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Title: How Governments Make Things Happen
Speaker: Stein Ringen, Professor of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Oxford
Time: 28 November 2013. 1pm
Venue: Room S1, Department of Politics and International Studies, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge (map).
Abstract: There is a view that governments run things. For example, at the opening of the final TV debate before the British 2010 elections, Gordon Brown said, ‘There’s a lot to this job and I don’t get it all right. But I do know how to run the economy, in good times and in bad.’
There is also a view of how governments run things. Governments, says Christopher Hood in The Tools of Government, detect problems and act on them with the help of the tools at their disposal.
And there is a view of what it is that enables governments to put tools to use. They can do that because they have power. Politicians get into government by winning power, and power enables them to get things done.
But all that, I suggest, is wrong. It’s just too orderly: get power, do. I think governance is a mystery and agree with Jeffrey Pressman and Aaron Wildavsky that it’s amazing when government programmes work at all.
So if governments do not run things, if ministers have no toolbox in their offices, and if power is not all it has been cracked up to be, how do governments get things done?