Legitimizing Transformative Government

Over the past decade, there has been increasing attention to meeting goals related to persistent, wicked societal problems, such as climate change. Solving these societal problems typically requires socio-technical transitions. This trend towards goal-oriented, socio-technical transition requires governments to search for and reevaluate their role in delivering these challenges.
The socio-technical transitions literature has emerged in response to the advent of societal challenges, notably sustainability, and put forth several frameworks to help understand, support and direct transition processes. These transition frameworks have developed several policy recommendations and approaches to identifying these. However, implementation of these recommendations by governments is slow to follow, presumably because civil servants do not feel legitimate to take up the role transitions studies prescribe to them.
In practice civil services have over the past decades looked to the Public Administration (PA) literature for guidance on how to act in society. Governments, and especially civil services, need legitimacy to act, particularly when aiming for systematic change. Legitimacy is defined as mutual agreement that power is assigned to a certain actor and how that actor accounts for that. The PA traditions legitimize behavior of civil servants and are both prescriptive and evaluative. However, these PA frameworks do not prescribe any guidelines for the government’s role regarding transitions and therefor it remains unclear if PA traditions will benefit transitions or perhaps even mark them as illegitimate.
The goal of this research is to bring Transition and PA literature together in order to find bases of legitimacy which government can call upon to undertake action. For that purpose we examine if tasks prescribed by the Transition literature can be legitimized through PA frameworks.
Method
This article is structured by four consecutive research steps. In Section 1 we inventory what kind of tasks Transition Literature (TL) prescribe to the government, through analyzing and coding the different strands of TL literature inductively. Subsequently in Section 2, we review the different PA traditions to understand how these traditions can legitimate governmental action on transitions. Next, in section 3, we analyze where the possible discrepancies lay between governmental tasks prescribed by TL and ways PA can legitimize these transformative tasks. Once the white spots between these two bodies of literature are clear, we decipher in section 4 the outlines of a new PA tradition where transition scholars point towards to legitimize transformative policies for ministries. We reflect on the merits and disadvantages of this fourth tradition.
Results / Findings
The governmental transition tasks prescribed by transition literature can be clustered into six categories: 1) give direction; 2) create governance; 3) support the new; 4) institutionalize change into new structures and processes; 5) develop internal capabilities; 6) break down the dysfunctional. Once these prescribed tasks are superimposed with PA traditions some of these tasks become quite problematic for the civil service. Within ‘give direction’, the subtasks as ‘create and shape markets’ and ‘guiding role in structural change’ can be complicated to legitimize from certain PA traditions. PA traditions do not recognize the responsibility of civil service in many of these assigned subtasks (68 in total) i.e.: ‘act as a niche manager’, ‘develop the capability to steer from within through experiments’, ‘invest in technology’, ‘ensure that a process of co-evolution leads to desirable outcomes’. These are not easily legitimized by all the current PA traditions. By abstaining to acknowledge the legitimacy questions of PA, the transition literature makes itself thus less impactful in advising the administration. There are openings in these different PA frameworks but these are not coherent and mainstream interpretations of the traditions hardly permit these.