Autonomy and regulation: coping with agencies in the modern state

Abstract

An increasing common response to perceived interference by politicians in public services is the argument for 'depoliticisation' or removing political control over key national agencies.Gordon Brown's decision to create an 'independent' Bank of England was a prime example of this.However, Matthew Flinders and Jim Buller, in a chapter on 'Depoliticisation, Democracy and Arena Shifting', suggest that having analysed several such attempts at depoliticisation, the issue is not as straightforward as it might seem.Decisionmaking may have simply been shifted to another politicised environment or depoliticisation may, indeed, represent the seeds of a more meaningful and deliberative democracy.The critical insights from this chapter are typical of a much-needed book focusing on an international comparative approach to governance issues in the aftermath of the 'New Public Management' (NPM).Autonomy and Regulation is an edited volume, comprising 13 chapters divided into six sections and covering themes such as: links between regulatory reforms and development of new 'autonomous' national agencies; depoliticisation and arena shifting; the reassertion of central control; issues of autonomy and coordination; regulation, the state and rebalancing state and agency relationships.So far, we have had excellent books on English governance developments, notably by Janet Newman, but this a welcome international collection.The contributions are indeed international, coming from Canada, England, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand and the United States.The Introduction contains a chapter on 'Agentification and Regulatory Reform' by Christensen and Lægreid.At the outset they theorise the development of new forms of regulation and the role of 'autonomous central agencies' in the era of the NPM 'movement' across Europe, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.The chapter looks at regulatory reforms from a number of perspectives, for example economic/rational, organisational/ structural and institutional, and ends by problematising issues of power, accountability and legitimacy.The second section on 'Depoliticisation' contains three chapters, including one on the 'scientization' of central banking in which it becomes clear that Gordon Brown's modernisation strategy appears to be following an international trend rather than creating it.The third section concerns the 'reassertion of the centre', which looks at how supposed autonomisation has actually resulted in new ways of asserting central control.This is not theoretical innovation in itself but the international perspective is useful.The section contains chapters on 'joined up government' in the New Zealand state sector, the role of the centre in first-generation NPM systems and political control and administrative autonomy under New Labour.These chapters are essentially about Anglo-Saxon countries, where NPM has achieved the greatest penetration.Section 4 has rather similar themes to Section 3, although it looks at issues of balancing centre and autonomous organisations in Nordic countries.The final two sections, containing three chapters, are reflective and look at issues of trust, regulatory reform and arguments about movement to re-regulate across the different countries.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 155 citations exist upstream.