Elite governance at the sub-sectoral level: the case of policy networks

Policy network analysis has become the dominant paradigm for studying policy-making in European Political Science and has been applied at every level of governance (Rhodes 1997).

Network analysis proceeds from three simple, if contestable, assumptions about the nature of policy-making in liberal democracies. First, policy-making is the outcome of the interaction between policy networks, hierarchies (i.e. governmental structures) and markets. Secondly, it is an empirical regularity that policy communities are the most common form of network found in liberal democracies. These are tight-knit decision-making structures characterized by a limited number of privileged participants in a resource dependent relationship. Thirdly, policy communities constitute an elite system of governance.

In a seminal article, J. K. Benson (1982: 148) defines policy networks as a, ‘cluster or complex of organizations connected to each other by resource dependencies and distinguished from other clusters or complexes by breaks in the structure of resource dependencies’. The concept of a policy network is thus employed as a generic term to categorize the rela­tionship between groups, third sector organizations and government/ government agencies. Within the general categorization there are different types of policy network. These can be situated along a continuum with policy communities at one end of the spectrum and issue networks at the other. In a policy community there is a limited number of participants who share values on policy outcomes with a limited number of decision-making centres (see Table 2.1).

Most network analysts tend to emphasize the dominance of sectional interests within the policy-making process, particularly in liberal democra­cies with centralized systems of governance such as Greece or the UK (Chondroleou 2002). This is reflected in the identification of closed elite- driven policy communities in which elite circulation is dependent on the bargaining resources of the sectional interests involved. In the edited volume Policy Networks in British Government (1992), David Marsh and Rod Rhodes, together with a team of research students and junior lecturers at the University of Essex, provided an empirical test of what has become the dominant approach to the study of policy networks - the Rhodes model (see Table 2.1). Rhodes’s meso-level typology was combined with a limited macro-level analysis with the aim of assessing policy network effects on policy outcomes and, by implication, policy change. However, Marsh and Rhodes (1992: 260) conclude that: ‘networks are but one component of an explanation of policy change - there is no agreed definition of, or criterion for measuring, the degree of change in policy networks’. Hence, for Marsh and Rhodes, while networks matter, policy network analysis itself was not equipped to provide an explanation of policy change.

The notion of a policy network does appear to capture some of the key features of contemporary governance - collaboration between state and non-state actors in the delivery of public goods at the sub-sectoral level; the importance of resource dependency; the increasing influence of privileged groups in policy-making at the sub-sectoral level; and, the multi-level char­acter of contemporary governance. However, policy network analysis itself has self-evident shortcomings as an explanatory theory of policy-making (see Dowding 2001 and Evans 2001). Minimally, an explanatory theory involves a systematically related set of statements, including some law-like generalizations that are empirically testable. Policy network analysis does not meet this definition. At best it may be viewed as a metaphor that likens policy formation to the outcome of interactions between governmental and non-governmental actors within a network setting but does not explain how and why they change over time. This argument does not negate the importance of the policy network approach. A sound model is not necessarily one that purely explains or predicts with precision. It can be one rich with implications. Novel hypotheses may be extracted from the policy network approach which must themselves be articulated in a systematic fashion and subject to empirical test.