There’s an important reason why despite professions of wanting to usher in reforms during electoral campaigns, democratic governments struggle to implement them. It’s as if the bureaucrats and politicians stumble while attempting to cross a valley that separates a reform idea from its implementation.
There are perhaps two approaches to doing public policy reform. The first is to formulate a comprehensive and water-tight proposal and implementation plan, get the buy-in of all the stakeholders, and then implement the reform. The second approach is to come up with a basic program design, prepare its implementation plan, get the broad support of important stakeholders, implement it, and then iterate based on emerging insights. As per this approach, the important thing is not the idea or the design or the plan, but the quality of iteration.
The second approach assumes significance, especially in the context of public policy issues. I have written here about the value of iterating with the Minimum Viable Product and scaling up promising public policy ideas. The uncertain elements of a new idea are too many to make any comprehensive en-ante design/plan impossible. We need to iterate to allow the uncertain features to play out, and then address them.
Consider the practical challenges with the first approach. If we were to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s of any reform’s design and implementation, we would start to encounter several problems. Any reform idea by nature is treading new ground. Any public policy intervention will have several design features, and being new, each design feature will have several uncertain aspects. And then there are imponderables of practical implementation for each design feature. Finally, there are the risks associated with the emerging political economy responses, which can manifest in the form of adverse news items and public protests.
When faced with such extreme uncertainties, bureaucrats tend to batten their hatches and pull back from the reform. Perversely, this kind of risk aversion is especially likely with a bureaucrat who is prone to do his homework and diligently examine all the possible issues associated with the reform idea.
It’s for this reason that I’ll argue that any reform requires some space for strategic ambiguity.
There are some good frameworks to describe such ambiguity. Three come to mind.
Albert Hirschman proposed a theory of hiding hand to describe the need for governments to have a cloak over complete information if they are to proceed with complex reforms. Accordingly, for example, if a government were to become fully aware of the several uncertainties and costs associated with building a hydropower project, it might in the first instance never set out to build one.
Similarly, Bent Flyjvberg has described the idea of strategic misrepresentation as an essential requirement to get approval for large infrastructure projects. Given that such large projects invariably cost massive amounts, and are prone to cost and time over-runs, governments, especially the Finance Departments, are likely to resist approving them. Therefore, to win approvals for such projects, the sponsoring ministries and their agencies end up misrepresenting by low-balling estimates to win approvals, in the firm belief that they’ll be able to renegotiate the estimates upwards once the original project is approved and implementation starts. It’s difficult impossible for any government to pull back and leave the project incomplete.
Deng Xiaoping famously institutionalised Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, which was essentially about the strategy of “crossing the river by feeling the stones”. See this, this, and this. Local and provincial government officials were encouraged to undertake low-profile experiments of various kinds that went radically counter to the dominant principles of communism and the Chinese Communist Party. These experiments were then closely watched but outside the glare of any publicity, which allowed them to happen in a low-stakes environment. But once an experiment started to show promising results, it would get adopted by the Party and scaled up nationally (famously exemplified by Deng’s high-profile personal visits and announcement to scale up the initiative).
Such strategic ambiguity requires work at the bureaucratic, political, and civil society levels. In fact, I would argue that the space for such ambiguity emerges from a virtuous cycle that intertwines the motives and actions of all three stakeholders.
First, the bureaucrats must become more willing to break out of their risk aversion and bite the bullet based on their judgment of what are good ideas that are steps in the right direction and have a reasonable likelihood of success if done well and over some reasonable period.
Second, the bureaucrats’ willingness to accept the risk emerges from their political masters’ willingness to accept and tolerate failures. This space is critical and must be communicated widely within the bureaucracy for the individual bureaucrats to summon the courage to trust their judgments and propose/approve reforms. In other words, there must be a politically created culture that encourages experimentation and reform, that’s underpinned by a tolerance for failures.
Third, this political appetite for failure, in turn, comes from the civil society’s acceptance of honest failures. This is formed by the institutional maturity of the press and the wider public commentariat. Instead of excoriating missteps and condemning officials and politicians who dared to pursue these reforms, the public commentary must restrain itself from sensationalism. Public intellectuals and scholars must rise above partisan politics and populist grandstanding to support genuine and well-intentioned reform endeavours.
The third requirement is extremely difficult in polarised political situations, that is now common across democracies.
In the circumstances, it’s all the more important for at least some bureaucrats and politicians to show leadership and the courage of conviction to break free from the shackles of risk-aversion and pursue reforms that they are convinced about. Such individual initiatives therefore become the only outlets for reform. It’s important that those individuals, especially bureaucrats with the inclination to pursue reforms, are provided the space to do so.
A very useful way to increase the likelihood of success with public policy reforms is to do it quietly and outside the glare of publicity. Unfortunately, this runs counter to the incentives within the bureaucracy and the political system, where the natural propensity is to claim credit for doing something new and where the tenures of officials and politicians are not enough for them to experiment and successfully scale up complex public policy interventions. Besides, this propensity also comes in the way of bureaucrats, in particular, cutting corners to make the reform look good in the short-term but with serious long-term consequences. Worst of all, it creates perverse incentives to pursue reforms that while creating some immediate good (or the form of “good”) end up leaving greater long-term damage.
While it’s understandable for the politician to claim credit, it’s especially unacceptable for the supposedly impersonal bureaucrat to flaunt their reform and claim credit. It may therefore be useful to align incentives within the bureaucracy by backing genuine reform attempts and honest failures. For sure identification of such honest reform endeavours is difficult. But equally, they are not impossible and can be done with good judgment by experienced bureaucrats.
A useful marker or validation for backing bureaucrat-led reform efforts could be signatures that the reform is not being pursued with the intention of publicity and for furthering the personal agenda of the bureaucrat (most often when pursued with these considerations, its negative signatures are clearly visible within the bureaucracy).
A more institutional approach may be to explicitly acknowledge an experiment as just that and with all the associated risks of failure. This would be akin to providing a virtual ring-fenced reform sandbox, thereby creating the conditions for experimentation and encouraging honest reform endeavours. This is harder to achieve but creates the public space for such reforms to be pursued without all the usual constraints and fetters.
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