administrative hierarchies as the main basis for how governments conduct their activities, we are lapsing again into the use of simplistic dichotomies, which do not accurately capture the complexities of governing under modern conditions. Also, debates about the future of the public sector based upon dichotomies tend to polarize and distort participants’ viewpoints. They lead to labelling some approaches as all bad and others as all good, which is unfortunate.
The complex and diverse universe of organizations and processes involved with the governing processes today cannot be neatly divided into two categories: public versus private or networks versus bureaucracies. It makes more sense to think in terms of hybrids and on-going transitions, not pure types and overnight transformations. Networking is hardly brand new; it has always been part of the repertoire of behaviours of politicians and public servants, especially in a federal country like Canada where the three orders of government have collaborated in the design and delivery of programs for decades.
Probably networking is more extensive today than in the past, but a lack of agreement on a definition makes this difficult to state with precision. Do public-private partnerships, contracting out, horizontal policy-making, service integration and other emerging activities, all constitute types of networks? Within the traditional departments, there has been a growing use of devolved decision-making, task forces, work groups and earned autonomy. Do these trends mean that networking is taking place within the boundaries of the much-maligned old-style bureaucracies?
Presumably not all networks are the same and the goal should be to develop a typo
