The twin faces of public sector design

Abstract

Design thinking has become a popular approach for governments around the world seeking to address complex governance challenges. It offers novel techniques and speaks to broader questions of who governs, how they govern, and the limits of rational instrumentalism in policy making. Juxtaposing design thinking with an older tradition of policy design, this article offers the first critical analysis of the application of design thinking to policy making. It argues that design thinking does not sufficiently account for the political and organizational contexts of policy work. Design thinking also errs in universally privileging one particular policy style over others, and fails to account for the reality of policy mixes. Despite these deficiencies, it is argued that design thinking can inform and enrich governance by helping policy designers produce more adaptable designs, better appreciate the behavioral dynamics of public sector design, and leverage networked approaches to social problem solving.

Innovation labs and co-production in public problem solving

“…Despite the speed at which these new units are being established, innovation labs have only recently begun to receive attention from scholars in public administration (see, for example, Lewis, McGann, and Blomkamp 2019;Nesti 2018;Tõnurist, Kattel, and Lember 2017;Williamson 2014Williamson , 2015b. Much of this scholarship has focussed on their role in applying so-called 'design thinking' approaches to public problem solving, broadly understood in terms of 'human-centred' approaches that draw on the creative processes used by industrial and product designers to generate, test, and iterate solutions with potential policy 'users' (Bason and Schneider 2014;Clarke and Craft 2018;Kimbell and Bailey 2017;Lewis, McGann, and Blomkamp 2019;Mintrom and Luetjens 2016). To this extent, the rise of innovation labs is said to reflect a turn towards new forms policymaking characterized by a greater emphasis on the values of empathy and creativity, and the use of abductive forms of reasoning (Lewis, McGann, and Blomkamp 2019;Bailey and Lloyd 2016).…”

Change In Public Administration In The Era Of Economic Digitalization

“…Scientists see digital changes in the public sector from the perspective of transformation of providing public services (Lindgren & van Veenstra, 2018), as a service for creating personalized public goods using information technology (Romme & Meijer, 2019;Clarke & Craft, 2019), focus on ways to quickly switch from electronic to digital government (Mergel, 2019), study various aspects of management in the transition to digital, for example, the formation of a smart system city as one of the ways to improve interaction between authorities and society (Pereira, Macadar, Luciano, & Testa, 2017).…”

Recalibrating the machinery of government for Indigenous affairs: Towards a new policy design for self‐determination

“…The Canadian academic Michael Howlett () describes policy design as ‘statecraft’ and emphasises that it is a deliberate process of making choices about the appropriate mix of policy instruments in order to achieve a particular objective, or set of aspirations. Though dismissed by some as a reversion to a narrow view of policy‐making as instrumental‐rationality, controlled by government actors (eg Colebatch, ; Turnbull, ), policy design recognises the political context in which policy is made and observes the range of government and non‐government actors who work together in networks to achieve shared goals (Clarke & Craft, ). Built in to the analysis of policy design is the recognition that all decisions are constrained, whether it is by lack of resources, or lack of political commitment, or stakeholder resistance, or something else.…”