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The Cultural Dimension of Metagovernance: Why Governance Doctrines May Fail

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Abstract

National cultures often reflect a preference for one of the ideal-types hierarchical, network or market governance. A comparison of four similar policy cases in the UK, the Netherlands, Germany and the European Commission reveals that successful public managers under certain conditions are able to construct and design productive mixtures of the three styles. They applied metagovernance, a process of designing and managing situationally optimal combinations of the three competing, and to an extent mutually undermining, governance styles. Their national cultures and politico-administrative traditions co-determined the governance mixture which would work in a given situation. The research reinforces the case already made by others, that governance doctrines cannot be transferred as ‘best practices’ from one nation to another without adaptation. The article suggests that the future does not lie in inventing new management and governance doctrines, but in investing in post-dogmatic public management.

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Notes

  1. Schein defines culture as “a pattern of basic assumptions—invented, discovered, or developed by a given group as it learns to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration—that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think and feel in relation to those problems”.

  2. Networks, communities, clans or egalitarism are terms used for the ‘third’ form of coordination, besides hierarchies and markets (Entwistle et al. 2007: 65).

  3. Power distance, the degree of individualism, gender roles, uncertainty avoidance, and long term orientation.

  4. Retrieved from http://www.geert-hofstede.com/hofstede_germany.shtml on 1 August 2007.

  5. Source: http://www.geert-hofstede.com/hofstede_united_kingdom.shtml , retrieved on 13 August 2007.

  6. According to German Commissioner Günther Verheugen in an interview in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on 4 October 2006.

  7. Interview held on 28 November 2007 (translated from German by the author).

  8. Interview held on 29 March 2007.

  9. Interview held on 29 March 2007.

  10. Interview held on 30 March 2007.

  11. Interview held on 8 May 2007.

  12. See also Bissessar (2006) for illustrating this with the introduction of a competency system for senior civil service in Trinidad and Tobago.

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  1. Advisory Council for Research on Spatial Planning, Nature and the Environment (RMNO), Emmapark 6, NL-2595ET, The Hague, The Netherlands

    Louis Meuleman

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Meuleman, L. The Cultural Dimension of Metagovernance: Why Governance Doctrines May Fail. Public Organ Rev 10, 49–70 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11115-009-0088-5

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