Steering

Who Steers?

As indicated at the beginning of this article, there has been a good deal of debate about who is, and who should be, responsible for steering contemporary societies. This debate occurs at two levels. At the more general level, scholars have been engaged in a debate over the relative roles of official and unofficial actors in governing. Within the public sector there has been a discussion over the relative importance of elected officials and bureaucrats in governing. These two levels of debate have both empirical and normative dimensions, questioning the actual practice of governing, as well as the pattern of governance that would be most desirable, given the particular set of premises that any one analyst may bring to the debate.

The discussion about the role of nongovernmental actors in governing reflects the power of social actors and networks in some societies and the more general movement of governments to involve societal actors in making and delivering public policy. It is difficult to deny that nongovernmental actors play a significant role in the overall process of steering, although it may be too easy for some enthusiasts of this approach to forget that the influence of these social actors is exerted within a framework that depends heavily on public authority and law. Likewise, it is also easy to forget that the involvement of social actors is not exactly novel but has been in existence for decades.

The second debate centers on the relative capacity of politicians and civil servants to steer and to govern effectively. Elected politicians are often characterized as less knowledgeable than their civil servants about the policy areas for which they are responsible; elected politicians often are under significant time pressures that leave them virtually incapable of providing direction to their ministries. On the other hand, civil servants may be too closely tied to their individual departments and programs and hence incapable of guiding the society in other than a very narrow manner. The normative arguments in this debate are perhaps more compelling than the empirical ones, given the importance of maintaining democratic control over policy and public organizations.

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