Summary – Implementation Networks

Implementation networks are both social and complex, as reflected in a burgeoning literature that acknowledges the use of “multiple linked social actors, often multiple organizational actors, to achieve collective purposes” (O’Toole and Meier 2004, 681). However, most researchers remain focussed on issues of network management, performance measurement, and the development of empirical theory (O’Toole and Meier 2004). Management is not apolitical, and this managerial approach to networks may reflect a general “blindness toward the distributional consequences of network actions” (O’Toole and Meier 2004, 681; 683; cf. O’Toole and Meier 2006).19 The drive to make networks more efficient and manageable is not matched by any concurrent effort to make them more democratic than the hierarchical or market alternatives (Sorensen and Torfing 2005).

Active network management requires a manager “that is willing to actively shape a network through manipulation of the collective agenda and playing politics” (Huxham and Vangen 2005, 222-227). In public administration O’Toole and Meier (2004) see this type of strategic action by the state as a “dark side” of networks (O’Toole and Meier 2004, 681). Dark side strategies include distancing dominant network actors from politically volatile policy issues using diffuse networks, steering implementation by limiting participation, and cooptation. The use of networks to respond to complex social conditions may lead to the strategic use of complex networks, both to obscure policy intent, and to “tilt the table” (O’Toole and Meier 2004, 684; cf. Schattschneider 1960).20 But limiting complexity can also reinforce the

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“Whereas democratic legitimacy is an inherent feature of the rule of government in parliamentary democracy, there is no semblance of any guarantee that network governance will be democratic. It is not even clear how we construct relevant criteria for assessing the democratic performance of a governance network. Here lies an enormous question … governance networks might prove to be an efficient means for governing society under certain conditions, but are they democratic?” (Sorensen and Torfing 2005, 207).

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Although O’Toole and Meier’s article is titled “Desperately Seeking Selznick” (2004), they make a strong case for researchers to also return to Schattschneider’s 1960 book, “The Semi-Sovereign People” (1960) as a

dominance of some interests. As Mills (1956), Schattschneider (1960), Miliband (1968), and others have previously observed “networks are more likely to be populated by actors and organizations that already possess political resources” (O’Toole and Meier 2004, 685). Loading a network with sympathetic actors is the best way to ensure that outcomes desired by these actors are achieved, but this may come “at a price” (O’Toole and Meier 2004, 685). Among the costs are informal cooptation (O’Toole and Meier 2004; cf. Selznick 1949), where state actors or others “sacrifice the primary agenda of policy … in the interests of survival” (O’Toole and Meier 2004, 684).21

Understanding implementation “requires recognition of the multi-actor character of policy action” (O’Toole 2000, 266), the social context in which implementation takes place. The state is not the sole actor in implementation; the consent of other implementing actors is necessary, and is gained through reciprocal exchanges (cf. Edelman 1960; 1964; Miliband 1969). Implementation, then, is “a point of departure for bargaining among implementers” (Pressman and Wildavsky 1984, 166). This bargaining occurs within “complex chains of reciprocal interaction” (Pressman and Wildavsky 1984, xxvi), where central actors “trade off control for agreement” (Rhodes 2000, 360). As with all political contests, there is no

certainty that negotiation will be free or fair (Miliband 1969). It may be coordinated by the state, but “cannot be coerced” (Pressman and Wildavsky 1984, 134). Coordinating matters such as compliance through negotiation may mean that “policy may be modified, even to the point of compromising its original purpose” (Pressman and Wildavsky 1984, 134; cf.

Miliband 1969). Rhodes (2000, 355) considers this a normal condition of networks, going so far as to state that a regulator’s efforts to maintain focus on original policy intent may

confound negotiations and coordination within implementation networks.

Negotiations do not precede implementation, they are ongoing and continuous. In multi-actor implementation, actors external to the state are “more than passive recipients of publicly initiated effort; they are among the parties who have to be active toward implementation, through coproduction or in some less direct fashion” (O’Toole 2000, 266). Implementation is

starting point for new thinking about research into implementation networks. I believe that there is value in this suggestion, perhaps more that the authors themselves anticipated. In this theory of politics, Schattschneider describes how politics embed conditions of simultaneity and constant conflict which lead to fluid social

conditions in which socially mediated ‘structures’ are in a state of continuous re-creation. If researchers were to ask how these ‘structures’ can be fluid and constantly being recreated, the answer could well be that the

researchers themselves have frozen the fluid social in order to study it post mortem. 21

Participation in rule-making is a more effective strategy that opposing change. Golden (1998) has shown that opponents new regulatory rules are less likely to gain concessions from state agencies, while ‘supporters’, even when they are acting to protect narrow special interests, are more likely to have their positions reflected in the final rules. Thus, participation in advance of hearings or behind the scenes would allow special interests to be seen as supporters of a public interest which coincides with their own private interest (cf. Schattschneider 1960 [1983]).

a network of local negotiations in which “each actor deploys its resources [political, financial, and informational] to maximize influence over other players without becoming indebted to the others” (Rhodes 2006, 431). These calculations of cost and indebtedness are local, and rarely consider the original policy intent. This shifting ground of coproduction brings us back to Pressman and Wildavsky’s wry observation: “Implementation is no longer solely about getting what you once wanted but, instead, it is about what you have since learned to prefer until, of course, you change your mind again” (Pressman and Wildavsky 1984: 234). In the recent research contests over how implementation or governance networks should be viewed several insights have been revealed. First, the implementation and governance literature has shown an abiding interest in the role of local actors in implementation networks and their influence on policy outcomes. The relative influence of local actors over

implementation outcomes varies according to the number of actors involved, the extent to which their private or special interests overlap with policy intent, the overall visibility of these negotiations, and the costs the administrative agency may be willing to assume for

specification and monitoring implementing actors. For the research described in this thesis, the focus is correctly set on the network of archaeologists, developers, planners, the public, and descendant populations engaged, in some way or another, with implementing

archaeological policy. That is, the research, to the extent that I can identify actors, and their interests and objectives regarding the policy it may be possible to identify the social and political forces acting on policy to generate particular outcomes.

2.3 Schattschneider’s Theory of Politics and Implementation