Drowning the Deadweight in the Rhetoric of Economism: What Sport Policy, Free Swimming, and Ema Tell Us About Public Services After the Crash

Abstract

In light of the Coalition government's plans to ‘consider new and radical approaches to public service provision’, this paper discusses the decision making process within central government and argues central government's response to the crisis reflects ongoing trends in Whitehall. The paper explores these trends using sport policy, Free Swimming and the Educational Maintenance Allowance. These funding decisions show the continued power of the Treasury within Whitehall and the extension of the Green Book's economism, along with a specific rhetorical use of economic evidence to present controversial decisions as technical exercises. The Coalition's claims of an overhaul of public service provision reflect the furtherance of longstanding developments in Whitehall's method of policy analysis, displaying remarkable similarity to New Labour's approach to decision making. For those scholars aiming to offer forms of critique to Coalition policy, the paper opens a significant site, and language, for resistance.

From welfare state to participation society? Austerity measures and local sport policy in the Netherlands

“…This could produce increasingly sharp distributional conflicts (Vis et al 2011). An example in the United Kingdom is the termination of the free swimming programme (O'Brien 2013).…”

Feeding young people to the social investment machine: The financialisation of public services

“…The use of concepts of investment to legitimate state activity within the constraints of a (neo)liberal political consensus has been subject to important critiques for their instrumentalism and limited effectiveness (Lister, 2003), and as functioning to draw voluntary and private sectors into governance through mechanisms such as partnership and commissioning (Newman, 2001). Third-way politics was associated with policy-making underpinned by economistic ‘evidence-based’ decision-making procedures, targeting and audit, and the expanded power of the Treasury and the Cabinet Office across government (O’Brien, 2012).…”

Sport policy evaluation: what do we know and how might we move forward?

“…Subsequently, policy evaluation focusing on process analysis has emerged (most notably the theory-driven process evaluation approach, Chen, 1990Chen, , 2015, aimed at informing policy and resource allocation decisions (Foley, 1992;O'Brien, 2013;Tilley, 2000). The major strengths of the process evaluation approach are that this approach helps to identify information critical to understanding how a programme is implemented; as such, this careful understanding of the implementation process contributes to the dissemination of the programme to other settings (Chen et al, 2008).…”

“…Evaluation is one of the key components in policy processes or cycles (Easton, 1953;Hill, 2005;Hogwood & Gunn, 1984). It plays an important role in decision-making processes (Foley, 1992;O'Brien, 2013) by providing policymakers with accounts of initiatives' impacts (Weiss, 1993). The last couple of decades have seen the rapid development of policy evaluation research in many fields (e.g., Furubo, Rist, & Sandahl, 2002;Jacob, Speer, & Furubo, 2015;Mastenbroek, van Voorst, & Meuwese, 2016), such as nursing, housing, education, medicine, engineering, social services, and international development.…”