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COURSE UNIT: Government and Society

CHAPTER EIGHT: (Detailed CHAPTER III)

Typologies of government-society relations:

Enabling government, Open government,

Adaptive government, Responsive government

ENABLING GOVERNMENT is a term that tries to express the

changing orientation of the state in the recent decades. It means that
instead of the state supplying the social rights involved in
citizenship, it ensures that the conditions, resources and
opportunities for the citizen’s welfare exist, so that the individual may
help himself, without being a burden on the state.

The idea is to offer public support to fields that are the individual’s
responsibility (such as employment, health, education, etc). This is a
social policy that lays responsibility for improving the individual’s status
both on the individual and on the state.

Creating the model contains four processes that run simultaneously:

privatization, decreasing public expenses, employment and social
cohesion.

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The state privatizes some of its services towards the citizen, decreases
the public expenses, switches over from welfare to workfare and
changes its connections with the individual in a way that creates more
social connections. The concept of an enabling government defines most
industrialized states today. The enabling government model obligates a
broad and strong civil society upon which the state can lean.

ADAPTIVE GOVERNMENT is the ability of a government to

efficiently and quickly deal with crises and the changes reality imposes.
The government must propose appropriate “legislation=a group of laws”
for changing “circumstances =events and facts affecting what happens in
given situation”. In order to do that, it must be highly adaptive, so that it
may be successful in proposing appropriate legislations to answer
new challenges as they arise. In order to succeed at this, the flexibility
of the public sector must be increased, which in turn will increase its
ability to act to bring change to strategic policy in order to bring to the
quick restoration of society and/or the economy. Creating change entails
changing people’s attitudes, creating new knowledge and using rarely
used knowledge (for instance, scientific knowledge), as well as
cooperating with various sectors outside the government, such as the
civil and corporate sectors.

Achieving flexibility in the public sector is dependent on changing

behavior patterns in the public sector, on organizational changes,
delegating responsibilities, and on changing the way services are
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supplied to citizens (increasing competition and adding other sources as
service providers).

OPEN GOVERNMENT means citizens have more significant

participation in the democratic process. Such participation requires
knowledgeable participants and therefore an open government means
implementing transparency principles and affording citizens access
to information and documents regarding the government’s
activities. This transparency encourages responsibility on the side of the
government, improves service to the public, acts as a form of regulation
on the governments’ activities and reduces governmental corruption.

The values of the open government define all democratic countries in the
world. The meaning is that of a government that uses social media.
Many democratic countries today are adopting the idea, out of
recognition of the fact that this leads to direct, honest and
unprecedented dialogue between citizens and the government.

RESPONSIVE GOVERNMENT is a government that reacts and

responds to the public’s mood, is attuned to it and includes it as policy-
formulating process.

Citizens today have much higher expectations than of governments in

the past. They also want to take an active part in the government work.

Because of this, a basic change was created in the leadership culture, in

the effort to create high-quality relationships between the government
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and the public: - the government is more attentive to the public’s
sentiments and demands and includes more factors in the policy
formulating stage. - Consolidating the concept that the citizen is in the
center means providing the public with services that are better, more
“decent= of accepted standard”, more accessible and more
understandable.

Technology allows making the services more accessible, placing them

online (e-government).

A responsive government is a government that seeks advice from the

public as a part of formulating policy. The purpose of this advisement is
to improve the public policy as well as the leadership’s legitimacy.
Governments today understand more and more for that they can’t
effectively execute and implement policy if the citizens don’t understand
or support that policy.

Responsivity means coordinating with the public and taking its

suggestions under advisement while formulating and implementing
public policy and public services.

At the same time, this advisement with the public is not meant to be a
replacement for the traditional representative democracy or the
government’s and parliament’s role in the policy-formulating stage,
rather, it is there to supplement it.

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Oftentimes it is easier and more appropriate to coordinate with citizens
and consult with them during the decision making process on the local
level as opposed to the national level.

The approaches of Open Government, Adaptive Government and

Responsive Government all assume the position that there is a need to
have the public get much more involved in the decision making, policy
making and planning process.

The public refers to the citizens themselves, as well as civil society

organizations and the corporate sector. The approaches of Enabling
Government and Adaptive Government both share the position that
the public (again, including the civil society and the corporate sector)
should take a more active part in the aspect of policy execution.

The difference between the two approaches is that the Enabling

Government retains the full responsibility over planning policy and
oversight, while the Adaptive Government opines that these
responsibilities should be held “in tandem with the public = work
together with”.

There is a tight relationship between Open Government and the

Responsive Government. An open government must also be responsive,
meaning, providing solutions for new ideas, demands and needs that rise
from the public. Openness does not refer solely to transparency, but also

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to Responsivity and accessibility, whose goal is to create a better
relationship between the government and the public which it serves.

An adaptive government combines scientific knowledge and other

knowledge types in order to locate and promote a common interest for
all sides. This is done using open decision making structures, in other
words, involving “regular” people in the decision-making process,
alongside policy-makers on various levels.

Open Government On the most basic level, an open government is the

idea that people have the right to gain access to government documents
and procedures.

The principles of the open government currently define all the

democratic countries in the world. Even though this is an old concept,
the actual and practical significance keeps evolving. What this means is
that the idea of an open government is more focused today on
providing opportunities to partake in government activity. So an
open government means a government where not only citizens have
access to information, documents and political processes taking place
within the government, but they can also play a significant role
participating in the government (Lathrop and Ruma 2010).

An open government is there based on the principle of transparency.

Usually transparency can be seen as encouraging more responsibility on

the government’s side. More transparency also means improving service
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to the public, which means giving citizens more power when dealing
with the government, as well as a form of regulation on government
activities.

An open government is only possible in democratic countries, which

have less fear of public involvement in government doings and aren’t
threatened by the strengthening of the opposition following the opening
of informational channels. The principle is that in a democratic regime,
the power is in the citizens’ hand, and therefore all citizens should be
knowledgeable regarding the government’s actions, so they can criticize
it. The concept is that the decisions reached will be better, not only
because of the public’s ability to contribute in the decision-making
process, but mainly because the decision makers know they are working
under “public scrutiny= careful look at something” (Curtin and Meijers
1995, Coglianese 2009).

However, too much transparency or transparency in the wrong places

could actually harm the decision makers’ ability to reach good decisions.

Full transparency can also make it hard for the government to receive
essential information from corporate bodies, since these may fear the
information will become public knowledge, especially to their
competitors. The obvious question, then, is how much transparency is
needed, and which kind of information should be revealed.

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The information age changed the face of society. Citizens today have
much higher expectations from their governments than before. They
also want to take a more active part in the governing work, which
means, more than just the limited opportunities of dropping a vote
in a ballot box every few years (Bourgon 2007).

There is a tight bond between the open government and the responsive
government. An open government must also be responsive, or, in other
words, must be able to respond to new ideas, demands and needs that
arise from the public. Openness does not only mean transparency, but
also responsivity and accessibility, in order to create a better, higher-
quality relationship between the government and the public which it
serves.

Responsivity means giving the public, the corporate sector and the civil
society organizations the option of participating in the decision-making
process. The government must listen to the public and take its
suggestions into account while formulating and implementing public
policy and public services (OECD 2005: 29- 30).

A responsive government is a government that consults much more with

the public on matters of legislation and during the policy-making
process, in order to improve the public policy as well as the
governmental legitimacy. Governments that wish to be more responsive
must improve the tools for consultations with the public (Ibid: 41).

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Governments today understand more and more that they cannot
efficiently execute and implement policy, good as it may be, if the
citizens don’t understand or support that policy. Therefore, governments
are looking for new ways to involve a wider range of actors in the
policy-making stage.

There are countries (such as Canada, Iceland, The Netherlands and

Norway) where consultations with the public is an established practice,
while other countries have only recently started recognizing this practice
is a main component in modern policy-making.

The goal is to listen to public sentiment and take into account the
opinion of the public, as well as that of interest groups, during the
policy-making process, in order to make the policy a better one.

There is a wide range of ways to consult with the public.

REFERENDUMS are an example of an established and binding
consultation. There are other ways which are less binding, such as
consulting with certain interest groups (Ibid: 42).

As a matter of fact, the understanding is increasingly developing that it

is much easier, and perhaps more right, to cooperate and consult with
citizens during the decision-making process on the local level as
opposed to the national level.

According to Needham, several significant obstacles must be overcome

if consultation with the public is to become a real foundation to building
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a relationship between the authorities and the residents, as well as
creating community involvement in the process of making decisions that
affect their lives. The first obstacle is funding. This is an expensive
procedure that must have adequate funding. The second obstacle is
demands. It is hard to hold efficient consultation when the public does
not wish to participate.

If the participating experience is a friendly one and people feel their

demands and needs are being responded to, they will want to continue
participating in the future. The third obstacle is transparency. The
authorities must publish information regarding the process, its findings
and the authority’s response. The objective is for the people to
understand how the cooperation is being done and how effective it is
(Ibid: 712-713).

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