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Mr. Guido Enthoven

“The power of democracy is to learn; to move with more and better ideas slowly but surely towards 't...


Dirk Wolfson


The mismatch between knowledge and democracy

A number of things are fundamentally wrong in the knowledge infrastructure of democracy. Useable knowledge and public service motivations of professional civil servants and citizens are crowded out in bureaucratic control, independent research is under pressure as consultants take over, vital information is withheld from parliament, and politics is driven by teletext, instead of the other way around. The author proposes a new architecture for the use of knowledge from within government and the transfer of ideas from outside.

There is a wealth of useable knowledge around, and so the question is where to find it and how to tap it. A sterling example is the way a handful of people at the Dutch Treasury found a way out of the banking crisis, last year, setting the stage for interventions elsewhere as well. Ingredients: know your business, know who are the outside experts, talk to them, and step into a void of leadership the moment you see it.  

There is always an element of serendipity in finding the right solution, but success can be organized by reinventing the civil service. Make governance lean and mean, get rid of consultants as ‘escape hatches’ and have a program of intellectual empowerment of the civil service, including frequent rotation with the academic and the ‘real’ world outside. Vitalize five independent think tanks to cover research and development(s) in the broad fields of public interest: human capital (people; SCP), environment (planet; RIVM + PBL), economic affairs (profit; CPB), rule of law (WODC) and international affairs (Clingendael) as sounding boards and transfer points between knowledge and democracy; let them keep a register of academics and practitioners with proven value added in expertise, and remodel governance in situational contracting – see my plea in session 5.1 – by giving front-line professionals broad mandates to do their professional thing on the basis of apply-or-explain. Delegation and empowerment grant the right to do the wrong things in order to make – on balance – the better of it.

Literature:

D.J. Wolfson (2009) Situational contracting as a mode of governance (forthcoming)

D.J. Wolfson (2007) Keer de dreiging van het eigen gelijk, Staatscourant, March 13.


 

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