The Learning Government

The question is “how do governments identify important changes in their environment affecting the result of their policies and actions and develop capacity to make appropriate and timely adjustments in public policy and services?”. The short answer is “with great difficulty, although competent governments do so on some of the issues some of the time”. Successful dynamic adaptive behaviour in government involves virtually every significant feature of the system of government in some way. It is about how the rationality of policy analysis and public management comes together with the rationality of politics. It is about creating an environment which has good governance and good management. It involves resolution of disputes among competing views of the public interest or simply among competing private interests. It involves the effectiveness of the relationships between the government’s constituents and the institutions and policies of government. At the deepest level it is about effective democracy and how in any country a sequence of governments over time choose to exercise their constitutional authorities and whether they do this effectively in some wider sense of serving the best interests of their citizens in a system of democratic accountability...