Strategic Management for Public Governance in Europe

Creating effective and credible government has become a big issue in the last 25 years. Our perspective is that of management theory and practice, rather than political science or organization theory. In investigating public governance and management we have paid closest attention to the role of strategic management in building effectiveness and credibility. This no doubt reflects the emergence and spread of new ideas and new thinking on public governance. We think that these new ideas, which now abound not only in the academic literature but also in the pronouncements and work of international bodies, need more empirical investigation. This sets the book on a path of moving beyond the legacy of approaches dominated by concepts of bureaucracy and of government leaders and officials operating mainly through the law. That legacy is now being confronted by ideas focusing on understanding how to develop the strategic functions of public governance and how government can interact with civil society to facilitate action on societal challenges and problems.

The purpose in this chapter is to help set the scene for our analysis of the governance processes developed by the European Union to deliver the Europe 2020 Strategy. It specifically sets out to build a deeper understanding of the variations in the strategic capabilities of the national governments of Member States. As we noted in the first chapter, the strategy document drafted by the European Commission in 2010 was very clear that there were important differences between Member States and very clear that this should be reflected in the delivery of the Europe 2020 Strategy by national governments. It was proposed to reflect this in varying the national targets under the Union-wide strategy. Presumably the success of the multi-level approach of the Europe 2020 Strategy would depend on the strategic capabilities of national governments and parliaments and on their cooperation with the European Union institutions. Nevertheless, there was no explicit assessment of the strategic capabilities of Member States in the document, nor of their readiness and fitness to be integrated into a European Union-wide effort to deliver the Europe 2020 Strategy. This omission is not explained in the document, and it may be that such assessments were made but not included in the strategy document. Alternatively, perhaps the Commission assumed that it was not needed and that strategic thinking and planning would also be undertaken at national level using the Europe 2020 Strategy as a framework. If so, perhaps it was further assumed there would be a great deal of involvement of national level governments and parliaments in strategic thinking and planning.

In this chapter we offer an interpretation of the national level data to suggest how national circumstances, government effectiveness and credibility, and societal outcomes are linked together as interrelated phenomena. We will suggest that it is possible to interpret the evidence as showing the plausibility of a model of sustainable societal progress achieved by effective and credible governments that have strategic management capabilities.

Governance has been widely discussed by scholars since the nineties in the different but related fields of politics, public administration and European studies. Research and theorizing of governance has resulted in a complex, diverse and at times bewildering array of writing. Governance has been written about as a new approach by the modern state (Kickert et al. 1997). In contrast, it has also been analysed as governance without government (Peters and Pierre 1998). It has been studied in relation to regimes, law, rules, judicial decisions and administrative practices (Lynn et al. 2001). Then again, it has been studied in relation to non-state actors and policy entrepreneurs building networks (Klijn 2005; Kooiman 2005). One influential view suggested that there are a number of approaches to the concept of governance in the study of public administration, including the study of: (1) inter-jurisdictional governance, (2) extending state function by exporting it to third parties (profit or non-profit), and finally (3) non-state governance in accounting for NGO activities (Frederickson 2005).

The European Union has government institutions that are very unusual, making it unlike the government structures of the Member States that compose the Union. In part these specificities reflect concerns to ensure national governments and citizens are represented in its governance system; and in part the functions and relationships of the European Commission have been moulded to help support a process of transition to political solidarity across Europe. We would also suggest that European Union governance varies from policy to policy and that the European Union is a system of differentiated integration in levels of centralization (competition versus foreign policy) and also in territorial extension (Schengen/non-Schengen, Euro/non-Euro) (Heidbreder and Brandsma 2017). The European Union is a polity in the making but European policies have developed in a piecemeal way with a varying influence over time of Member States in their formulation and this in a context of globalization reshaping the Europeanization process itself (Leontitsis and Ladi 2017). The European Union edifice is characterized by incompleteness and fluidity, which is not a new thesis at least for political control on policies (Marks 1996).

In this chapter we investigate the Member States’s actions in delivering the Europe 2020 Strategy. We have already analysed the governance mechanisms of Europe’s multi-level governance system and the issue of political leadership in relation to the Europe 2020 strategy. Both Chaps. 4 and 5 left some matters unfinished, including the contribution of Member States to delivering the Europe 2020 Strategy. One aspect we wanted to follow up on was whether the strategy might have been delivered partially on the basis of a voluntary system of alignment of national visions, priorities, and strategic targets. In other words, Member States might have voluntarily adjusted national strategies. This would be a strategic system based on self-alignment of the constituent Member States. It would have meant, in the light of our earlier findings, that Member States would have probably provided the necessary leadership and monitoring of their delivery of the Europe 2020 Strategy on the basis of national initiative and action.

If there is an effective ‘centre of government’ at the European Union level, we expect it might be located partially in the European Union. The nature of the Commission’s contribution to a centre of government function might go beyond its obvious roles in initiating and formulating legislative proposals and its work of monitoring and guiding Member States with respect to the Europe 2020 Strategy. We have noticed that the Commission, starting in 2014, may have been taking on a more overtly political involvement in the work of leadership of the European Union. It looks as though this might have happened to compensate for the way in which the European Council has discharged its political leadership role towards the Europe 2020 Strategy and other collective endeavours. From a neo-Weberian perspective, the change could be seen as politically sensitive since bureaucrats and politicians are meant to occupy different formal positions within a mass democracy system. From an early 1990s governance perspective this change in the Commission may seem unsurprising—assuming that the move to a more overtly political orientation in the leadership of the Commission was a part of a trend to ‘de-differentiation’ of the roles of bureaucrats and politicians within a system moving towards a greater capacity for partnership in problem solving and a move away from hierarchical coordination in society. These preceding comments suggest a need for some theoretical open-mindedness when approaching the empirical data presented in this chapter on the leadership and monitoring activities of the European Commission.

By the start of the twenty-first century, much official thinking on good public governance contained both a rejection of neo-liberal political ideas generally and the laissez-faire state specifically. Thinking at this time also came around to the idea that leadership—as well as good management—were essential ingredients of an effective government.