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Robust governance in turbulent times 

9 October 2024

Research

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Turbulence refers to the unpredictable dynamics that public governance is currently facing in the wake of today’s polycrisis. This heightened societal turbulence calls for robust governance to maintain the core functions, goals and values in the public sector. A Cambridge Elements monograph argues public managers must accept that turbulence is the new normal and abandon the dream of long stretches of stable governance.  It identifies a broad range of robustness strategies that can be used to respond to turbulence. They include flexible adaptation, scaling and scalability, and proactive real time innovation.  

Living in turbulent times

Public governance has always been challenged by turbulence. This is defined as situations where events, demands, and support interact and change in highly variable, inconsistent, unexpected, or unpredictable ways. There are multiple sources of turbulence including:  

  • government failures to address pressing problems properly 
  • international conflicts and sanctions that can challenge established supply chains, resulting in inflation, shortages, social unrest, and political disputes 
  • economic crises and escalating public debt which may give rise to austerity measures that create social problems 
  • demographic changes, changing societal values, and new family structures which in turn give rise to demands for change. 

These issues and other disruptive events have led to a new and growing sense that turbulence is a chronic and endemic condition for modern governance.  

Robust governance

From a governance perspective, robustness refers to the strategic and practical efforts of public managers to balance and combine change and stability in the face of unpredictable dynamics. Public managers are successful in delivering robust governance in so far as they manage to make authoritative decisions that are both: 

  • effective in terms of achieving specific outcomes 
  • legitimate in the eyes of those who are executing the decisions and those affected by those decisions. 

Strategies for robust governance

A consequence of turbulence is that it tends simultaneously to:  

  • create turmoil by increasing the range of interactive and disruptive factors and actionable demands. 
  • shorten response times. 
  • increase unpredictability or uncertainty.  

Strategies for the robust governance of turbulence must enhance the ability to attend to multiple interrelated and evolving challenges at once without the luxury of planning or definitive knowledge. Several strategies are proposed to achieve this. They include:

1.Redundancy, slack, and buffering: “Keep something in your back pocket”

Redundancy, slack, and buffering create latitude within an organisation for reflection, innovation and the repurposing of governance resources and tools. There is value in keeping options open. When faced with a high degree of uncertainty and unpredictability, public managers should imagine multiple possible futures and avoid committing to or overinvesting in any particular strategy or scenario.

2.Vigilance: “Prepare to be surprised

Robust organisations think in futures and prepare to be surprised by maintaining high levels of alertness. They invest in both foresight capacities and in the dynamic capacities that allow them to respond quickly to incoming information. They balance the need for both focus and breadth in their search for information; they are looking for the infamous “needle in a haystack” and are prepared to act upon finding it.

3.Flexible adaptation: “Stay ready to adapt”

There is considerable agreement that flexibility is a desirable quality for dealing with turbulence. There are different dimensions to flexibility which public managers need to pursue. Strategic or decision-making flexibility captures whether people and organisations can shift their strategy or adapt their decisions as new conditions arise. With structural flexibility, organisational structures can shift easily in response to changing circumstances. Then there is operational flexibility which refers to the ability to change procedures and processes and to reallocate resources as new challenges arise.

4.Scaling and scalability: “Get ready to plug-and-play”

Turbulence often presents itself as a challenge of rapidly producing certain decisions, goods, or services to meet a particular scale of demand or need. Robust governance not only requires a certain scale of operations or production but also a capacity for scaling to meet volatile demands. It involves the ability to scale up but also adapting governance to scaling down.

5.Proactive real-time innovation: “Be ready to improvise, probe, and learn”

Turbulence places public governance in novel situations where standard-operating procedures are of limited use. Public leaders must rely on improvisation that innovates in real time and on the spot. Such creative improvisation requires acceptance of the possibility of failure, the development of dynamic capabilities to adapt structures and operations, and the ability to probe system conditions. 

The bottom line

Public managers need to accept that turbulence is a normal condition, and stability is not always a given. Spells of heightened turbulence have become near-chronic for public governance, meaning that public managers must ask themselves how they can continue to uphold key public functions, achieve policy goals, and respect the foundations of the public sector. They must avoid a one-sided focus on compliance and efficiency and pursue adaptability and innovation, the two key ingredients of robust governance. 

Want to read more 

Robust governance in turbulent times – Christopher Ansell, Eva Sørensen, Jacob Torfing and Jarle Trondal, Cambridge University Press, April 2024 

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Published Date: 9 October 2024