ABSTRACT
Within the limits defined by history and by the outside world, public policy decisions emerge as the result of the interaction – or non-interaction (for mutual avoidance may be profitable) – of a chaos of decision-makers who function at national, regional and local level. Power is diffused among a host of bodies – the executive (which itself resembles a huge Byzantine court riddled with feuding factions), parliament, the political parties (including those of the opposition), the pressure groups, the banks, industrial firms and insurance companies – all of which are fragmented and divided. Policy co-ordination in this compartmentalised world is peculiarly difficult, but given the web of overlapping jurisdictions it is vital. Any major policy requires the overlapping of many State actors. Steel in the 1980s, for example, required the intervention of the president, the prime minister, the ministers for finance, labour, social affairs, and European affairs, and a host of public and private bodies at national and at local level. As noted in Chapter 10, however, some co-ordinating bodies complicate, rather than facilitate, policy co-ordination, while some rarely if ever meet. Decision-making is, therefore, éclaté, complicated and messy; prolific, but inevitably incoherent, with the multiple and conflicting roles of the State being reflected in a multiplicity of conflicting decisions.
