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CHAPTER 1 Transnational Public Administration: Imperatives, Dilemmas and Opportunities The pursuit of the public interest is the sine qua non of public officials in liberal democracies. This is no simple task: the modern state is beset by a burgeoning array of domestic-global political, so...

CHAPTER 1 Transnational Public Administration: Imperatives, Dilemmas and Opportunities The pursuit of the public interest is the sine qua non of public officials in liberal democracies. This is no simple task: the modern state is beset by a burgeoning array of domestic-global political, social and economic influences. The task of the public servant, as much today as ever, is one of plotting safe passage of domestic policy agendas through the forbidding maelstroms whipped up by these uncertain forces. Yet it is recognised by public administration scholars that we are witnessing a gradual shift from the local to the global (Pierre 2013), and it is the global trends of that attract the focus of this book, and three in particular. First, we live in an interconnected world. There are, for example, few countries (if any) that can truly claim to have full control of its currency, or a food supply chain that is independent of overseas disruptions, or a labour market policy that is not impacted by migration flows or fluctuations in avail- able foreign investment. Second, managing the complexity of the state is a matter of know-how, and never before have there been such prodi- gious quantities of information available for decision-makers. This is, of course, a product of today’s digital era. An abundance of policy-relevant raw data is generated and assimilated by public and private information systems with automated data-capture and matching, producing unpar- alleled insights into societal and economic meta-trends—this is the age of so-called ‘big data’. Information on the policy initiatives of other jurisdictions is also made accessible by the connectivity of the Internet. © The Author(s) 2021 1 T. Legrand, The Architecture of Policy Transfer, Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55821-5_1 2 T. LEGRAND The enterprising policy official merely needs basic web literacy to get a schematic understanding of any given issue, yet this abundance of knowl- edge can also become a burden. As far back as 1957, Herbert Simon described how policy-makers, who were subject to a ‘bounded rational- ity’, make suboptimal decisions when faced with a surfeit of information. If this insight is accurate, then the abundance of data in the digital era puts modern government in real trouble. Third, it is recognised that there is a trend towards a gradual flattening of authorities, from hierarchical to horizontal decision-making. This is evident in several respects, not least in how government agencies form relationships with the private and non- government sectors. It is also evident within governments as agencies turn towards collaborations, perhaps urged forward by the zeitgeist of ‘joined- up-government’. Finally, horizontal relationships are also visible in the cross-border relationships forged with peers in partner governments. It is in this context of local and global complexity that contem- porary public policy scholars and policy practitioners are joined in a common ambition to understand the circumstances, inputs and outcomes associated with the processes by which policy ideas transfer from one jurisdiction to another. For the former, this interest has manifested in an expansive, and expanding, multidisciplinary policy transfer literature that spans geography, law, business studies, political science, international relations and public policy scholars. For the latter, it is clear that a series of connected trends have substantially expanded the opportunities and imperatives for government officials to learn from elsewhere: first, the ubiquitous access to shared information via the Internet has entailed fundamental changes in the way governments acquire, analyse and dissem- inate information; second, the devolution of decision-making autonomy has given individual policy officials greater licence to seek policy-relevant information from overseas counterparts; and third, the growth in transna- tional policy issues brings new policy challenges to the fore. Together these trends form the backdrop to the modern state and the impera- tives of transnational cooperation and collaboration. In the background, though not explored here, is the cut-and-thrust of politics, what Ferdi- nand Mount described as the ‘instantaneous, immediate, hot-and-strong breath of public opinion’, in which policy-makers must march to an unfor- giving rhythm set by a 24-hour print, television and online media in a climate that tolerates little failure yet demands immediate action on the emergent problems of the day.  1 TRANSNATIONAL PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION … 3 Policy Transfer and the Public Interest What drives policy officials to look overseas for new ideas? The lodestar of policy-making in modern liberal democracy is the unrelenting pursuit of the public interest. This is the imperative that all decisions, all state- based actions and allocations of resources should be directed towards serving the needs of the public, from whom all authority and legitimacy derive. This is captured in Cicero’s maxim: Salus populi suprema lex esto, the health of the people should be the supreme law. Yet how are such interests divined? Jeremy Bentham stuck to a matter-of-fact view of this question: ‘The interest of the community then is, what? – the sum of the interests of the several members who compose it’. In Public Opinion, Walter Lippman, the grandfather of public administration, sets aside three chapters to reflect on ‘The making of the Common Will’, asking whether it is possible for the public to collectively generate a common purpose, given the ‘unmanageably complex’ and unique impressions individuals have of their environment: ‘How are those things known as the Will of the People, or the National Purpose, or Public Opinion crystallize out of such fleeting and casual imagery?’ (1997, p. 125). John Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems (1946) dedicates its opening chapter to ‘Search for the Great Public’. There he argues that the pursuit of the public interest is one contingent on time and place: ‘In no two ages or places is there the same public. Conditions make the consequences of associated action and the knowledge of them different’ (p. 33). On both views, the complexity and contingency of the ‘public interest’ are manifest and underline the impor- tance of learning, reflexive policy agents. Yet herein lies a fundamental challenge: How is that ‘health’ to be determined? Dewey frames the problem bluntly: ‘What is the public? If there is a public, what are the obstacles in the way of its recognizing and articu- lating itself? Is the public a myth?’ (1946, p. 123). Dewey’s puzzling is typical of a problem that continues to express itself as a challenge that requires us to first depict what or whom the ‘public’ is, and, second, as an epistemological problem of how we determining the ‘real’ interests of that public. Not least, we might worry whether it is possible to achieve a meaningful understanding of ‘interests’ in aggregated form—i.e. once two or more ‘interests’ are combined, are not both transformed? This is not a trivial question: the corollary of a centred public interest is that the state must have mechanisms and means of determining what its citi- zens say is, or is not, in their interests and, to the best of its resources 4 T. LEGRAND and administrative ability, it works towards those (van Deth and Newton 2016, p. 339). We use the term representative democracy to denote the relationship between the public and those who make decisions on their behalf: elections periodically install or reaffirm a government with a demo- cratic mandate by approximating the expressed interests of the public through a plebiscite. Between elections, it is a trickier matter. And so it is imperative that a healthy democracy has an active media—a means for the public to talk to amongst one another (which is why the advent of social media has been transformative, or disruptive, depending on your viewpoint)—and arrives perhaps by way of negotiation or attrition at a series of more or less commonly held positions. It is also important that the public have a means to represent their interests in input to decision- making, via their local legislative representatives or by vehicles such as interest groups, protest movements and so on. The public interest is in the foreground of policy transfer, because this is not a book just about how we understand the way policies are borrowed and adopted across jurisdictions; it is a book about the trans- parency of the decision-making process. The visibility of how decisions are made, by whom and for what purpose is critical to the function of legit- imate and trusted democratic institutions. How policy officials operate beyond the state is therefore of importance to the legitimacy of decisions. It is also for this reason that to understand how those policy officials regard the provenance of new ideas is of vital importance. As we shall see below, international dynamics and processes have steadily intruded on the autonomy of all state, transforming the capacities and resources of the state and its officials. In so doing, a class of transnational policy chal- lenges has reared-up, provoking multiple states to forge policy responses and widen the pool of available policy ideas for learning officials. Active in the background of learning processes are implicit assumptions of provin- cial validity: that is, a validity ascribed to ideas that originate from a priori privileged sources. Chapter 4 unpacks this in detail, but in short the claim pursued is that some sources of policy ideas are regarded more highly than others: Specifically, in the case of English-speaking countries, particularly those of comparable socio-economic status, the so-called Anglosphere states place a premium on lessons from their peers.  1 TRANSNATIONAL PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION … 5 Globalisation and Interdependency No man is an island, Entire of itself, Every man is a piece of the continent A part of the main If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. John Donne: Devotions upon Emergent Occasions The opening lines of John Donne’s often-quoted poem speak eloquently to the principal themes of this chapter: global society and interde- pendency. Alongside the public interest, these are two issues that are unavoidable in our present discussion. It is easy to overlook the inter- woven strands of state administration, private enterprise and public action that contribute to the day-to-day functioning of life and livelihood of the state and society. In the modern world, each of these strands is neither isolated nor ‘entire of itself’. Rather, each is very much ‘a part of the main’ in an internationalised and interdependent matrix of processes, link- ages and dependencies between countless state, non-state and commercial entities, from mining, energy and food production to financial trading, communication networks and transportation. The internationalisation of the state and society is almost taken for granted today. But it is worth considering briefly its historic dimen- sions, for these dimensions affect not only how contemporary governing dilemmas emerge, but also how they are understood and managed. Prominent International Relations (IR) scholars, writing in the 1970s, called attention to the manifest codependencies between states in what was labelled transnationalism. In two seminal papers, Transgovernmental Relations and International Organizations and Power and Interdepen- dence, Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye presented a critique of the realist conceptualisations of world politics and the role of states as unitary actors playing out their national self-interest. Developing a conceptual position that relied on a disaggregated, rather than unitary, model of the state, they argued that the interaction of states could not be adequately explained without considering the role of ‘complex interdependency’ in the international system. They contended that emerging patterns of societal international interdependency drive transgovernmental relations, which play out in international organisations, in turn driving policy inter- dependence (1974, p. 61). For Keohane and Nye, there is a resultant 6 T. LEGRAND series of transgovernmental relations understood as ‘sets of direct interac- tions among sub-units of different governments that are not controlled or closely guided by the policies of the cabinets or chief executives of those governments’ (Keohane and Nye 1974, p. 43). These interdependency trends have manifested in political and scholarly debates over the relative autonomy of the state in the face of transnation- alising trends that now fall under the label of globalization. The early debates of the 1990s centred on whether ‘the state’ was made redundant, diminished, enervated or merely transformed by surging global markets and emboldened corporate actors. The globalisation debate of the 1990s was framed as head-to-head collision between the beleaguered state on the one hand, and out-of-control global economic forces on the other. Those championing the virtues of a qualitatively new form of globalisa- tion vaunted the benefits brought by a bullish new breed of multinational companies that had ‘carved out entirely new channels for themselves’ (Ohmae 1994), rendering redundant the nation state’s inefficient role as a regulator. Others were more reticent and, whilst acknowledging the strength of the nascent global forces, foresaw a moral peril in the declining capacity of the nation state to rein-in private enterprises and transnational processes that were ‘more powerful than the state to whom ultimate political authority over society and the economy was supposed to belong’ (Strange 1996; Falk 1999). For others, perhaps most notably David Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt, and Jonathan Perraton, the newly identified forms of globalisation, represent a continuation of a series of ‘globalisations’ that have occurred over humanity’s longue duree (Held et al. 2000). On this view, global interactions could be construed as merely the latest form of globalisation. So, in contrast to scholars envi- sioning a weakened nation state battening down the hatches to weather the maelstroms of increasingly powerful global forces, Held et al. argue that the state has been transformed: ‘Far from globalization leading to the “end of the state”’, they claim, ‘it is stimulating a range of government and governance strategies and, in some fundamental respects, a more activist state’ (Held et al. 2000). Others, such as Paul Hirst and Graeme Thompson, challenged the ‘conventional wisdom’ about the reach and pace of globalisation, proposing that the economic, social and polit- ical dynamics were something more akin to regionalisation of Europe, North America and Asia Pacific (Hirst 1999). In later work, Hirst and Thompson warn of the propensity of politicians to appeal to globalisa- tion ‘to undermine any attempt to maintain or improve public services and welfare standards’ (Hay and Rosamond 2002). They contend that  1 TRANSNATIONAL PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION … 7 the concept of globalisation has ‘dangerous political side effects’ that, as a concept, weakens policy-makers’ confidence in the governance capacities of the nation state (Hirst 2000). According to these authors, the dimin- ished confidence in the nation state is critical: ‘Without such capacities there can be no effective foundations on which to build and to control forms of international governance’ (2000, p. 58). Imperatives of Global Governance: Interdependency and Emerging Policy Challenges In more recent years, the footing of the globalisation debate has shifted somewhat towards the parlance of ‘global governance’. This term turns on social, rather than economic, questions of how political classes can manage a new set of transnational issues that have been produced by glob- alisation and great shifts in demographies and lifestyles. Amidst a global population boom, there is a ‘dramatic increase’ in global mega-cities (Kraas 2007, p. 79): in 2018, the number of people with access to the Internet passed 4 billion, 2.17 billion of whom had social media profiles on Facebook1 and a rapidly digitising global news media.2 Around 4 billion people use air travel, a number expected to double by 2037.3 Economically, trade in services amongst OECD countries tripled from $US1.49t in 2005 to US$4.5t in 2016.4 Thus, increasingly, we see refer- ence to the permeability of state borders, the easy and largely unfettered transit of finance across countries, the ubiquity of global digital media and demise of local print media. Against this backdrop of rising internationalisation and interdepen- dency, a family of new imperatives for the state are emerging. Because of the internationalisation of national economies, societies, cultures, commerce and industry, crises that originate elsewhere on the world can, and often do, spread rapidly to affect neighbouring and distant states. The last thirty years have witnessed an unprecedented growth in technologies that give rapid transit to ideas, information, goods, fuels, services and people around the world. There is absolutely no doubt that these technologies have invigorated the international economy—though many states have benefited only marginally—and unlocked new vistas of education, health care, economic development for developing and developed countries alike. Yet a new set of transnational challenges tran- scend sovereign borders to the extent that meaningful policy measures require multilateral action, such as those posed by climate change and 8 T. LEGRAND environmental pollution, economic instability, international terrorism and organised crime, pandemics and asylum seekers, amongst others. These are partly challenges exacerbated by modern technologies and patterns of society. For example, the physical digital infrastructure that consti- tutes the Internet has uncoupled geographical and temporal constraints on communication. Global flows of information are only partly limited by our social circadian rhythms and business working hours, though even this impediment is to all intents and purposes irrelevant in sectors that either automate processes round the clock, or use shift-workers to cater to market demands in different time zones. The immediacy of informa- tion and communication is exemplified in the use of online technologies to communicate ideologies. Access to social media platforms has been widely recognised as a crucial accelerant of uprising across the Middle East during the Arab Spring, which saw several countries spiral into crisis and conflict (Frangonikolopoulos and Chapsos 2012), while in the rise of the Islamic State (IS) the use of social media was one of the prin- cipal means to recruit supporters from across the world to travel to Iraq and Syria. In global finance, meanwhile, the dynamics of interdependency were loundly pronounced during the Global Financial Crisis; govern- ments are now acutely aware of the inherent risks and instabilities in integrated global financial markets—none more so than Iceland, which saw all three of its principal banks collapse under the weight of debt induced by over-enthusiastic lending practices in the USA. In the cyber realm, the sovereignty of the state is in disarray. Online crime, committed by individuals and groups overseas, occurs on an almost pandemic scale beyond the physical and legal reach of law enforcement. The threat of major disruption to banking, policing and defence agencies and industry is now a daily reality: online credit card fraud, identity theft and intellectual property theft are growing in scale and sophistication. In addition to new technological dynamics, a host of public safety threats are not only compounded, but are widened and accelerated by global interdependencies, leading Uriel Rosenthal to observe that ‘The growing interdependence and the increasing mobility and communica- tion make each society and each policy domain ever more vulnerable to crisis agents’ (2003, p. 135). For example, food supply chains now span continents and introduce new vectors of risks. This was borne out in 2011 when fenugreek seeds imported from Egypt contaminated bean sprouts grown on an organic farm in Germany with a harmful E.coli bacteria. The contaminated bean sprouts were consumed across Germany and Europe,  1 TRANSNATIONAL PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION … 9 causing the deaths of 53 people and another 3950 illnesses. As we have seen with the mounting death toll of the COVID-19 pandemic, inter- national travel accelerates and widens the threat of pandemics, especially with the advent of low-cost air travel opening up commercial markets and tourist destinations to an increasing number of people in the West and developing countries. The COVID-19 pandemic was presaged by the infamous ‘swine flu’, H1N1 influenza, that spread across the world in 2009 killing between an estimated 151,700 and 575,400 people. Such public safety threats amplify the urgency of cross-border learning, not least because public policy decisions made in one state can impact directly on the governments (and publics) of others. The regulation of nuclear power station design in Soviet Ukraine and Japan had enormous reper- cussions for neighbouring countries when Chernobyl and Fukushima respectively failed in 1986 and 2011. Public health management in West Africa, for example, was of keen interest to Western governments in the midst of the Ebola outbreak of 2014. These transnational tensions compound trends towards interdepen- dency. Cities are beholden to thinly-stretched supplies of petrol and diesel. Manufacturing, food production and transport are wedded to profitable just-in-time production and delivery processes from aviation and maritime transport routes. Businesses increasingly transfer their critical commer- cial data to cloud-based servers located across any number of overseas states, posing hitherto unresolved questions of legal jurisdiction and data ownership. Increasingly, it seems, the distinction between interconnected and co-dependent is diminishing, whilst the resolution of public-private dilemmas is becoming increasingly urgent, as noted in the UK Parliament in 2007. The loss of critical infrastructure in one country has the potential to have severe effects in another. The loss of power supply can hinder emergency services or transport, for example, and these knock-on effects are able to continue across borders. Following human error, an overload of the elec- tricity transmission system in Germany in November 2006 resulted in some 50 million EU citizens losing power in Germany, Austria, France, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Portugal. (House of Commons 2007: Column 1518, cited in Aradau 2010) These threats of transnationalism and interdependency represent a signif- icant challenge to the autonomy of the state. Modern state officials now face the dilemma posed by globalisation’s drivers: that beyond-the-state forces have widened the state’s exposure to a host of threats whilst at 10 T. LEGRAND the same time diminishing the capacity of domestic policy officials to unilaterally prevent or mitigate such risks. [T]he fragmentation of political agency and the diffusion of legal or law-like arrangements at different levels and across different dimensions of global governance have blurred the boundaries between the interna- tional states system, the international community and transnational society. (Brütsch and Lehmkuhl 2007, p. 1) The Global Financial Crisis exposed not only the systemic vulnerabilities and corruptions of a US-centric global financial system but also the extent to which states’ economies had become interdependent. Whilst seemingly invulnerable multinational banks foundered, interest rates soared, shell- shocked bankers vacated their seemingly invulnerable institutions with little more than a box of possessions and a sense of disbelief. The perils of global interdependency can scarcely be better illustrated than by this precipitous collapse of financial institutions and, with that collapse, the loss of billions in retirement savings, evictions, job losses and the impo- sition of what was euphemistically described as ‘austerity measures’ to correct the budget losses. Thomas Piketty in his acclaimed book, Capital, points out that experiences of ‘globalisation’ are far from equal: These very different collective experiences of growth in the twentieth century largely explain why public opinion in different countries varies so widely in regard to commercial and financial globalization and indeed to capitalism in general. In continental Europe and especially France, people quite naturally continue to look on the first three postwar decades—a period of strong state intervention in the economy—as a period blessed with rapid growth, and many regard the liberalization of the economy that began around 1980 as the cause of a slowdown. (Piketty 2014, p. 98) These variegated national experiences of cross-border flows lead us to the important debates around global governance: the question of how, and with what authority, decisions can be made about the above-the-state forces absent the constraints of nation states. This is a debate kick-started by Rosenau, but remains very much alive amongst scholars. Indeed, the terminology and debates of global governance are to be found threading through the pages of this book. One thread in particular is relevant: How is the public interest served by decisions made above the nation state—whither the democratic legitimacy?  1 TRANSNATIONAL PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION … 11 The ineluctable consequences of globalisation seem to come with few stipulations about its regulation, if indeed that is at all possible. Doubt- less, publics of the world are affected profoundly by the beyond-the-state flows of capital, goods and finance. They are also affected by the decisions of foreign governments, international organisations and multinational corporations: Who is ultimately responsible for the decisions that, say, alter prevailing interest rates, or the price of food, or the stability of employment? In whose interests do these operate, and can they really serve multiple public interests at once? Certainly, it is the poorest who are most vulnerable. The globalisation-welfare state nexus (see Genschel 2011) is a worrying one: on the one hand, the caprices of international finance create a volatility that unsettles long-term employment, requiring states to fill in the gaps to sustain the labour market in transition. On the other, the same global pressures systematically undermine the affordability of doing so. The result is imbalance, as Stiglitz points out: Globalization and technology both contribute to the polarization of our labor market, but they are not abstract market forces that just arrive from on high; rather, they are shaped by our policies. We have explained how globalization—especially our asymmetric globalization—is tilted toward putting labor in a disadvantageous bargaining position vis-à-vis capital. (Stiglitz 2012, p. 347) Towards Transgovernmentalism: Collaboration and Cooperation in an Uncertain World The outlook for an autonomous, sovereign state, then, seems unsteady at best. If, echoing John Donne’s verse, we argue that society is embedded in a global matrix of interconnected social, economic and political processes, then state autonomy is no longer a viable concept, taken literally, and is increasingly encumbered with a ‘global-local’ dilemma. Pursuing the public interest, as we have already seen, is a complex and contingent activity and is only made more complex by growing global intersections. In an environment in which domestic outcomes are shaped not only by local interventions but by the (often unintended) consequences of actions in distant locations, it is far more difficult to ensure a simple correspondence between politicians’ ambitions, actions and outcomes (and the public interest). 12 T. LEGRAND How have governments responded to this globalising environment of policy-making? Returning to the early days of reflection on the nascent global flows, Keohane and Nye posited the interdependency of states. This structural perspective foreshadowed new forms of decentralised cross-border collaboration: ‘As the agenda broadens’, they suggested, ‘bureaucracies find that to cope effectively at acceptable cost with many of the problems that arise, they must deal with each other directly rather than indirectly through foreign offices’ (1974, p. 42). In the decades since Keohane and Nye’s interdependency claims, new tech- nologies of transport and communication have accelerated the global policy interdependencies, imperatives and opportunities for collaboration. Recognising the multiplying cross-border interdependencies, policy offi- cials are increasingly active in ‘transnational administration’: new venues of informal decision-making involving non-domestic actors such as multi- national corporations, NGOs, IOs and other states. We detect these logics of international collaboration in policy-making frameworks. The UK government expects officials to collaborate with ‘counterparts in other international administrations’ (Bullock et al. 2001, p. 13), but also advises policy officials: ‘The world for which policy makers have to develop policies is becoming increasingly complex, uncertain and unpre- dictable’ (Bullock et al. 2001, p. 15). So, all is not quite lost for the state. Though emergent ‘uncertain’ transnational challenges cannot be staved off nor ignored unilaterally, opportunities for multilateral, collaborative action to address challenges that are common to multiple states offers an obvious way out. This is the basis of the international system and the principle of liberal institutionalism that underpins it. For Anne-Marie Slaughter, the national sovereignty is indeed only meaningful within a system of international interdependency: However paradoxical it sounds, the measure of a state’s capacity to act as an independent unit within the international system – the condition that ‘sovereignty’ purports both to grant and describe – depends on the breadth and depth of its links to other states. (Slaughter 2004, p. 187) The obvious corollary is to whom do states turn? From where do they derive lessons and learning amidst the incredible digital availability of information? In the Introduction to this book, I surveyed in brief the influence of Chinese administration in the establishment of the UK’s civil service. In The Rise and Progress of the English Commonwealth (1832),  1 TRANSNATIONAL PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION … 13 Francis Palgrave charts the evolution of the British state, its institutions and constitution, for which his admiration is evident: ‘the political history of England is, on the whole, more cheering than that of any state or dominion which has hitherto existed’ (1832, p. 6). The virtues of the English constitution, claimed Palgrave, was demonstrated by its adoption (or, if not adopted, ‘earnestly desired’) ‘in the fairest and in the most intelligent countries of Europe’. Palgrave’s belief in the preeminence of the British model of government was fairly typical of its time. The early years of policy transfer were inextricably linked to colonial rule. London’s oldest university, Gresham College, was the training hub for budding civil servant. It was so important that the college earned an explicit exemption from the Seditious Meetings Act 1819, which otherwise forbade meetings to discuss trade and manufacture and public grievances. Today’s entrants to public services can expect to undergo a no less professional training in the legal and institutional expectations of being a modern official. To take just one example of how governments explicitly incorporate lesson-drawing into the policy-making process, a UK Cabinet Office report entitled ‘Professional Policy Making for the Twenty-First Century’ found that: Our evidence shows that looking at other countries’ experience can contribute very positively to the policy-making process. The New Deal for Lone Parents and the Single Work Focused Gateway Project (‘One’) both drew extensively from experience abroad to inform their thinking. The latter made comparisons with similar interventions in California, Maryland and Wisconsin USA, Australia, New Zealand, New Brunswick, Canada and the Netherlands and involved a practitioner from the USA in some of the detailed work. (Strategic Policy Making Team, Cabinet Office 1999, 5.2) In addition, this study placed a heavy emphasis on ‘learning lessons from experience’. The authors argue that a more systematic procedure for assessing the effectiveness of policies should be put in place to obtain detailed information on the outcomes and effectiveness of policies. Such a system, they claim, is especially necessary wherein: ‘The more policy makers innovate, the less certainty they can have about achieving intended results and the greater the need to assess policy impacts and be prepared to change tack’ (2003, 10.5). This sentiment is reflected in Twelve Actions to Professionalise Policy Making in which the UK Civil Service’s Policy Profession Board called for government to ‘Identify learning from policy failure/successes’. 14 T. LEGRAND The Technological Revolution Scholarly interest in the process of policy learning and transfer is corre- lated with an increasing tendency of policy-makers to resort to transfer and learning, especially between states that share similar administrative traditions: Straightforward a-to-b movements of policy occur almost on a daily basis across Westminster style democracies and are rarely either underpinned by evidence-based research or scrutinised by legislatures. (Marsh and Evans 2012, p. 480) Indeed, analysts use this supposed increase in policy transfers as a ratio- nale for the argument that ‘policy transfer’ requires further theoretical and empirical attention: ‘as the body of literature associated with policy transfer has grown it has become indisputable that political actors are consistently engaging in the process’ (Dolowitz 1997, p. 23). But is this quantifiably demonstrable? Technological transformation is relevant to questions of why policy transfer appears more prevalent than ever (see Annesley 2016; Bomberg and Peterson 2000). In itself, determining the quantum of policy transfer is not straightforward. Phillips and Ochs observe it is ‘extremely difficult to quantify’ policy transfer (2003; see also Houlihan et al. 2010), though certainly advances in modern technology and communications have considerably deepened the pool of policy know-how available to govern- ment officials. The modern state has had to evolve rapidly to accommo- date administrative dynamics that were scarcely conceivable thirty years ago. The arrival of the desktop computer into civil service offices in the 1980s heralded a new era of administration in which the possibili- ties seemed limitless. Recognising the possibilities, companies were asked to develop laptop designs—or ‘kneetops’ as they were then dubbed—to allow for mobile computing. In the 1990s, the networked interoper- ability of computers allowed the construction of, and universal access to, vast electronic government databases containing detailed and cross- referenced personal information. Now, the rapid growth and evolution of the Internet has profoundly changed the rules of engagement between all sorts of political agents, from individuals to NGOs, to local authori- ties, to governments, to international organisation—the world’s political landscape now has a distinctively digital structure. Increasingly, new and old information is digitised, indexed and made accessible through  1 TRANSNATIONAL PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION … 15 the Internet, creating a rapidly expanding repository of policy-relevant data that can be reviewed with limited effort for minimal cost (see, for example, van Waarden and Drahos 2002, p. 931). Some commentators have observed a concomitant increase in instances of policy transfer and attribute this rise partly to the ease of access to overseas and domestic policy information (Dolowitz and Marsh 1996, 2000; Evans and Davies 1999; Pierson 2003; Radaelli 2000). Reflecting on domestic political changes, it is argued that increased policy transfer reflects: ‘the growth of legislation and the pace of change is greater than ever before’ (Dolowitz et al. 1999, p. 719). The almost ubiquitous access to shared information via the Internet has entailed fundamental changes in the way governments acquire, analyse and disseminate information. Systematic data collection on consumer, economic, social and financial information has considerably enhanced the possibilities (though perhaps not the capacity) for govern- ments to interact with society in new ways and understand the impact of policies.5 Mostly, however, the roots of policy transfer, or, at least, the increased visibility of it, are linked to globalisation and the policy challenges that it brings. On this perspective, global social and economic forces produce a set of policy problems experienced by many countries at the same time, and who share an incentive to locate and offer collaborative policy solu- tions (Drezner 2001; Holzinger and Knill 2005). For Diane Stone, the corollary of heightened global processes means that ‘States will remain important mediators of globalisation but their capacities to react and respond will differ substantially’ (2003, p. 17). Consequently, policy- makers have become cognisant of: ‘the emergence of qualitatively “new” policy problems that cannot be dealt with effectively through established policy heuristic’ (1999, p. 53). As a mode of policy innovation, lesson-drawing has also been endorsed by international institutions. For example, whilst lacking the necessary overt mechanisms of power and/or coercion possessed by the IMF or World Bank (see Dolowitz and Marsh 2000), the OECD utilises the ‘moral’ influence of its member states to facilitate policy learning. Consider the following statements: Democratic governments want policies that are in the best interests of their citizens. But how can they –and their voters- be sure they are making the right choices? One answer is by learning from the tried and tested experiences of others […] 16 T. LEGRAND A country seeking to reduce unemployment, for example, can learn valuable lessons from its peers on what has worked and what has not. This can save time, and costly experimentation, in crafting the best policies for a particular country. (Pagani, 2002, p. 55) There is also an internationalisation of policy best practice. The Centre For Public Impact is a paradigm example: this is a think tank, established in 2015—funded by the US firm Boston Consulting Group—that in 2017 launched a digital repository of public policy case studies, selected for the salience as examples of successful or unsuccessful policy, drawing out the key lessons for future policy work. Notably, the digital resource promul- gates a western-oriented vision, or idea, of what public policy, who it is for and how it should be done. Its audience is, further, global in its ambi- tions: as part of its outreach, the Centre has hosted workshops in Mexico, India, Estonia, the UK the USA, Singapore and beyond: it is, to all intents and purposes, a broadcast channel of policy transfer. The shifting dimensions of the international technological, economic and political sphere give us cause to revisit some fundamental questions of policy learning and diffusion: How do policy officials learn? From which countries? What lessons? Why these lessons? Inevitably, research on this topic is hindered by the opacity of policy processes, or what is sometimes referred to as the ‘black box’ of policy-making, a product of the natural reticence of officials to declare the source of their inspiration, negative or positive. As a consequence, it is easy to see why there is relatively little substantive knowledge of international policy learning networks (as opposed to processes and outcomes, on which the policy transfer liter- ature is very active) and why few transgovernmental policy networks, especially those populated by elite officials, have been identified. In their recent review of the policy transfer literature, Benson and Jordan argue: ‘In general, the more empirical question of why and when certain types of transfer appear in particular settings and not others has still not been fully addressed’ (2011, p. 370). As noted above, it is generally agreed that policy transfer is an understood tool of public administration for policy- makers seeking to navigate the ‘changing world of governance’ (Dolowitz 2003, p. 100). Thus, globalisation is seen as a double-edged sword: where on the one hand economic forces create the imperative for policy co- ordination, and on the other: ‘the rapid growth in communications of all types makes exchange of ideas and knowledge much easier’ (Dolowitz and Marsh 2000, p. 7). Yet, the question of provincial validity remains  1 TRANSNATIONAL PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION … 17 unanswered. Are all sources of policy inspiration equally appropriate, irrespective of provenance? As a theory of cross-national policy movement, policy transfer analysts naturally reference globalisation and its constituent dynamics. Two domi- nant views have emerged in the literature concerning the impact that globalisation has had upon the increase in instances and uses of policy transfer, with it seen as either a useful by-product of global forces or a developed response and corrective to the erosion of the nation state by global forces. On both views, globalisation poses a new challenge to contemporary policy-making. Policy-making, on this view, resorts to policy learning and transfer from overseas because either: i. There is a crisis of representative democracy in which the rapidly increasing interconnectivity—economic and political—of states means that policy-makers’ traditional policy-making tools are incapable of meeting previously unencountered policy problems brought on by globalisation. Thus, policy transfer is deployed defen- sively as a means of ‘solving’ new policy problems; in this sense, the coherence of the domestic policy agenda is challenged and policy transfer is viewed as a way of re-empowering state actors by drawing upon the methods employed by overseas actors to maintain control over domestic policy in the face of exogenous forces. ii. The increasing interconnectivity empowers the policy-making process. Indeed, it is argued that: ‘The relevance of cross-national policy transfer promises to increase, with advances in communica- tions and the process of globalization’ (Mossberger and Wolman 2003, p. 429). On this view, the increasing technological capabilities which are a feature of globalisation offer policy-makers a powerful avenue to explore alternative policy-making methods used over- seas. Accordingly, policy transfer reinforces the range of techniques policy-makers can draw upon to meet domestic policy challenges, thus augmenting the portfolio of policy-making tools. Whilst assigning globalisation two very different causal roles, both views adhere to the notion that adopting policies from overseas helps policy- makers to realise their strategic goals. Yet, the role of globalisation has not been adequately disaggregated. On a normative level, theorists have emphasised the possible uses of policy transfer as a response to exogenous 18 T. LEGRAND forces which threaten traditional modes of policy-making. On another level, the technological and communication advances inherent in global- isation facilitate successful policy transfer, enhancing the possibilities for, and occurrences of, policy transfer. These accounts of globalisation do not help us with the questions posed at the outset of this chapter: How do we determine and serve the public interest? Doing so is of primary, a priori, importance to the policy- maker since she must first serve the domestic interest. There is little to be gained from adopting, say, a well-respected model of primary educa- tion from Scandinavia if doing so does not meet the needs of the local population. In other words, the adoption of ideas from elsewhere should never be a function merely of the performance of that policy in its orig- inal setting, but a function of how well it marries with domestic needs. And so we might assume ceteris paribus that policy transfer arises from a belief—of a policy-maker, or institution—of parity between the interests of the domestic and overseas constituencies. Determining how they do so is the interest of the following chapters. Notes 1. 2018 Global Digital Reports. 2. In 2012, there were just 5452 digital newspapers in circulation. In 2015, this number had risen to 25,421. Source: PWC. A value increase of US$950 million in 2012 to US$5.550 billion in 2018. 3. IATA: 2036 Forecast Reveals Air Passengers Will Nearly Double to 7.8 Billion. http://www.iata.org/pressroom/pr/Pages/2017-10-24-01.aspx. 4. OECD (2018), Trade in services (indicator). https://doi.org/10.1787/ 3796b5f0-en (Accessed on 26 June 2018). 5. The UK Office for National Statistics Indices of Multiple Deprivation is a case in point. Data on income, employment, benefit uptakes and so on, are regularly collected across the UK and made openly available. The resolution of the data is astounding: it is possible to view aggregated household data at a street level for any given postcode in the UK. References Annesley, C. (2016). Americanised and Europeanised: UK social policy since 1997. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 5(2), 143– 165. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-856x.00101. Aradau, C. (2010). Security that matters: Critical infrastructure and objects of protection. 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Together, the three chapters trace a lockstep ideational evolution across the Anglosphere, which includes (i) the adop- tion of NPM, against a background of already strong proximity; (ii) the transition into Third Way ideas and the production of the need to transform welfare; (iii) into the establishment of highly interactive and interpersonal elite networks. As the previous chapter suggests, the history of amity, exchange and collaboration between the policy officials of the Anglosphere prefigures a range of compatible institutional settings. We might describe these as concomitant, but not (yet) convergent: rather, my suggestion so far is that the historical context of the Anglosphere operates as a structural influence, but not as a structural determinant. This chapter explores the ideological background to what is, ostensibly at least, the beginning of the era of Anglosphere shared institutional archi- tecture. First a methodological proviso: the empirical data relied on here is drawn from Australia, the UK and the USA: within the constraints of resources, the project research did not have capacity to explore Canada and New Zealand, though Chapter 7 does expand briefly into these countries too. So, the purpose here is to undertake a sort of ideational archaeology in these three countries, tracing the heritage and intellectual development of the Anglo model of welfare-to-work. I approach this © The Author(s) 2021 129 T. Legrand, The Architecture of Policy Transfer, Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55821-5_5 130 T. LEGRAND by looking back at the conditions that gave rise to the prevailing atti- tudes towards welfare support during the 1990s in Australia, UK and USA. Most noticeable within this period is the impact that Third Way ideas were having upon government policy-makers, and the consequent rhetorical emphases on ‘rights and responsibilities’ which were packaged with renewed conceptions of community. The similarities in discourse and philosophy between the three countries are striking and display a shared commitment to projects of welfare restructuring. Here we survey the landscape of welfare politics in Australia, the UK and USA from the mid-90s to the early 2000s, drawing attention to the policy settings of active labour market policies (ALMPs) of each country, drawing attention to the salient features of each, since the sheer magnitude of programmes make it impossible to examine each and every one in a meaningful way. So, I have selected the main frontline programmes and ALMP measures for each country from the late 1990s to early 2000s. In the case of the USA and its plethora of state-administered systems, I have selected those measures and programmes that the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act (PRWORA hereafter) legis- lation endorses, although of course some of the more widely-known state approaches will also be mentioned. The chapter is divided into two sections. The first section begins with an overview of ALMP and what the term has come to mean. It explores the constituent programmes of ALMP and links these with the philosoph- ical commitments of the Third Way. An examination of the Third Way is seen as crucial to understanding the governing ethos of the governing actors in Australia, the UK and the USA during the 1990s. The chapter unpacks the ideas most closely associated with the Third Way and goes on to demonstrate how welfare-to-work policies grew out of Third Way ideology. In the second section, the chapter examines the welfare policy portfolios of the USA, the UK and Australia, respectively, during the 1990s. First, it looks at the political development of the PRWORA legis- lation in the USA (highlighting the strong Republican influence over the policy). Second, it tracks the development of the New Deal in the UK with a strong emphasis on the introduction of the welfare-to-work ideas. The introductory period is seen as crucial as it is in this period that the influence of overseas policies is most apparent. Finally, it addresses the development of two associated policy platforms in Australia: the notion  5 THE THIRD WAY AND THE LANDSCAPE OF WELFARE REFORM … 131 of ‘mutual obligation’ and its heavy parallels with the Third Way and puni- tive welfare policies; and Paul Keating’s introduction of Working Nation. The chapter concludes by arguing that the philosophical commitments of the three policy approaches in these countries were commensurate and gave rise to parallel commitments to restructure labour market and welfare politics. Invigorating the Workforce: The Rise of Active Labour Market Policy None among the poor should be idle, provided, of course, that he is fit for work by his age and health… Therefore, no one must be permitted to live indolently in the state; rather, as in a well-ordered home, everyone has his own role and its related tasks to perform. As the saying goes, ‘By doing nothing, men learn to do evil.’ Jean Luis Vives (1492–1540 CE) Failure to overcome successive employment crises in the 1980s and 1990s prompted conservative USA, Australian and UK governments to re-examine the state’s engagement with labour markets. Unable to manip- ulate demand-based levers to halt rising levels of unemployment, policy officials began to seek alternative policy levers: ‘Dissatisfaction with the efficacy of narrowly defined policies of demand management and mone- tary control led to greater interest in examining the impact of supply side constraints, especially in the labour market, on economic performance’ (Banks et al. 2005, p. 62). The move to supply-side management in the early 1990s stimulated a wholesale shift in labour market thinking; one that was marked by an increasing reluctance to interfere with market movements. Policy-makers claimed that the corresponding shift in the operations, functions and logics of capitalism meant that ‘the basis for state intervention, the mixed economy, nationalisation and the provi- sion of public services, [had] been radically undermined’ (Ferguson et al. 2002, p. 132). Notably, this approach is prominent within Anglo-Saxon political traditions. In Welfare and Work in the Open Economy, Scharpf and Schmidt contrast ‘Continental’, ‘Scandinavian’ and ‘Anglo-Saxon’ welfare states (Table 5.1): Within the Anglo-Saxon tradition, it is axiomatic to the neoliberal model of active labour market policy (ALMP) that the available pool of labour is able to be both adaptable to supply the caprices of the national 132 T. LEGRAND Table 5.1 Constellations of welfare states (Scharpf and Schmidt 2000, p. 11) Characteristics and Anglo-Saxon Scandinavian Continental properties Rights Individual Individual Family Responsibilities Individual Collective Collective Claiming principles Need Citizenship Work/family needs Beneficiaries Poor All citizens Male breadwinner Goal Poverty alleviation Equality/income Income maintenance maintenance Social security Flat-rate Flat-rate/contribution Contribution transfer related related Caring services Family/market State Family/intermediary groups Type of financing Taxation Taxation/contribution Contribution Source of financing State/market State State/earner Gender and status Neutral Pro-equality Differentiated effect (post-industrial, post-Keynesian) economy, and has a constant surplus of available labour. Labour market flexibility is the crucial dictum of this new logic: creating a market of skilled labour that can adapt to the rises and falls in job-demand across the range of industrial sectors. The pay-off is seen as twofold: (i) it provides a steady source of skilled labour which contributes to economic stability and growth, and (ii) it offers individ- uals more opportunities to access gainful employment and thus reduces welfare dependency and expenditure (Rueda 2006). Welfare-to-work policy is the most prominent example of ALMP (De Koning et al. 2004). Using a combination of incentive (or puni- tive) programmes and interventions, welfare-to-work policies cajole the unemployed into the labour market directly or indirectly via transitory voluntary work schemes which offer the work experience necessary to make an individual ‘more employable’. The central principle of ALMP is that workers must be equipped with sufficient skills or resources to meet the changing employment needs/requirements. More general levers to increase flexibility include: (i) the avoidance of mechanisms that could increase wage levels above productivity levels; (ii) the removal of barriers to mobility (such as non-transferable pension schemes); (iii) the introduction of flexible working hours (Brodsky 1994, p. 55); or (iv) the weakening of the employer–employee contract, making it easier  5 THE THIRD WAY AND THE LANDSCAPE OF WELFARE REFORM … 133 for employers to jettison excess labour (and all that entails for unions). The direct applications of ALMPs are most often seen through various government employment initiatives. Common examples of these schemes include: Training and education: this might be vocational or offer assistance in remedial skills (literacy, numeracy, etc.) (OECD 2001, p. 82). Youth schemes: using employment programmes and/or apprentice- ships to give school leavers an employment start (OECD 2001, p. 82). Employment subsidies: offering employers financial incentives to employ ‘hard-to-place’ workers (Layard 2001, p. 2). Job-seeking help: offering information and support appropriately tailored to the job seeker by matching their skills and experience to employment opportunities (Layard 2001, p. 2). Work experience: offering the unemployed the chance to gain work experience on government-sponsored and/or charity work schemes (Layard 2001, p. 2). These initiatives constitute the supportive mechanisms underpinning welfare-to-work policy, insofar as they create the channels for the unem- ployed to access job opportunities. However, they are accompanied by a concomitant set of punitive measures to provide an inducement for the unemployed to engage with the given opportunities. Variously, these measures include: a reduction in the amount paid to the unemployed to subsistence levels; time limits on claiming unemployment benefit; limits on the number of job offers an opportunity may refuse; or making benefit payments conditional on regular contact with the employment agency: Welfare-to-work must involve the principle of mutual obligation. The state has an obligation to ensure that offers of work are channelled to every unemployed person within a reasonable time after becoming unemployed. But in return the citizen should take advantage of those offers, and lose some or all of their benefit if they do not do so, unless there are medical reasons to the contrary. (De Koning et al. 2004, p. 11: Joint International Unit, DWP/DfES) 134 T. LEGRAND The Third Way and Its Advocates The ideational foundations of welfare-to-work merits close attention, for these underpinning ideas are illustrative of the philosophy of the ‘Third Way’. In the late 1990s, the Third Way philosophy was deployed extensively in political circles and promulgated endlessly by academics, particularly Anthony Giddens. Tracing its ideational development is a complicated task: ‘In the first place, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly whose idea the Third Way is, or whether this matters much. It is also hard to establish just when it came into prominence, or how long vibrant debate around it has lasted’ (McLennan 2004, p. 485; see also White 1998; Pierson and Castles 2002; Barrientos and Powell 2018). Pierson and Castles claim that the Third Way is better understood as shorthand for the repositioning of previously centre-left parties in the centre (2002, p. 683). The abandonment of traditional lines of political orientation makes the job of pinpointing the Third Way’s agenda more difficult: We know, of course, what the third way is not: it is not old-fashioned state socialism or statist social democracy, and it is not free market neo- liberalism. We know also that it aims to reconcile a neo-liberal emphasis on economic efficiency and dynamism, with a traditional left concern with equity and social cohesion. (White 1998, p. 1) Whilst pointing that out, we might also observe that the uptake and reso- nance of the Third Way since the 1990s (regardless of where or when it emerged) has been significant. Let’s begin with summaries of the Third Way by its chief protagonists, Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, sharing a platform in New York in 1998: [T]he whole idea of this third way is that we believe in activist govern- ment, but highly disciplined. On the economic front, we want to create the conditions and give people the tools to make the most of their own lives, the empowerment notion. On the social front, we want to provide rights to people but they must assume certain duties. Philosophically, we support a concept of community in which everyone plays a role. (Bill Clinton, Speech to New York University School of Law, 21 September 1998) It [the Third Way] leaves behind, if you like, the old left that was about big government or state-controlled tax-and-spend, and it is not the politics of laissez-faire, either. It is an attempt, as I say, to construct a different politics of community for today’s world… Socially, it is about a different  5 THE THIRD WAY AND THE LANDSCAPE OF WELFARE REFORM … 135 contract of citizenship. It’s saying, for example, in the welfare system, look, there are rights and duties that go together. (Tony Blair, Speech to New York University School of Law, 21 September 1998) These parsimonious summaries of the Third Way philosophy hint at the central themes in the various policy initiatives undertaken by both the Democrats and New Labour in those years: rights; duties (read as responsibilities); and community. It is worth noting that the theoret- ical clothing of New Labour’s Third Way philosophy was designed by Anthony Giddens (1994, 1998) who took his inspiration from the liber- tarianism of the USA and melded it with the ‘ethical socialism’ of New Labour (Prideaux 2001, p. 87). Indeed, to return to 1997, the year of New Labour’s election victory, we might notice that talk was in fact initially of ‘communitarianism’, rather than the ‘Third Way’. Indeed, Driver and Martell emphasise this contribution to the political philosophy of New Labour: ‘Communitarianism offers Labour modernizers a polit- ical vocabulary which eschews market individualism, but not capitalism; and which embraces collective action, but not class or the state’ (Driver and Martell 1997, p. 33). The communitarian dimension incorporates the concepts of moral obligation and stakeholding. It asserts individuals have certain (distinct) moral obligations to the community, such as a commitment to work, and maintains that individuals can hold a stake in social or economic enterprises. In this way, the individual could have a direct interest in the achievements of the society and company: ‘Essential to this line of thought was the belief that the selfish concerns of the individual had to be tempered with a collective responsibility’ (Prideaux 2001, p. 91). The mantra of the Third Way, rights and responsibilities , and the UK’s retooled welfare state emerged from these philosophical precepts (Sevenhuijsen 2000, p. 8). Indeed, Tony Blair asserted this point quite clearly: When I talk about rights and responsibilities, it’s not some idealistic, impractical idea. It’s real. It’s a genuine balance. And the New Deal is the best concrete example of it. (Speech on the New Deal, 30 November 2000) Blair’s rights-responsibilities dualism was situated at the very heart of the Third Way canon. In the UK, the effects of the rights and responsibilities drive had been to redefine the terms of public-private engagement. By 136 T. LEGRAND way of example this principle played out in New Labour initiatives as (i) an education contract obliging students’ parents to keep to certain condi- tions of ensuring the education of their children; (ii) tenancy agreements that explicitly attached the good behaviour of tenants to their ongoing accommodation (Deakin 2000, p. 12). The linking of rights and responsibilities gave the New Deal its philo- sophical impetus, validating the actions of government officials through a justification of individual responsibility: The success of the New Deal has been based on a clear framework of rights and responsibilities. We have been extending this to all claimants, building a system that recognises the responsibilities people have to get themselves off benefits, while ensuring that society fulfils its obligations to those unable to help themselves. (A New Deal for Welfare: Empowering People to Work. Department for Work and Pensions) In addition, with the fulfilment of societal obligation, so the logic went, the new communitarianism overcame the failures of, as Pierson and Castles note, ‘traditional’ social democracy: The decline in a sense of civic responsibility (matching rights with duties) is seen to have been one of the characteristic vices of ‘traditional’ social democracy…Responsibility does not mean though, as it is supposed it did for neo-liberals, either complete self-reliance or the kind of morally (and/or legally) charged obligation to work or support family that restricts the role of the state to that of charitable provider of last resort. (Pierson and Castles 2002, p. 681) The concept of ‘responsibility’ is deployed widely as one of ‘duty’ (Kershaw 2005). One of the most striking characteristics of Third Way philosophy is the way in which it has been adapted and taken up, in various forms, across the world. Governments in Italy, Ireland, New Zealand and Germany have all invoked the terms and terminology of the Third Way since 1996: ‘Although the rise of duty discourse is evident across political traditions, the New Right has enjoyed the most political success in English speaking countries by re-emphasizing the language of social obligations’ (Kershaw 2005, p. 2). And this portability of the Third Way ideas was perhaps one of its main features. For example, there is little doubt that Australian policy-makers embraced the Third Way as eagerly as their Anglo-Saxon counterparts: ‘We didn’t call what we were doing  5 THE THIRD WAY AND THE LANDSCAPE OF WELFARE REFORM … 137 the Third Way. For Australia, we saw it as the only way’ (Paul Keating 1999, cited in Pierson and Castles 2002, p. 683). The inbuilt capacity for adaptation/adoption that McLennan argues that Third Way ideas are ‘vehicular’: Vehicular ideas emerge as ways of problem-solving and ‘moving things on’. Anyone who wants to get from A to B, for whatever reason, can therefore usefully embrace certain sorts of ideas as ‘vehicles’ for doing so, whatever their other differences with fellow-travellers. (2004, p. 485) The ‘vehicular’ notion implies a form of pragmatic, rather than ideolog- ical, thinking. Ideas in the Third Way canon are, thus, instrumental and ends-oriented. This is not a contentious insight. Indeed, much of the rhetoric invoked by politicians adhering to Third Way precepts acknowl- edged the instrumentalism of their approach. As such, Pierson and Castles argue that: Third way politicians are proudly pragmatic (‘what matters is what works’) and willing to draw experience (and policies) from a wide variety of sources, including their more neo-liberal predecessors. (Pierson and Castles 2002, p. 683) Pierson and Castles observe that there is likely to be more than a hint of post hoc rationalisation at work here, justifying policy decisions based more in pragmatism than idealism (2002, p. 684). Yet the practical approach embedded in Third Way ideas represented a continuity with the era of New Public Management insofar as the managerial, techno- cratic instinct of NPM remained intact: ‘But perhaps the most obvious “Third Way” articulation of managerialism came in the commitment to “Evidence Based” policy and practice’ (Clarke 2004, p. 38; see also Davies et al. 2000). Duffy argues that the embrace of policy evaluation approaches, which are central to evidence-based policy-making , was facil- itated by NPM and digitisation. The purpose of evaluation is, according to Duffy ‘to manage policy subjects and communicate information about their activities’ (2017, p. 36). 138 T. LEGRAND The US Pathway to Workfare It is not entirely clear that the Third Way was the forerunner of welfare- to-work per se. As mentioned above, the dualism of rights and respon- sibilities emerged out of the welfare-to-work formulae. Certainly, albeit unsuccessfully, Clinton attempted to institute his own form of welfare reform in 1994. Yet, if the providence of the Third Way is ambiguous, the reforms to welfare policy in the USA were far clearer in their roots. Because of the latitude allowed to individual states in developing their own welfare policy, the USA has a rich pedigree in welfare policy experi- mentation. Here, a notable example which was eventually to provide the model of welfare provision emulated by the Federal US government, and farther afield, was provided by Wisconsin Works or, more commonly, W2. From 1987 onwards, Wisconsin gradually implemented a series of active labour market measures. Amongst these measures were a number that are now recognised as orthodox welfare-to-work policies: time limits on receiving welfare benefits welfare benefit payments only made to individuals actively seeking work incentives made available to encourage counties (who are respon- sible for administering welfare rolls on a local level) to increase job placements. These were introduced with enhanced employment service provisions such as: Employer-subsidies to increase job placements Funding for job-related training Job centres combining a number of employment agencies on the same site The apparent success of Wisconsin’s W2 programme piqued the interest of welfare policy experts around the world. It had influence when two Republican Governors used the experiences of Wisconsin and Michigan to popularise the welfare-to-work approach. As Ellwood, who was Clin- ton’s own inspiration for welfare reform, noted: ‘Republican Governors Tommy Thomson and John Engler got enormous political mileage out  5 THE THIRD WAY AND THE LANDSCAPE OF WELFARE REFORM … 139 of welfare reform in two relatively liberal states, Wisconsin and Michigan, long before Clinton ran for President’ (Ellwood 1996). The Political Picture The separation of powers in the USA threw up a common division of power during the 1990s. The Presidency was held by a Democrat, Bill Clinton, whilst Congress was held by the Republicans: This has led in part to a dualism in policy where Federally controlled programmes such as the Minimum Wage and Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) have expanded while there has been a retrenchment in what the USA calls ‘Welfare’. (Evans 2001, p. 8) The effect of this was not to cause legislative paralysis or stale- mate/gridlock (though this is frequently the case), but rather to lead to a, purportedly successful, employment policy throughout this period; indeed, a policy that, since its inception, has overseen successive falls in unemployment with year-on-year increases in labour productivity. Yet, close examination of the unemployment legislation itself reveals an unexpected emphasis on the reduction of out-of-wedlock births: The Congress makes the following findings: (1) Marriage is the foundation of a successful society. (2) Marriage is an essential institution of a successful society which promotes the interests of children. (3) Promotion of responsible fatherhood and motherhood is integral to successful child rearing and the well-being of children. (4) In 1992, only 54 percent of single-parent families with children had a child support order established and, of that 54 percent, only about one-half received the full amount due. Of the cases enforced through the public child support enforcement system, only 18 percent of the caseload has a collection. (5) The number of individuals receiving aid to families with dependent children (in this section referred to as “AFDC”) has more than tripled since 1965. More than two-thirds of these recipients are children. Eighty- nine percent of children receiving AFDC benefits now live in homes in which no father is present…. (10) Therefore, in light of this demonstration of the crisis in our Nation, it is the sense of the Congress that prevention of out-of -wedlock 140 T. LEGRAND pregnancy and reduction in out-of -wedlock birth are very important Government interests and the policy contained in part A of title IV of the Social Security Act (as amended by Section 103(a) of this Act) is intended to address the crisis. (Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act, 1996, preamble) The opening text of the PRWORA legislation is illustrative of the key concern in the minds of its authors: the breakdown of the family unit and the attendant repercussions of this for American society. Whatever hidden interests there may have been in the promotion of the PRWORA legislation, its creators left no doubt as to the principle ostensible purpose, which was to reduce the number of American single mothers and, with it, the spiralling cost of welfare provision. To understand this specific targeting within PRWORA, we need to recognise that this period of reform was set against a backdrop of public antipathy to recipients of the cash welfare system: ‘which was widely perceived to discourage employment and to encourage non-traditional family structure and fertility choices’ (Looney 2005, p. 6). In 1965, a report by the Office of Policy Planning within the US Department of Labor had produced a report entitled The Negro Family: The case for national action. The report argued that the family unit in black communities had been undermined by high unemployment and welfare dependency amongst black men: In essence the report argued that the payment of AFDC solely to lone mothers created a financial incentive for the formation of one-parent fami- lies in a situation in which unemployment had stripped many black men of their traditional role as breadwinners. (Deacon 2000, p. 8) The report, colloquially entitled the Moynihan Report after its author Senator Daniel Moynihan, endorsed a stereotypical view of welfare that endured through to the Reagan era. Reagan’s depiction of so-called Cadillac queens—back single mothers using welfare benefits to live comfortably at the expense of the tax-payer—gave legitimacy to concerns that ADFC was being abused by its recipients. The ensuing public outcry sealed the fate of ADFC system and compelled all parties to rethink welfare policy in the USA. Clinton’s promise to ‘end welfare as we know it’ was, then, born out of the fait accompli presented by Reagan’s Administration.  5 THE THIRD WAY AND THE LANDSCAPE OF WELFARE REFORM … 141 The depictions of welfare recipients in the popular media fuelled public support for reform. Certainly, Reagan’s rhetoric about ‘Cadillac queens’ was powerful, but the most telling signs of the US unease with welfare dependency were displayed in the statistics: before the introduction of TANF, 90% of welfare claimants were single mothers (Daguerre and Taylor-Gooby 2004, p. 29) and there was a lifetime guarantee of welfare support, if and when it was needed. It is partly because of the reliance of single mothers on ADFC that this component of welfare, rather than any other form of social assistance, has become synonymous with ‘welfare’. As Clarke argues: ‘So, social security programmes, covering a much wider range of benefits and a much larger population at a much greater cost, are referenced separately – they are not welfare’ (Clarke 2004, p. 22). PRWORA drastically changed this landscape. It introduced the rule that, over a claimant’s lifespan, he or she must work after two years on assistance. In addition, families that had received assistance for five years (cumulative or not) were no longer entitled to assistance. Sets of puni- tive measures were introduced to deal with those seen to be unwilling to work. On top of this: ‘Each state […] implemented a different TANF plan with unique objectives, funding priorities, time limits, and client bases’ (Lichter and Jayakody 2002, p. 119). The terms of engagement with single mothers changed overnight. Between the introduction of PRWORA in August 1996 and June 2000, the number of TANF recipi- ents fell from 12,241,000 to 5,781,000: a fall of 53% (figures taken from the US Department of Health and Human Services 2007). The groundswell of support for this putative antecedent of the UK’s New Deal and the USA’s PRWORA legislation was mostly from conser- vative Republicans: ‘[PRWORA] was a bill largely shaped by Republican governors, notably Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin and John Engler of Michigan’ (Blank and Ellwood 2001, p. 767). For Clinton, the autho- risation of PRWORA was a matter of political expediency, insofar as it had become necessary to institute welfare reform of some sort. Clinton promised prior to his 1992 election victory to ‘end welfare as we know it’. David Ellwood, the intellectual inspiration behind Clinton’s welfare thinking, writes: ‘The president’s famous promise to “end welfare as we know it” was the most potent soundbite on welfare. It came up so often that we referred to it as EWAKI’ (Ellwood 1996). Despite the extensive research and design which went into the architecture of Clinton’s much-trailed welfare policy, the proposed 1994 Work and Responsibility Act (WRA) was eventually refused by a GOP-dominated 142 T. LEGRAND Congress. Consequently, as Blank and Ellwood (2001, p. 761) argue: ‘The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), passed and signed in the summer of 1996, was very different from Clinton’s original conception’. Clinton had twice rejected the proposed (Republican) legislation but, after the third revision, accepted the inevitable reality: that the guiding control over the new welfare legis- lation was to be Republican. Although PRWORA was subsequently seen to be an unqualified ‘success’, this success created an ethical tension for the Democrats: These results allowed both Congress and Clinton to gain political credi- bility, but have also further reduced the importance and legitimacy of the losers from welfare reform if they are not working and are no longer on welfare. (emphasis in original, Evans 2001, p. 9) The ethical tension created by the new legislation was too much for Clin- ton’s two principal welfare advisors, Wendell Primus and Peter Edelman, who both subsequently resigned. In the next chapter, I shall use inter- views with these two advisors to illuminate the ideational shifts which occurred during this period by Clinton. State Programme Variability Prior to the introduction of PRWORA, the main system of benefits targeted towards needy families was AFDC: Aid to Families with Depen- dent Children. Under the PRWORA legislation, this system was compre- hensively overhauled and replaced with TANF: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, specifically targeting families rather than individuals without children: The only safety-net benefit available in all States is TANF for families with children, which is the centre of welfare reform. Otherwise, public assistance safety nets are the sole responsibility of the States – or even local County governments. These schemes, called General Assistance (GA), can provide cash or in-kind benefits, but only in 13 States are there such programmes for able-bodied people without children. (Evans 2001, p. 10) Whilst the Federal legislation provides the block funding and basic eligi- bility rules, it is up to the States to set out the actual administration of  5 THE THIRD WAY AND THE LANDSCAPE OF WELFARE REFORM … 143 the financial support: ‘The 1996 PRWORA entirely relegated responsi- bility for detailed policy formulation and service delivery to the states. They determine their own eligibility criteria for cash assistance within the general framework of loose federal guidelines’ (Daguerre 2004, p. 52). Inter alia, it is also within the remit of the States to decide: the length of time for which individuals are eligible for support (to the legislated maximum of five years); the size of the job-catchment radius within which individuals must accept employment; and the amount and length of job- related training. Moreover, funding incentives are provided to those States which are able to reduce their welfare rolls below target levels, resulting in punitively-oriented TANF provisions. Crucially, Blank and Schoen argue (NBER Working Papers with number 7627, 2000, p. 7): Since 1962, the Secretary of Health and Human Services has had the authority to waive federal welfare requirements if a state proposed exper- imental or pilot programs that furthered the goals of AFDC. Although there were a few waivers granted in the 1980s, it was not until the early to mid-1990s that major, state-wide waivers became widespread. The initiatives undertaken through the federal waivers were varied, but commonly they were used to: increase the amount individuals could earn whilst staying eligible for cash assistance; widen the pool of people suit- able for certain types of jobs; limit the amount of time individuals could remain on welfare rolls (Blank and Schoen 2001, p. 7); and ‘allowed states to eliminate benefit increases to families who conceived and gave birth to children while on welfare (the so-called ‘family cap’)’ (Blank and Schoen 2001, p. 7). Indeed, the vast number of variations between the state welfare systems make it very difficult to draw specific comparisons between the states: The August 1996 passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Oppor- tunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), replacing AFDC with the TANF block grant, further increased both the degree of variation across state programs and the difficulty of tracking program rules. (Rowe & Roberts, 2004, p. 2) Whilst the efficacy of PRWORA was soon questioned by academic commentators (see Primus et al. 1999), it is clear that the prima facie result of PRWORA was a substantial fall in the number of welfare recip- ients from 1996 onwards. The key architects of PRWORA were clearly 144 T. LEGRAND motivated by the impact upon social cohesion that family breakdown was having and, accordingly, wanted to use the new welfare regime as a means of discouraging non-orthodox family units. By allowing indi- vidual states to take the lead in implementing their own tailored welfare programmes, the Federal Government effectively devolved the respon- sibility for delivering lower welfare rolls to the state-level. But, in so doing, they removed any form of minimum support for welfare recip- ients, resulting in huge national variations in living standards amongst welfare claimants. The Federal Government further put in place a set of financial incentives and supports to ensure the ongoing stability of TANF. The most ‘naked’ incentive proffered was a direct nod to the preamble of PRWORA: in 2007, an annual appropriation of 100 million dollars was assigned to the five states with the greatest reduction in ‘out of wedlock’ births and abortion rates, whilst $1 billion separately allocated for the best-performing states in reducing welfare caseloads (US Department of Health and Human Services 20071 ). The UK and the New Deal The 1997 victory for New Labour ushered in an era in which the engage- ment between the left and right was redefined. The political ethos of the Third Way disregarded key tenets of social democracy; ownership mixed economy, social redistribution or social entitlement, and replaced them with questions of efficiency and effective government: Without the ontological and ethical commitments of orthodox Marxism or social democracy, or any reformulation of them, the critique of capitalism as such turned into a critique of the particular capitalism of Thatcherite neo-liberalism. It ceased being a political claim and became a managerial one about how to run things better. (Finlayson 1999, p. 274 emphases in original) In so doing, New Labour forged a new path between the two entrenched positions of social democracy and conservativism. The consequences of this redefinition were apparent in the state-citizen contract: This agenda is distinct from the conservative Right in its support for welfare entitlements; but also distinct from the liberal Left in insisting that  5 THE THIRD WAY AND THE LANDSCAPE OF WELFARE REFORM … 145 those entitlements must be conditional: welfare rights must be matched by welfare responsibilities. (Driver 2004, p. 35) The New Deal represents a raft of policy initiatives instituted by New Labour designed to tackle some of the UK’s most pressing employment issues. Amongst these, unemployment amongst young people was seen as a priority, as was changing the culture of long-term welfare dependency. The previous Conservative Government had already recognised these problems and had taken the first tentative steps towards enacting active labour market measures capable of curbing the high rates of unemploy- ment seen in the 1980s and early 90s. Perversely, according to Prideux, the changeover of power in 1997 entrenched some moves already taken by the Conservatives: ‘a deeper examination into the details that lay behind the New Deal proposals also reveals that these deals were merely continua- tions of previously tried schemes in authoritarian welfare’ (Prideaux 2001, p. 97). Layard et al. (2004) (Layard, incidentally, was an advisor to the creation of the New Deal) point out: But from 1986 onwards the work test began to be used again and the system tightened. In 1986 six-monthly work-focussed interviews (called Restart Interviews) began, and since 1990 benefit recipients have been formally expected to be “actively seeking work”. From 1990 onwards the benefit office and job centres were progressively reunited, and in 1996 the Job Seekers Allowance was introduced which allowed a personal adviser to issue directions to the job seeker. (Layard et al. 2004, p. 16) The Restart interviews, the expectation that benefit recipients must be actively seeking work and the use of personal advisors were all facets that, in one guise or another, were incorporated in the New Deal. Yet, the inclusion of these facets might also be regarded as reflecting institutional continuities. Moreover, the retention of these features of the pre-1997 regime does not represent a concomitant commitment to the same welfare ethos. As Layard affirms: Thus the big new idea in Labour’s New Deal is this. We ought to offer everybody on the threshold of long-term unemployment a choice of activity for at least a period. And when that happens we should remove the option of life on benefit. (Layard 2001, p. 2) 146 T. LEGRAND Long before the institution of the New Deal’s welfare-to-work, the efficacy of state welfare provision was being called into question. The traditional goal of full employment through a Keynesian demand- management strategy and direct creation of employment had lost value in the face of nearly unprecedented levels of unemployment during Thatcher’s later years in office. Even before this however, there were indications that a paradigm shift in welfare provision was imminent. It was clear that Thatcher was uncomfortable with the amount spent funding a cumbersome and lethargic welfare system and, indeed, felt that welfare was partially to blame for some of the societal ills that it puta- tively remedied. In his book, ‘Dismantling the Welfare State?’ (1994) Paul Pierson highlights the attempts of both the conservative Thatcher and Reagan Administrations to: ‘cut back entitlements and weaken the political foundations of the welfare state’ (Starke 2006, p. 105). The guiding rationale of increasing employment echoed the Thatcher-Reagan economic-individualist philosophy: ‘The promotion of employment in the 1980s followed a distinctively neo-liberal route. Self-sufficiency through paid work was the single governing principle of welfare reform’ (Daguerre 2004, p. 44). These attempts in the UK failed because of two key pillars upon which the welfare state depended: institutional inertia, and the enduring popular support for the welfare system. But, whereas Conservative attempts at implementation (the processes by which welfare was delivered) reform failed, New Labour’s revamp of the welfare system succeeded through reform of the welfare contract as a whole. By 1996, the ‘rights and responsibilities’ mantra had percolated from Clinton’s third-way logics, through to Giddens’ social diagnosis of the UK—‘The Third Way’—into the party mindset of New Labour. Welfare-to-work had two prongs; emphasising both the responsibility of the unemployed to actively seek employment or engage in training leading to employment and their right to receive state support whilst doing so. The qualifying phrase ‘whilst doing so’ emphasised the new contingency of welfare: the unemployed are entitled to state support only whilst they demonstrate a willingness to participate in the labour market: This is a system of stick and “carrot”, based on mutual rights and respon- sibilities. Everyone has the right to [job] offers but in return they have the responsibility to use them – or at least to stop drawing benefits. Rights and responsibilities is a central philosophy of New Labour and of the New Deal. (Layard et al. 2004, p. 2)  5 THE THIRD WAY AND THE LANDSCAPE OF WELFARE REFORM … 147 The insistence that individuals have an implied moral duty to ‘at least stop drawing benefits’ if they fail to take an offer of employment (of any sort) reflects the normative political philosophy of the New Deal’s Third Way. It is this form of rhetoric that captures the communitarian social contract extended by New Labour, and this form of message is not only promulgated through advisory pamphlets to job seekers. The Cabinet Off