In defence of design principles
Policy Director
An exciting day yesterday as we published our latest report, What powers where?.
Alongside recommendations and other kinds of analysis, this report sets out some ‘design principles’ for how to think about the distribution of responsibilities and accountabilities through whole local systems (not just focusing on the emerging regional tier of combined authorities, which is what most current devolution policy is about).
The use of design principles in policy research is sometimes criticised. Design principles are a long way from the tangibility and practicality of a well-constructed policy recommendation. By definition, these principles are higher-level (some might say vague, abstract, or academic) and might in practice seem difficult to translate into actual policies as a result. They might also sometimes seem to establish contrasting priorities that run against each other, or oversimplify to the point of overlooking what might really be involved to bring about change in a system.
I nevertheless think that these design principles have an important role to play in policy. This is never more true than in the context of local government, or any area of policy where the particularities of implementation and delivery will vary from place to place.
The very flexibility and breadth that can make design principles seem ‘fluffy’ can also give them an important role as policy designers and actors get to grips with the specific needs of their own context.
A country is an extraordinarily complex system. The policy that will work in one spot will not reliably work so well in another, because conditions will vary from place to place. This is one of the main reasons to call for both decentralisation and devolution.
But to advocate for devolution and then develop one-size-fits-all recommendations for each individual place would be to miss the point. Worse, it could simply replicate the dynamics and disempowerment that is generated by a genuinely overcentralised system like our own in the first place.
Design principles are different. They establish the elements of good practice — the things that should be true about how a system ultimately works — but create the leeway for local actors to work together to find ways to meet those principles in practice, and accept that this might mean different approaches in different places.
Probably the best example of this approach can be found in the work of Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in economics. She developed a set of influential design principles for self-governing communities, based on extensive research of how such systems tend to operate around the world. The principles joined the dots from her description of how communities can come together to manage resources to a set of flexible and generalisable guidelines that could then be taken up by others to foster similarly sustainable, efficient, and highly participatory approaches.
In What powers where? our design principles are informed by close study of government systems — including those in other countries — alongside research informed by interviews with officers, politicians, community leaders, and others with strong views about how local systems should operate. And, importantly, they come alongside some quite specific recommendations for both central and local government, including a ‘regional planning’ process that is designed to pull together all the local actors with ‘skin in the game’ so that a true plan for devolved powers and their management can be developed, in line with the principles established. Check out our report to see how we have used design principles to help make the case for a more coherent, whole-system approach to devolution.