From Evidence to Prototyping: Political Epistemology beyond the Democracy-Technocracy Dualism

From the first months of the Covid19 pandemic onward, a group of key actors in the growing public sector innovation (PSI) discourse declared the crisis an opportunity-in-waiting, arguing that the pandemic has exacerbated underlying problems of democracy. PSI advocates from leading global innovation consultancies regularly seize upon critiques of inadequate digital infrastructure, slow crisis management, and democratic deficits or backsliding to promote creative, deliberative, and participatory mechanisms for dealing with public problems. Public administration, they contend, has to be reformed such that silo-thinking is minimized, opportunities for cross-ministerial collaboration enhanced, and most importantly, new connections between citizens and public administration established. According to PSI advocates, democratic deficits are rooted in government’s inability to understand, manage, and remediate social challenges or solve technically and socially complex problems in demographically mixed, value-pluralist communities. At the core of the debate is an explicit critique of earlier innovations like New Public Management (NPM) and program budgeting whose overly rationalistic focus on outcome-based performance measurement and evidence-based policy making builds on technocratic epistemologies that fail to generate the right kinds of knowledge for dealing with complexity. Among proposals for greater government digitization, innovations to procurement procedures, or improvement of evidence evaluation is also, perhaps surprisingly, participatory or human-centered design. Building in part on traditions of policy design and deliberative planning but also on private sector practices like industrial design, architecture, and information design, this peculiar design practice places a premium on collective knowledge generation in which both technical expertise and lived experience have to be accommodated. It is this collective and creative approach that today proffers democratic alternatives to technocratic policy or public management conventions. This paper seeks to make sense of the current phenomenon of design in government genealogically, by situating it in a prior moment of administrative innovation: Third Way politics. Tracing contemporary PSI debates and consultancies to one site of origin in the UK, I show that New Labour’s rethinking of social democracy not only prefigured but set the stage for public sector design ideas and practices today on an institutional as well as methodological level. Often billed as the maturation of neoliberalism, the 1980s and 90s in the UK witnessed ongoing arguments over what it means for government to serve the people and how the success or failure to do so should be measured. But rather than repeating established analyses about the neoliberalization of the state––like the responsibilization of citizens through the marketization of public services or workfare programs and holding civil servants accountable through benchmarking or auditing––I argue that New Labour can also be read as a moment of experimentation with new democratic forms in the face of historical transformations. Against this background, then, today’s PSI and especially public sector participatory design–with its creative experimental approach–can be read as an attempt to recast public bureaucracy as an integral part of contemporary democracy rather than as a necessary technocratic exception to otherwise democratic processes. For better or worse, therefore, design is one mechanism through which technical democracy is enacted today.