ABSTRACT
This book is about the description of the policy process and not a prescriptive text. In this concluding chapter, two concepts are addressed that belong to a large extent to the prescriptive branches of policy analysis: evaluation and accountability. In examining how these issues are addressed in the modern world, there is a need to take into account the complexity of the policy process explored throughout the book and highlighted at the end of the discussion of governance in the last chapter. If there is a ‘democratic deficit’ arising from the complexity of governance, can new forms of evaluation and new approaches to accountability reduce that deficit?
Evaluation appears as a final step in stages models of the policy process. Yet, whilst for any policy process with a concrete output the other stages will have occurred in some form (however coalesced or convoluted), it will very often be the case that there is no evaluation process. And, even when evaluation does occur, the literature on that subject suggests that it is often seen as an unsatisfactory and problematical process with little in the way of substantive implications for subsequent policy activities. On the one hand, it is seen as something important for many versions of the ‘rational model’ of the policy process: a process of identifying whether something that was supposed to happen actually did happen. Traditionally, the evaluation literature puts the case for rational evaluation and evidence-based policy-making against the rough and tumble of the political context in which it occurred. The idea that a policy process should involve the explicit identification of objectives, translated as effectively as possible into action and thus susceptible to evaluation afterwards, dies hard. On the other hand, in the real world of policy, that ideal is rarely attained. What will be provided in this chapter are observations on the efforts to solve the problems in relation to this presentation of the issues about the process.
The wish to evaluate and accountability are logically linked. Inasmuch as there is a view that someone should be in control of a policy process, it is pertinent – even perhaps necessary – to examine whether that control was successfully exercised. This is most evident in that model of democratic politics that sees the policy process as the translation into action of the will of the people, but it is by no means absent from models that adopt a more complex view of what accountability implies. Here, the 302examination of issues about accountability, which will follow the section on evaluation, will look at what is involved in processes of holding public officials to account and the ways in which this is an area of dispute. It will be shown that there are many forms of accountability, including ones that supplement or challenge traditional top-down approaches. Then, issues about the way professionalism poses problems for these models are explored, picking up on themes developed in Chapter 12. This takes the discussion first to the extent to which new modes of accountability are embodied in the ‘New Public Management’ (NPM) movement and second to some important ideas about direct accountability to the public.
A final section explores issues about both evaluation and accountability in the context of modern governance, recognising the way in which mixed modes of accountability often co-exist and pose questions of choice for policy-makers. In this way, it will sum up the stress in this book on the diversity of policy issues and of policy process contexts, which leave issues about evaluation and accountability very much areas of dispute.
