|
|
|
|
| Editorial: The role of standards in a Public Administration environment, by Francesco Molinari |
|
|
While largely used and recognised as useful in industrial contexts, standards seem to be in search of legitimacy within modern Public Administration.
To be sure, in the past 10-15 years there has been a plethora of national, transnational and supranational initiatives involving the establishment and/or harmonisation of administrative practices at central and local government level (from OECD Puma to EU Sigma to UN Convention against corruption, to name but a few).
Neither should we forget the rapid advance of ISO certification of quality, safety and environmental systems within private as well as public organisations, nor the additional needs for integration/interoperability and cross-border standardisation of public services, emerging from the wide opening of European market to mobile citizens, workers and enterprises.
Thus if we look at standards as “generally accepted principles” that are substitutes for superimposed regulation, with their working status of “recommendations and guidelines” instead of binding rules, their spectacular growth has been undoubtedly a feature of modern times, as far as government and e-government practices are concerned.
The advent of “New Public Management” school, with its customer-oriented public services provision and the focus on accountability of political conduct, is not unrelated to these developments.
On the one hand, it is self evident that the essence of a quality (ISO 9000) accreditation is to achieve a service standard by controlling the processes that deliver it.
On the other hand, one can argue that standardisation of administrative procedures (same replies to same questions, and the never too praised “one-stop-shop” model) is an indicator of policy fairness and transparency, as well as a way to reduce the competitive asymmetries and negative externalities brought about by the market.
Yet there is something missing from this evolutionary portrait.
For instance, the quality of public services is not exceptionally related to personal, “ad hoc” solutions enhancing customer satisfaction, efficacy and political accountability, by an opposite and possibly conflicting way to that deriving from basic or minimum standards implementation.
Exceptions rather than rules (although voluntarily adopted) drive the performance measurement of complex organisations; distinctions rather than commonalities draw the competitive profile of legal and institutional systems, in a neo-Schumpeterian vision that is not unknown to policy makers, as in the past decades some of them have used national standards as a way to achieve internal market protection or segmentation.
In spite of the long-invoked target of integration and interoperability between local, central, and cross-border administrations, much work needs to be done for a full standardisation of procedures, data formats and technology platforms, not to speak of the semantic/conceptual standards that are completely lacking at back-office level, as the slow-paced experience of “one stop shops” is there to demonstrate.
Whatever is missing, we need a process to make it shape and emerge.
Borrowing from the ICT world and other industrial contexts, we can isolate three main institutional settings or “fora” that have been historically established in the past century and are now relevant to the progress of standardisation efforts:
| • |
the “formal” standard setting organisations (like ISO), involved in a continuous, multi-step, open and transparent elaboration process, empowered by “consensus”; |
|
| • |
several governmental or quasi-governmental agencies or authorities (like OECD, EU, UN, IMF etc.), aiming at the harmonisation of practices, empowered by law or binding conventions; |
|
| • |
finally, the bulk of “informal” consortia, users and practitioners groups, that are involved in “de facto” or “grey” standardisation practices. |
|
With some notable exceptions (e.g. Transparency International for the fight to global corruption, or the World Economic Forum concerning multilateral foresight and benchmarking) it appears that the first and especially the third institutional setting is hardly relevant for Public Administration, both in Europe and worldwide.
Would this be an explanation for such a poor standards development? By no means, the enforcement power of a legally or statutory binding organisation is a way to ensure full reception of improvements and best practices; this is what happened when the requirements of the New Public Management school became mandatory for the countries having to receive IMF loans.
However, the essence of a standard lies in its voluntary character, which can ensure the widest and undisputed application of newly developed guidelines, principles and recommendations.
That is why we would like to end this brief reflection by asking how the world might look like, in case we experienced a surging wave of self-organising standard setting institutions and “fora” in the Public Administration environment.
|
|
| |
|
Back to top