Memorandum by Martin Lodge, Department
of Government and ESRC Centre for the Analysis of Risk and Regulation,
London School of Economics and Christopher Hood, All Souls College,
Oxford and Director, ESRC Public Services Programme (CSE 03)
CIVIL SERVICE POLICY-MAKING COMPETENCY: REFLECTIONS
FROM A BRITISH-GERMAN STUDY
BACKGROUND
The following seven observations are largely
based on a comparative study of civil service competency[3]
in policy-making in the UK Department of Trade and Industry and
the (then) Federal Economics ministry in Germany.[4]
The report of the study is available from the website of LSE's
ESRC Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation.[5]
POLICY-MAKING
COMPETENCY: SEVEN
OBSERVATIONS
Competency is not just delivery
1. Over the past 20 years at least, discussion
of civil service competency in the UK has focused overwhelmingly
on issues of "service delivery" and the management qualities
(or deficits) associated with delivering effective public services
to citizens. Such matters, as well as the process management skills
emphasised in the recently announced "Professional Skills
for Government" initiative for departmental management (October
2004), are undeniably and perennially important. But they should
not overshadow the issue of civil service competency in policy-making,
and indeed numerous well-informed observers (such as Donald Savoie
in Canada) have pointed to the dangers of trying to fix service
delivery competency without paying at least equivalent attention
to policy making competency. Indeed, Savoie goes so far as to
claim that it is the latter that (contrary to stereotype) is the
more problematic competency for high civil services.[6]
Three limitations of official competency frameworks
2. Until recently, at least, official competency
frameworks applying to civil servants engaged in policy-making
in both the UK[7]and
Germany have been limited in at least three other ways as well.
(a) "Over-individualised". They
have tended to focus almost exclusively on the skills and behaviours
of individuals, rather than on the team or group capacities that
the "core competencies" literature in strategic management
have identified as crucial to achieving "best in world"
organisational effectiveness (and on which both outside and inside
critics tend to focus in diagnosing the most serious failings
of the civil service policy machine, as often containing a mix
of brilliant people and terrible organisation).
(b) "Evidence lite". In spite of
professed commitment to "evidence based policy-making"
in both countries, competency frameworks have been produced on
the basis of the views of self-referential civil service focus
groups rather than on systematic research documenting what behaviours
and skills civil servants actually bring to the process (or processes)
of policy making and how they are perceived by outside parties.
It is as if Frederick Winslow Taylor (the father of modern management
theory) had set about organising work processes and compensation
on the basis of a self-selected workers' focus group rather than
by actually observing work processes on the factory floor.
(c) "Process heavy". Official competency
frameworks also have something of a "Hamlet without the Prince
of Denmark" quality. By that we mean that they are not based
on well-developed criteria for judging how good the "policy
crafting" of civil servants is in a substantive sense. (Though
there are procedurally-oriented check-lists of a rather elementary
kind, that invite shallow box-ticking responses and typically
give no guidance as to how to handle tradeoffs among different
desiderata or how to handle so-called "wicked issues".)
While it is undoubtedly difficult to judge the quality of civil
service contributions to policy, given the confidentiality and
political sensitivity of much of that work, such issues arise
in judging quality of work in almost every profession. Moreover,
many of those who we interviewed in our study showed the ability
to judge policy substance against the political constraints policy-making
civil servants were working under, suggesting that peer-evaluations
are far from impossible. The challenge for any central framework
for individual and organisational competencies is to collect and
develop those judgements into explicit competency criteria for
civil service policy-making—something that would have to
be done from inside, and not take the form of a hand-me-down business
competency framework.
A new age presents new challenges for policy competency
3. Yet, despite the beguiling mantra of
"delivery", policy-making competency in national civil
service systems is perhaps more important than ever in current
conditions. The contemporary age presents sharp new challenges
for civil servants' policy competency for at least three related
reasons:
(a) The subject-expertise needed for effective
and well-informed policy-making is decreasingly likely to be available
within the central parts of the public bureaucracy as in-house
expertise is squeezed, outsourced or simply unavailable. So civil
servants increasingly need the sort of competency that involves
successfully identifying, assessing and relating to the sources
of that expertise, wherever it may be found;
(b) Even outside the boundaries of government
organisation, in an age of globalised science and technical expertise,
there is no longer any guarantee that established sources of national
expertise, even in developed countries such as the UK or Germany,
are "best in world" for all purposes. So civil servants
increasingly need the sort of competency that enables them to
operate successfully in an international rather a purely national
arena of expertise;
(c) The internationalisation of markets make
many of the ways that governments traditionally consulted and
gathered information about policy increasingly problematic in
the selection of appropriate stakeholders and consultees. So civil
servants increasingly need new sorts of competency in consulting
and gathering information that fit those altered circumstances.
Consultation at the central policy competency
4. Indeed, the skills and knowledge needed
for effective consultation are central to civil servants' policy-making
competencies, yet those consultation skills have tended to be
largely ignored in official competency documents over the past
decade. That is partly because (as noted earlier) those documents
have had an overwhelming "delivery management" bias
and also because the frameworks have tended to stress analogies
with private-sector management, for which there is no real counterpart
to the process of policy consultation in and by government. It
is true that consultation has become part of the Regulatory Impact
Assessment exercise in the UK and a number of official UK documents
now exist with recommendations about good consultation. Nevertheless,
it is curious that consultation is not given a central place in
official competency frameworks.[8]
The outward-facing policy competencies modern
governments need
5. Specifically, effective policy-making
by civil servants in modern government requires skills in outward-facing
consultation in at least three ways:
(a) consultation within an increasingly complex
and multi-layered structure of government, inside and across central
departments and other parts and levels of the state;
(b) consultation outside government with
groups affected by policy, including business groups and the public
at large, in a world of internationalised markets and changing
technological possibilities for conducting consultation;
(c) consultation within and outside government
with experts and scientists—something that has been much
discussed in the aftermath of policy failures in food and agriculture
policy, but much less so in economic or industrial policy.
However, in neither the UK DTI nor the (then)
German BMWi did official central competency frameworks lay heavy
stress on such skills. In neither case did those frameworks encompass
all three of these key dimensions of consultation. And in both
cases interviewees tended to be complacent about the challenge
of ensuring that the input of expert and scientific expertise
into policy was "best in world".
Boundary-spanning competencies[9]
6. Policy-making occurs in many different
political climates, modes and circumstances. But where it amounts
to anything more than political signalling, presentation or judicious
"parking" of difficult problems, a crucial skill for
civil servants is to make effective links between standard-setting,
information-gathering and behaviour-modification or implementation.
That link—or the absence of it—is central to the problem
of policy effectiveness in modern government. In current conditions,
where policy standards are often set at the EU level or by other
international bodies and where information-gathering and implementation
tend to be the responsibility of special-purpose bodies or local
and regional government, a key challenge for civil servants in
policy-making is to develop the skills and disposition to link
together effective ground-level implementation experience with
influence over standard-setting.
How to develop boundary-spanning competencies
7. Developing this crucial competency requires:
(a) The ability and opportunity to switch
between policy-making roles and "front line delivery"
work. Such switching was traditionally hampered by both the structure
and culture of executive government in both the UK and Germany
and remains so in Germany.[10]
But our study the UK department brought front-line experience
to bear on policy-making by incorporating individuals with that
experience into policy teams in a way that did not happen in the
German case, and indeed the UK government departments are increasingly
bringing front-line expertise to bear on their "delivery"
policies, in a development that needs to be sustained and encouraged.
(b) The ability and opportunity to switch
between government and business experience via secondments of
civil servants to business and from business into the civil service.
Numerous initiatives of this kind have been mounted in the UK
over the past 20 years, and we found more instances of it among
the policy-making civil servants in our UK case than in the German
one, where legal provisions largely precluded such interchanges.
But it must be asked how such interchanges can be organized so
as to develop the policy-making competencies of the secondees.
(c) The ability and opportunity to work in
different national civil service settings. Traditionally confined
to the foreign service (and even there typically within the "bubble"
of the national corps), this requirement runs up against both
formal and informal barriers to movement of this kind. In our
study, most of the policy-making civil servants who had gained
international experience in both countries had done so by working
for international organizations, or working for the UK in Brussels.
But it must be asked whether a far more international pattern
of recruitment to policy-making positions in the civil service
is needed to develop such competencies.
OVERALL
The Civil Service competency frameworks that
first appeared in their modern form about a decade ago have tended
to emphasise delivery and "corporate-man" (or "-woman")
attributes. Policy-making competencies should not be squeezed
out by this approach and the challenge now is to develop a new
generation of competency frameworks that put policy competencies
at centre stage.
December 2004
3 Competency is an idea that has several different
strains, and ideas about the skills and competencies required
of public servants engaged in policy-making have varied both over
time, among countries and even among different parts of the public
service in the UK. Examples of such variation include the differing
relative emphasis placed on subject expertise, on areas of knowledge
or skill crucial to the strategic position of an organization
and, most prominently in the past two decades, to individual behaviours.
See C Hood and M Lodge (2004) "Competency, Bureaucracy, and
Public Management Reform" Governance, 17 (3): 313-33 and
M Lodge and C Hood (2003) "Competency and Bureaucracy: Diffusion,
Application and Appropriate Response?" West European Politics,
26(3): 131-52. Back
4
The study, sponsored by the Smith Institute and the Industry Forum
in 2001-02, involved tracing the autobiography of six policy documents
(varying in the degree of "problem complexity" involved)
in those two organizations, identifying the skills and knowledge
contributed by the various civil servants involved in producing
those documents, and comparing the qualities revealed in that
analysis with the official civil service competency frameworks
applying to the two departments in the study. Back
5
Available at: http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/CARR/documents/civilServicePolicyMakingCompetencies.htm. Back
6
D J Savoie (1994) Thatcher, Reagan, Mulroney: in search of a new
bureaucracy, Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press. Back
7
Available at: http://www.civilservice.gov.uk/management_information/senior_civil_service/scs_performance_and_reward/publications/pdf/competence_framework_a3.pdf. Back
8
See http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/regulation/consultation-guidance/.
Similarly, consultation is part of the codified standard operating
procedures of federal ministries and of the federal government. Back
9
For the concept of boundary spanning, see P Williams (2002) "The
Competent Boundary Spanner" Public Administration 80: 103-24.
See also P Ingraham (2001) Linking Leadership to Performance in
Public Organisations, PUMA/HRM (2001)8/Final, June 2001. Back
10
However, in the German case, the fact that the Länder are
entrenched in large areas of policy-setting and responsible for
implementation of most federal policy, meant that a implementation
perspective was embedded in the policy-making process in a way
that does not happen even in post-devolution UK. Back
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