1. Research programme and mission
The Public Administration and Policy group studies the governance of wicked problems in the policy domains of the life sciences. Policy problems are wicked when they are ill-defined, ambiguous, contested and when they involve complex interdependencies and social dynamics across scales. The Public Administration and Policy group focuses mainly on sustainable agriculture, agro-food chains, adaptation to climate change, water management and vital rural areas. These are policy domains that face wicked problems and where significant change is in progress. At the same time we also find periods of relative stability and failed attempts to govern change. This has far reaching consequences for the governance of policy domains like global climate change, food security, sustainable agriculture or flood protection. To deal with these complex and dynamic problems, new theoretical concepts of governance have been developed (e.g. adaptive governance), but when new governance arrangements are tried out in practice, they often face barriers or cause tensions with existing institutions.
The Public Administration and Policy Group has developed a research programme entitled "Changing Governance and Governing Change". If governance is about organizing values and voices, then our programme is about governing changes in values and voices, and about changing the institutionalized ways in which we organize values and voices. Changing existing governance systems may be necessary to enable new ways of governing change. We understand governing in a broad sense. It refers to activities of political, administrative, societal and business actors that are aimed at solving societal problems and influencing wicked problem domains. Governance refers to the system of actors, frames and rules that emerges as a pattern from governing activities and structures subsequent governing activities. To achieve in-depth understanding, the research programme also focuses on the mechanisms underlying the processes of change and stability in policies, policy agendas, policy frames, policy networks and governance arrangements.
The mission of the Public Administration and Policy Group is to analyse governance in the life science policy domains, to flesh out the social mechanisms that contribute to stability and change, and to use these findings for designing innovative governance arrangements and interventions. In this way the group aims to contribute to scientific progress, to societal debates, and to the reflective practice of professionals involved in governing change and changing governance.
The research programme has five core objectives:
- To understand how public and private actors frame wicked policy problems in the life science domains and how they make sense of policies and governance arrangements;
- To analyse how change and stability in policy domains occur and which mechanisms can explain these processes;
- To analyse the actions and interactions of public and private actors in their attempts to govern change;
- To analyse how new concepts of governance can help to govern change, and which barriers they face when put into practice;
- To develop new governance arrangements and governance capabilities to govern change.
Through this programme the group is developing an innovative niche in the national and international field of Public Administration and Policy by:
1. Forging a creative synthesis of theories and practices from organisation science, public administration, policy science and political science
2. Focusing on the life sciences policy domains and cross-disciplinary research with the natural and technical sciences
3. Connecting theory and practice by theorising practice and practising theory.
2. Central Themes in the Research Programme
The Public Administration and Policy group is mainly interested in wicked problems, also referred to as multidimensional, messy, unstructured or complex problems. These are problems that are hard to deal with and sometimes persist for years, despite many efforts to remedy them. The core of these problems is often hard to pin down, because they change over time, involve uncertainties and can be framed in diverging ways. They usually play out at different scale levels, cut across jurisdictions and blur the traditional boundaries between the public and the private sector. Because these problems are both socially and technically complex, cross-disciplinary collaboration with natural and technical sciences is part of the research strategy.
When dealing with wicked problems, existing policy-making and policy implementation processes may prove inadequate and can even become part of the problem. Hence, a number of new concepts of governance have been developed to improve the governing of change in wicked problem domains, such as collaborative governance, network management, adaptive governance, transition management and responsive governance. Our group in particular studies the tensions or barriers that occur when new concepts of governance are brought into practice. Change to new concepts of governance does not occur overnight, but often incrementally. Existing policies and modes of governance tend to lock in continuity rather than enabling change. As a result, actors involved in the policy-making process who desire a change in governance usually get entangled in all kinds of barriers. Consequently, they may either revert to more familiar governance strategies or achieve small incremental changes that churn old routines into new learning.
Wicked problems in the life science domains usually involve a broad range of political, administrative, social and economic actors. All of these may take action to govern change in problem domains of their concern. Governing change can take multiple forms, varying from inducing change (e.g. adapting water management to climate change) to protecting stability (e.g. maintaining a stable subsidising system for farmers delivering green services). The developments in wicked problem domains are the result of the combined (and possibly contradictory) attempts at governing change by multiple actors.
A central concern in our research is the search for governance capabilities to deal with wicked policy domains. We define governance capability as the ability of governance actors to observe and to act, and as the ability of the governance system to enable this observing and acting. The concept of capability includes skills, capacities, commitment and readiness. We identify four governance capabilities:
· Reflexivity refers to the capability to value the variety of problem perspectives, to continuously reconsider dominant problem frames and to bring about a redefinition of action perspectives. Without reflexivity, and thus without addressing this variety, there is a risk for tunnel vision that contributes further to the wickedness of the situation.
· Resilience refers to the capability to adapt to changing unpredictable circumstances without losing identity and reliability. Without resilience the governance system can be eroded to the point that a small disturbance provokes a failure to keep fulfilling basic functions.
· Responsiveness refers to the capability of actors in a governance system to respond wisely to continuously changing policy demands. Without responsiveness, governance actors run the risk of not addressing citizens’ concerns and losing their legitimacy.
· Revitalization refers to the capability of actors in a governance system to recognize and unblock counterproductive patterns in policy processes, in order to escape futile attempts to apply “more of the same” solutions, and to stop escalating discussions between people who stick to their own routines.
The Public Administration and Policy Group attains the objectives of the research programme ‘Changing Governance and Governing Change’ through a number of research lines:
· Policy change and stability
o Punctuated equilibrium theory and the politics of attention for policy issues
o The role of political advisory committees in changing marine policies and politics
o Planned and emergent change in the establishment of eco-industrial greenhouse parks
o Institutional barriers for the development and implementation of climate change adaptation strategies
· Sensemaking in policy networks
o How civil servants make sense of the decentralisation of rural area policies
o Sensemaking of EU requirements for blue and green services
o Analysing fixations, deadlocks, and interaction patterns in the debate about changing the common agricultural policy
o Powering and puzzling climate change adaptation policies through interactive framing
· Scaling and governance
o The politics of scale in resource governance
o Scale framing in decision making about intensive livestock production
o Changing modes and authority of biofuel governance: the case of Brazil
· Global governance
o Global governance of agri-food production and value chains
o Hard and soft law in international regulatory frameworks
· Innovative governance approaches
o Effective, legitimate and resilient governance arrangements for climate change adaptation
o Adaptive governance, collaborative governance, network governance, responsive governance, transition management, scale-sensitive governance
o The role of governance capabilities in addressing wicked problems
· Leadership
o Changing roles for public leadership in transition processes towards sustainable agriculture and vital rural areas
o Ideational leadership for sustainability