RIETI Policy Symposium

Professional Approaches to Policy Making - Beyond New Public Management -

Summary and Observations

NISHIYAMA Keita NISHIYAMA Keita, Consulting Fellow, RIETI

The Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI), in cooperation with the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), held its Policy Symposium, "Professional Approaches to Policy Making - Beyond New Public Management" on June 6th and 7th, 2003. Prominent speakers and discussants from around the world exchanged their views during the symposium which was attended by an audience of close to a hundred. This symposium was the first milestone in the "Policy Professional" project undertaken by RIETI and METI, and it is hoped that the work will continue to be carried on.

My experience as Human Resource Management Director at METI has prompted me to start this project. In the old days of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), there was probably a shared vision of what an ideal "MITI Official" should be, based on certain qualifications and experiences, tacitly passed on through the generations. It is the picture of officials depicted in Saburo Shiroyama 's famous novel "Kanryo Tachi No Natsu (A Summer of Government Elites)". This image has been a support to the development of officials' capacity, their maintenance of morale, and the improvement of performance as an organization over the years. However, the changing environment has rendered this past idealistic model obsolete, and can no longer serve as a foundation for the organization and its officials. Upon pondering on how to design personnel policies for young officials, and on how to construct a new model, "professional policy making" is a conclusion that I reached. Of course, terms that are more frequently used, such as "how to reconstruct the role of bureaucracy in its relation with politics", is also close to my theme, but the way in which this dichotomy is framed, to me, seemed to be slightly archaic.

Of course, to say the least, it is unclear whether the characteristics of a new "Model METI Official", even if that can be successfully constructed, are particular to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. My intuitive reply to the question is the identification of the characteristics of "Professional Policy Makers" that are competitive in the global scene, and not necessarily limited to central government officials but include a wider variety of actors who are involved in policy development, would probably be a more promising approach than discussing what a "Model MITI Official" or a "Model Japanese Civil Servant" should be.

Moreover, it is my sense that the conceptualization of a "Model Professional Policy Maker" cannot be achieved using existing theories. In actuality, there are efforts around the world that try to respond to challenges that are posed by the modern policy making environment, such as 1) need to adapt to an increased speed; 2) consideration for global linkages, 3) procurement of expertise beyond permanent civil service, and 4) decision-making in a multi-actor environment which are neither fully captured by the notions of "market" nor "corporatism". Putting together dispersed responses to different environmental challenges, and theoretize based on the emerging picture of the puzzle should be an effective approach. RIETI seemed to me to be an ideal place to conduct such an experiment that brings together the challenges faced by those doing the fieldwork of policy making, and those working on theories.

Let us turn to a more concrete explanation of the project. The core of this project is in identifying and sharing practices and methods used by countries to overcome policy making challenges, based on actual policy-making cases in those countries. Here, "policy making challenges" does not refer to the content of the policy issue (such as whether an FTA is beneficial or harmful). Rather it refers to the ideas that were put into improving the process of policy making (e.g. in the case of policies on recycling system, pertinent questions would include "based on what information was the system designed", "through what processes did the actors reach an agreement", and "how was the implementation rendered efficient"). Of course, there is a counter-argument that it is one of the important characteristics of our age that there is a fusion of policy content and process, and that "contents" and "semantics" converge, but let us emphasize, at least for the time being, that we are considering only the process of policy-making. It is hoped that through the combination of individual methods of the policy-making process, we can draw a holistic picture of a new and effective policy making process which takes into consideration the relationships between central and local governments, between politics and bureaucracy, within and outside of governments, and between nation state and the global community. This will then allow us to discuss what is meant by "Model Bureaucrat" (or more precisely, a "Model Professional Policy Maker" which incorporates players outside the governments), competency evaluation of civil servants, and their education and training programs.

This symposium, did not lead to actual discussion and sharing of methods and practices of policy making (as this was only the first symposium). Nevertheless, there were encouraging signs that results drawn from this conference would lead to the further development of the project.

In the first session, discussion centered on the direction of administrative reform in participating countries. Mr. Mulgan from the U.K. Cabinet Office made a presentation on how to conduct "strategic" policy making in a more than ever complex policy making environment. He underlined the importance of being able to predict the future based on meticulous analysis of the current state of affairs, and communication skills that would lead to consensus building amongst stakeholders. Mr. Mulgan argued that the skills he mentioned are necessary to avoid short-sighted policy making, but I would like to emphasize , in addition, that 1) the skill-set considered to be necessary for policy making is also changing within the United Kingdom, and 2) the one-way flow of policy-making process presupposed in an orthodox two-party system, which starts at the values held up at the political level (and presented in Manifesto) and concludes with the implementation by the government machines, is also going through some transformation.

In the second session, the research team consisting of Professor Hood, Doctor Lodge and Professor Shiroyama, presented their results based on analysis of actual policy making cases in UK's Department of Trade and Industry, Germany's Ministry of Economy, and Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry respectively. The presentation covered issues such as the identification of skills necessary in the policy making processes represented by the cases, and whether the right combination of the skills was factored in the respective agency's personnel policy. Professor Hood noted as a trend amongst major countries, that 1) there is an increasing interest toward the policy making capacity of civil servants as an element of their competency evaluation, in addition to management skills of public services, and 2) whereas the term "competency" is used with different connotation, as far as it concerns the competency evaluation of senior officials are concerned, it does not refer to task-processing skills in a particular field, but rather to a more general behavioral characteristics.

Several important issues were brought up with regard to the presentation by the aforementioned three professors as well as to this project as a whole which bases itself on policy making cases. Examples are; 1) if studies are based on actual cases, won't the cases only turn out to be successes, and won't the failures be hidden? 2) if the analyses are based on "competency" which is a measure of individual's capacity, the analyses will likely contain personal attacks, and won't it be possible to carry out objective analysis? 3) shouldn't the capacity evaluation of the team as whole be considered in addition to individual competency? These are all issues that need to be dealt with as the project moves further forward, but at this juncture, my reactions to some of those issues are as follows:

(a) It might be difficult to take up "failure" cases right away, but by having countries bring up "challenges" they are presently facing, other countries could show their "promising practice" as better solutions to these challenges. At the root of this project is a hint gained from "knowledge management" that is carried out by private companies such as consulting firms. In consulting firms, "consultancy cases" conducted by individual consultants are accumulated and serve to improve the level of consulting service of the firm. The consultant who provided cases that are frequently referred to, naturally receive good evaluation. That is to say, identifying "failure" cases are not always required. It could be said to be a case of Gresham's Law in reverse, i.e. "Good money driving out bad". Nonetheless, there is a great deal to learn from failure, and efforts should be made to incorporate failure cases, but I believe it is a somewhat narrow view to conclude that nothing can be learned without studying failures, from fear of only obtaining self-praise.

(b) The reason why this project emphasizes policy making "practices" is to avoid the discussion to lead solely to individual's competency evaluation. We naturally cannot separate it completely from personnel policy, as it is natural for the individual or team that developed "good practice" processes to receive good evaluation. However it needs to be emphasized that this project does not simply aim at a competency-based system which gives an incentive to individuals that developed and implemented "good practice" processes, and evaluate them accordingly. There is much more weight placed on the reform of the organizational architecture, which gives incentives to the development and implementation of a new model in a bottom-up approach at a time of when the organizational model is unclear.

The third session covered curricula of graduate school of public policy. Professor Kelman introduced the curriculum of the Kennedy School which initially concentrated on microeconomics, statistics and policy analysis based on the former two, to which were later added leadership theory, business management, and ethics as a basis of policy choice. He also pointed out future challenges including the incorporation of procurement and contracts, psychology, and history within the curriculum. He further explained Kennedy School's training experiment in which students are divided into a number of teams to investigate solutions to a policy issue, and then brief to the 'senior civil servants' played by their professors. Many participants raised the importance for the government administration to first identify what are the skills necessary in a changing policy making process, a challenge common also to our country's own graduate school of public policy. It is hoped that this project will help in providing some direction, and in that regard, it is necessary to follow-on the discussion on education and training program together with the clarification of the required "process" and "skills".

It is my hope to be able to carry out follow-up activities to this symposium and continue with the project, partly to respond to the warm words of encouragement I received from the participants, and partly because the U.K. Cabinet Office has kindly offered to host the next meeting. I regret that, largely owing to my inadequate preparation, the discussion was not entirely focused; hence I would like at the next meeting, to narrow down the issues. I would like to steer the next discussions to be carried out in the UK and Tokyo next year to focus on the following three issues.

The first focuses on the difference on the policy making processes among countries. Japanese policy making processes and the characteristics of the role of administrators became the subject of debate in this symposium. It is necessary to carry out detailed comparative analysis based on actual policy making cases in a specific policy areas. However, based on my recent personal experience at the Industrial Revitalization Corporation of Japan and the experience in the running of the Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy, I would like to emphasize that our country's policy making process is at a transition. It is in a transition, but it does not mean that a new process is in sight, but rather ad-hoc reactions to challenges are taking place at a time when traditional processes no longer function. The transformation may also be only partial. In any case, there is no utility in stereotypically classifying traditional Japanese policy making processes. Rather, efforts should be made to take up recent cases and compare them with cases from other countries. At the same time, it should not be forgotten, as aforementioned, that other countries' policy making processes are also under transformation, and some of their aspects are approaching our model.

The second sheds light onto actual policy making processes. It seems to be productive to focus on concrete themes, such as "effective production of multiple scenarios", "effective benchmarking with other countries' policy and institutional conditions", "consensus building through communication of stakeholders", and discuss challenges faced by various countries, and actual attempts at solving the problems. If countries carry out education and training programs to tackle these issues, they should also be discussed within this framework.

Last is the question of capacity evaluation of civil servants and the implementation of personnel policy. This point is not yet made clear within the research project by Professor Hood et. al. It is probably valuable to carry out international comparative study on the implementation of personnel policy, for each of the identified actual policy making processes in the above theme. When discussing competency evaluation of civil servants, there are naturally aspects that fall outside the scope of policy making. But this project will focus on capacity evaluation surrounding the policy making aspect. (This symposium has the wording "Beyond New Public Management" in its title, to insinuate that the project does not look at the efficient provision of public service. It does not suggest that our country has already implemented NPM, or whether efforts to do so are not required. However, since all objectives are changing as time goes by, it is essential to fix on an updated objective that incorporates the elements beyond NPM, without which all reform efforts will be brought to naught.)

Finally, this project has just only started. It is encouraging that there was a tremendous amount of interest on this subject domestically and internationally even from those who could not attend this time. We would like to take the next step to try to respond to those interests, and take on board any criticism and response to this project that we welcome.