On the Future of Public Policy Schools: What Can Be Done to ‘Take Back Control’?

Published date01 February 2019
Date01 February 2019
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12657
On the Future of Public Policy Schools: What
Can Be Done to Take Back Control?
Claus Offe
Hertie School of Governance
Helmut Anheier has condensed his experience and ref‌lec-
tions accumulated during his 10 years of tenure as the pres-
ident of Hertie School of Governance, a start-up in training
and research in public policy which has so remarkably f‌lour-
ished under his leadership. The reference problem is how to
get things done,problemsresolved and how to coerce
ourselves to do the right thing(as Jane Mansbridge has put
it so eloquently) in public affairs. All this must be accom-
plished under conditions where state capacity (govern-
ment) alone is typically insuff‌icient and governanceis
called for instead a mode of collective fate control in lib-
eral democracies that cuts across both the divide between
state and non-state actors and the divide between states
and other states.
Yet before we can start to solve problems we need to
recognize them. How do we recognize a policy problem if
we see it? The pragmatist answer, offered by Robert Kagan,
to this seemingly simple question is this: A problem is a
condition when: (1) a change for the betteris widely
deemed desirable and when (2) the means needed for
effecting such change are at the disposal of policy agents.
When you have a hammer, all problems start to look like
nails. Conversely, if you dont have a hammer, you dont
want anything to look like a nailand may even lead you to
eclipse the perception of all the nails. As Lisa Anderson has
reminded us in a recent talk, millions of preventable ...
infant deaths from unsanitary waterare considered normal
because we lack the hammer, as we do in the case of
f‌inancial market near-melt downs and manifest policy disas-
ters such as Brexit. Available means select actionable ends,
as when the presence of a strong public administration
apparatus in Prussia allowed for building the foundations of
a Bismarckian social insurance system in the 1880s.
One of the strengths of Helmut Anheiers essay is that it
addresses and puts on the agenda of public policy analy-
sis and training the two issues that need to be addressed.
The easier one, I submit, is the answer to the question:
What is to be done?Often much harder to answer is the
other and superordinate one (for which, e.g. the Economic
and Monetary Union (EMU) and its multiple crises can pro-
vide ample illustration): Is there any institutionalized agency
equipped with adequate resources to actually do anything
that can pass as an answer to the f‌irst question?And if the
answer to this second question is no what can account
for this absence?
In the early 20th century, there was a school of political
theorists and reform activists (T. H. Green, B. Bosanquet)
referred to as the British idealists. They have famously
def‌ined the policy problem of achieving the public good
and human development by a dual negation: how to hin-
der hindrances. To which, in line with the second question
specif‌ied in the previous paragraph, we must add the
thorny issue of what hinders us from doing so, that is, from
effectively hindering hindrances? Pursuing this question
what cannot be done and why would sensitize us to a
negative version of policy analysis and at the same time
commit us to something that Albert Hirschman used to
call possibilismthe search for possibilities which are so
far foreclosed.
Both Barak Obama in the US and Angela Merkel in Ger-
many have run campaigns by claiming effective agency:
Yes, we can!and Well get that done!(Wir schaffen das!).
These slogans have been electorally successful in the former
case yet resulted in a manifest policy failure and disappoint-
ment in the latter. In both cases, the credibility of such pol-
icy ambitions and the trust in the capacity for control of
political leaders has suffered, giving rise to political forces
which challenge basic principles and institutional shells of
liberal democracy which blamed for operating in such disap-
pointing ways.
To illustrate: It is well known and beyond any doubt that
the volume of consumption of sugar is a major public
health problem, and not just (but especially so) in the US.
1
Yet this condition of excessive sugar consumption, while
being clearly a problemby the above criterion (1), does
equally clearly not pass criterion (2). That is to say: there is a
A Response to On the Future
of the Public Policy School,
Helmut K. Anheier*
*Anheier, H. K. (2019), On the Future of the Public Policy School,
Global Policy, 10 (1), pp. 75-83. First published online: 08 October
2018, https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12599
©2019 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Global Policy (2019) 10:1 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12657
Global Policy Volume 10 . Issue 1 . February 2019
98
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