Sneaking up on Stakeholding

Abstract

Public policy-makers fall into ruts more easily than most. ‘Path dependence’ is the technical term. But that is often an overly generous description, suggesting as it does that there might be some objective forces at work (such as the effort involved in retraining all trained touch-typists out of the QWERTY keyboard, for a famous example). Rutted thinking in public policy more typically stems from a simple failure of imagination. Nowhere is this more evident than in relation to the problem of poverty.

This chapter has roots in a 1995 workshop convened by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, jointly with the then Department of Social Security, to discuss Baldwin (1995). I am indebted to Diane Gibson, Peter Saunders and public servants protected by anonymity for discussions at that time. The present version was written at Nuffield College, Oxford and the LSE and presented to the American Political Science Association Annual Meetings, Boston, August 2002. I am grateful, then and later, for comments from Bruce Ackerman, Brian Barry, Jurgen De Wispelaere, Keith Dowding, Julian Le Grand, Carole Pateman, Robert van der Veen and Stuart White.