Quango

The term quango, an acronym for quasi-autonomous nongovernmental organization, has come into use as a label for a wide range of public bodies and extragovernmental organizations that are responsible for developing, managing, and delivering public policy under largely appointed, rather than elected, governing boards.

The definition of quango has been the subject of considerable dispute. Quangos differ in their size, their funding, their legal and organizational forms, their accountability mechanisms, and their relationships to their reporting ministry. Reflecting these differences, quangos have also been named differently in different countries: service agencies in Canada, independent administrative authorities in France, crown entities in New Zealand, departmental public bodies in the United Kingdom, and independent agencies in the United States. Despite such differences, there seems to be some consensus on three basic features of quangos:

• 1.
  They are created as a result of governmental action, although not necessarily directly created by governments, and are considered part of the public domain.
• 2.
  They have no direct electoral accountability and operate, to a greater or lesser extent, at arm's length from government officials.
• 3.
  While they spend public money and fulfill key public functions—ranging from advising policymakers to commissioning, purchasing, and delivering public services—they are not government departments or even subsections of government departments.

Yet some analysts suggest that the conceptual problem is that the plethora and range of bodies that the term quango can refer to, with such broad features, is so wide as to render the term completely worthless, making it difficult to use the term quango as an analytical category. One proposition has been to map the field of quangos as a continuum moving away from direct governmental control toward organizations that are clearly in the private sector but perform some public tasks. The location of one organization on the continuum would then depend on several factors including its managerial autonomy, its governance structure, its policy dependence, and its legal structure. This continuum approach, while acknowledging the diversity of quangos, also highlights their dynamic nature and the fact that quangos can change into other types of organizations by adopting new organizational features.

As suggested by many governmental reports and scholarly works, the creation of quangos in modern democracies has been driven by three main objectives:

• 1.
  An increased autonomy for public actors. The transfer of functions from elected politicians to [Page 782]organizations enjoying a degree of autonomy is conceived of as a means of insulating certain activities from political and bureaucratic influence, creating a buffer zone between the spheres of policy formation and policy delivery, and consequently protecting some areas of public administration from the cut and thrust of day-to-day politics.
• 2.
  An increased participation in public policy. One of the key arguments for supporting the creation of quangos is their potential to offer new opportunities for involvement and participation. Thus, quangos are conceived of as tools to involve societal actors that are often underrepresented through the electoral process (disabled people, ethnic minorities, women). Quangos are also used as a means of drawing specific groups of people into public services, such as specialized professionals and experts that would not otherwise be attracted to the world of politics.
• 3.
  An increased effectiveness and efficiency of public services. The creation of quangos has also been driven by the widespread perceptions of the inadequacies of state-run organizations and the quest for greater effectiveness and efficiency of public services. The rationalization for the disaggregation of large, multifunctional bureaucracies into a range of quasiautonomous bodies draws upon the assumption that the structural isolation of these bodies from the political arena, their management autonomy, their smaller size, their focused objectives, and the opportunity they offer to separate the roles of purchaser and providers will create conditions for innovations, will generate new incentives, and will make them more responsive, more adaptive, and more efficient.

Although the creation of quangos is an old feature of statecraft strategy and is common to all modern democracies, the rapid establishment in recent years of a range of unelected bodies has raised widespread concerns as to their impact on public governance. A first chief concern relates to the capacity of the quango state to maintain the coherence of public policy. The institutional fragmentation occasioned by an increase of quangos inevitably produces a dispersion of governmental activities and may cause problems of coordination. This creates a challenge to the maintenance of government and policy coherence across a complex network of service bodies. Such a fragmentation may also reduce the strategic capacity of governments due to the growth in the potential constriction points through which each initiative must pass. Another main concern relates to potential threats to accountability. The growth of fringe bodies that are insulated to some degree from direct governmental or political supervision is often perceived of as a retreat from the traditional democratic framework. In particular, there has been much criticism of the lack of transparency surrounding the appointments of quangos' boards and their benefits. In addition, observations have shown that governments and elected politicians may use nonelected bodies as a means of paying political allies or extending their influence over areas of public activity that are politically strategic and difficult to control centrally. In some cases, quangos have been created to replace functions previously performed by local authorities. In such cases, the creation of quangos may be interpreted as a project to substitute new agencies, operating from a centrally determined agenda, for local authorities. Government officials facing difficult political choices may also prefer to create a quango that will take responsibility for possible failures, even though these failures may result from poor policy decisions.

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