ABSTRACT
The use of policy pilots and other forms of temporary and projectified organisational arrangements has become increasingly widespread over the last two to three decades in public services in the United Kingdom (UK) and elsewhere. Drawing upon a policy ethnography of a pilot programme conducted in the English National Health Service (NHS) we examine the implications of bringing project rationalities to bear upon policy making. Drawing upon the legal-philosophical concept of the “state of exception” (Schmitt, 1985), we show how the process of policy piloting requires a suspension of the ordinary rules in order to enable innovation. However, this has both practical and political consequences. In the immediate term of the pilot, the creation of conditions that are out of the ordinary means that the pilot itself is not necessarily a good test for how things might work in the long run. At the same time, the proliferation of temporary policy projects, each bringing its own suspension of the rules, threatens the integrity of the “ordinary bureaucracy” within which the project is embedded. Piloting obviously represents an attractive and pragmatic approach for politicians and policy makers, while also broadening scope for practitioner and “local” involvement in the generation of policy. At the same time, this project form brings with it a technical rationality and a narrow focus on project goals at the possible expense of core political values such as deliberation and democratic accountability.
