When politics dams feedback
The cybernetic approach to bureaucracy is promising, but we need to account for politics, too.
Dan Davies’ account of how complex institutions drive decisions and actions while shielding themselves from accountability is a major contribution to public policy analyses. I applaud him for bringing cybernetics back in and for developing a model that surpasses the standard economics approach to information. But as with any pioneering breakthrough, the argument will become both more encompassing and more refined with attempts to apply it to real-world problems.
As a political scientist, what I find missing are politics and power. They are mentioned in the forthcoming book, yet get short shrift there and in his essay for Hypertext. More attention is given to the public at large, for Davies makes clear his commitment to recognizing the interests, concerns, and knowledge of “users and consumers.” However, this is largely accomplished by an improved feedback loop that focuses on increasing management capacity. And that takes us back to the relative neglect of the political and power arrangements that can distort or even ignore that feedback loop. Davies’ analysis is focused on improved communication. That is certainly necessary, but it is hardly sufficient to ensure that the perspectives of the affected populace are incorporated into governance decisions and goals.
The very process of setting up a governance system is political, with some interests often dominating others. In his essay, Davies focuses on outsourcing through contractual relationships between public agencies and private firms. I wish to return the focus to the relationships among public agencies at different levels of government. The creation and evolution of the authorities tasked with water management of the upper and lower basins of the Colorado River offer a case in point, as well documented in Mark Reisner’s Cadillac Desert. Water scarcity in the U.S. Southwest led to bargaining among states (and Mexico before it was excluded) and with the federal government over water rights, resulting in the 1922 Colorado River Compact and the development of regional arrangements and authorities. The initial precipitant to the demand for government intervention was the Homestead Act of 1862. Having expropriated the land and water of the Southwest from the native populations, the federal government allocated land to settlers based on estimates of plot size for subsistence farming in the Midwest, which had more fertile land and more water. Consequently, most of the settlers failed, and the result was the agglomeration of land by wealthier farmers. The Colorado River Compact formalized the jockeying for water, but ultimately intensified the underlying competition. Persistent infighting undermined joint conservation efforts, and demands by powerful farmers and urbanites drove costly infrastructure projects such as dams. The ultimate result was the draining of the Colorado River Basin.
This system may have succeeded in getting water to those with the most clout and awarding contracts for building dams to those with the most influence. However, it was power and politics, not communication issues or an “accountability sink,” that led the authorities to ignore the interests of Mexico, weaker state governments, and small farmers — let alone the expertise and rights of indigenous peoples in the region. There was also little thought given to environmental impact. A misunderstanding of the science of aquifers and water conservancy may have affected initial decisions in the 1920s through the mid-20th century, but the various state and regional authorities, the United States Army Corps of Engineers,[1] and the United States Bureau of Reclamation remained immune to the best scientific as well as popular feedback as the science and harms evolved.
It was power and politics, not communication issues or an “accountability sink,” that led authorities in the Colorado River Basin to ignore the interests of Mexico, weaker state governments, and small farmers — let alone the expertise and rights of indigenous peoples.
Davies’ cybernetics framework provides some of the reasons for this immunity. However, without analysis of the politics and power, interventions aimed at improving feedback from the locals and others affected will have little consequence. Even if communication and information flows are all we would wish (which they definitely are not in regard to the Colorado River), strong corporate and state interests, the disproportionate influence different interests exercise on government decision-makers, and bureaucratic rivalries continue to make it difficult for management to “learn by doing” or to change course when they do learn.
This case raises an additional issue. Management needs more than feedback and the capacity for change: It also needs criteria and methods for arbitrating the conflicting feedback it will receive, given the different needs of an institution’s constituencies. This is particularly true when the system is flawed for reasons quite separate from what cybernetics teaches us. In a recent interview with Ezra Klein, Jennifer Pahlka reminds us that fear of litigation often leads to regulations that insulate the bureaucracy from reprisal and indeed from all kinds of feedback or self-knowledge. In the same interview, Steve Teles emphasizes the overweening power of a professional elite — a “cultural class” in his terminology — in creating and maintaining the policy parameters for agencies. Both Pahlka and Teles point to the accretion of regulations into a problematic tangle from the perspective of those administering bureaucracies and those on the receiving end of that administration. This may well lead to the “accountability sink” Davies describes. The solution, however, is unlikely to be better communication and feedback loops, but the cleaning of the Stygian Stable — albeit, in their and my views, with different hoses focused on different areas and with different rebuilding materials than those Elon Musk is proposing.
Dan Davies, I’m sure, is well aware of the issues I’ve raised. My purpose here is to point out where there are gaps we collectively need to fill to ensure that Davies’ work has the impact we want for it.
Margaret Levi is Emerita Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, co-director of its Ethics, Society and Technology Review, and a Senior Fellow at its Center of Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. The author of eight books, she researches the origins and consequences of trustworthy government, among other topics.
[1] Davies notes that in the 2000s the Army Corps of Engineers got into trouble for internal directives to maximize its budgets, but this seems to be a goal the Corps long held.
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