B. Framework of World Public Order

THE WORKING CRITERIA FOR POLICY SELECTION

Geoffrey Vickers

Little Mead Goring-On- Thames

Reading RGB 9ED, England

I have been asked to prepare a note on the working criteria for policy selection. I start from a view of the policy-making process which is different from that implied in our conference prospectus, so I must first explain this view.

I cannot attach reality to “policy making” except in relation to some “po- litical” human system in which policy making is going on. The countries represented at this conference are regulated today by complex sets of “poli- cies.” Each of them depends on or is characterized by a host of internal and external relations, and in each of them governing bodies at national and local levels are monitoring some of these relations and trying to maintain them at levels which are as acceptable as is deemed consistent with other demands and with total resources. The standards which define these levels of acceptability are the operative standards which express the current policy selection.

Some of these relations are conditions of the society’s survival or of its growth. Externally, for example, its balance of payments reflects the relation between what it is drawing from beyond its frontiers and what the world outside is accepting from it. Internally its budget surplus or deficit reflects the relation between what it is trying to do and the resources available for the job. Cows and candle flames, no less than nation states, preserve a form more enduring than their substance only by drawing on the milieu and discarding into it. Their total physical capacity is limited by what they can thus metabolize, and they perish unless intakes balance outflows. A great deal of policy making is directed simply to preserving the integrity and continuance of the system. I will call the relevant criteria “metabolic cri- teria.”

Allied to these are criteria of growth. These suspiciously cancerous cri- teria have long dominated business and are influential in national govern- ment (less so in local government). They are currently being qualified even in business but they remain important, if only because increased resources are supposed to increase the scope for initiative and sometimes really do so.

Insofar as any human system acknowledges any purpose other than to survive and to grow, a new field of policy making emerges, regulated by what I will call functional criteria. All our countries anxiously monitor the level of unemployment, poverty, health, education, crime, and a host of other indices, observing how fast these are changing and in what direction and comparing the state of these relations with the operative standards

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which define what they “ought to be.” To a much lesser (although in- creasing) extent they concern themselves with similar indices in other countries and for the world as a whole, partly because external disasters may have internal effects and partly through a dawning sense of global solidarity.

These surveys of the “state of the system” reveal areas of promise and threat. In areas of promise the achievement of present standards may in- vite us to raise them. The more frequent areas of threat show current standards unattained or current attainment threatened by changes in cir- cumstances and call for different or more intense effort. Since the total demand implicit in all these new promises and threats, as in the earlier ones, is bound to be more than we can meet, choice is still needed to define the most acceptable new mix of standards which it seems realistic to set.

On any redefinition of policy the changed set of operative standards will be related to the old. It will have some continuity, partly because of the momentum and vested interest (in a good as well as a bad sense) generated by every ongoing policy, partly because even in revolutionary times these standards of the acceptable (which structure the minds of individuals as well as the policies of governments) do not change completely overnight.

The changed set of operative standards will also have some discontinutiy because it is generated by a dialectical process. More attention will probably be paid to areas which current policies neglected or handled unsuccessfully. Less attention may be paid to areas which current policies have handled so successfully as to abate their urgency. Furthermore, external events, like the current threat to oil supplies and the worsening terms of trade, may change the relative importance of different fields merely by requiring a radical relocation of resources to all of them. Thus, the working criteria for policy selection are a function of the ongoing state of a specific historical situation. This situation has several aspects. For Western States today, for example, these include the present state of the world’s physical resources and equally the present state and policy of other national systems, its own internal state as expressed in economic and other statistics and equally the present attitude of its citizens towards the values expressed in its policies, and to a host of other values which may not be so expressed but which pro- foundly influence them.

I realize that our conference is designed to focus on world problems. But I do not think that our countries can effectively contribute to these problems except by the internal and external policies which they adopt. These can only be considered in the context of the country concerned. Moreover, the impact which they are having now, for good and ill, on the rest of the world is the fruit of their current policies and invites appraisal in that light. We start from a highly specific-and highly unstable-historical situation.

If this be a valid summary of the policy-making process, three key ques- tions arise. How do human systems define the situations which invite con- trol by policy and changes of policy?. How do they generate the standards which define what is unacceptable? And how do they cut down the rival claims of inconsistent standards, so as to contain them all within the limits

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of available resources? Recent developments have thrown more light on the first of these questions than on the second or third.

The pattern of promise and threat which alerts attention may be general, as when a British parliamentary party prepares an election manifesto or an American president prepares a “State of the Union” message, or it may be specific as when a specific promise or, more usually, threat demands atten- tion in its own right. However wide or narrow the initial concern, the first step is-or ought to be -to analyze and model the situation which gives rise to it. This usually shows that both the factual situation and the policy issues involved are wider than they at first appeared.

The clearest example known to me arose out of a very limited, specific threat. In 1961 a British minister of transport set up a departmental working party of architects and engineers to study the problem of vehicular conges- tion in towns. In its report in 1963l the working party observed in effect that congested traffic in towns is not a problem but a symptom of the wider problem that modern towns generate more vehicular traffic than their an- cient layout can contain. Towns could be so designed that they could accom- modate more vehicular traffic than they do now. Equally, their activities could be so regulated that they generated less vehicular traffic. But towns and their activities, not roads and traffic, are the minimal variables which need to be considered, merely to understand the problem.

Similarly, success in solving the problem cannot be measured simply in the abatement of vehicular traffic congestion. Any change made to improve the state of this variable will affect others that no planner can afford to ignore, notably pedestrian access, safety, parking, amenity, and “visual squalor.” Different combinations of these, all imperfect, are to be had at different prices, but none of the alternatives can be judged simply by its effect on vehicular traffic.

The lessons for policy makers to be drawn from the Buchanan report can, I think, be summarized as follows:

1. Identify the minimum number of variables so interconnected that they must all be considered in order to understand the problem and to estimate the probable result of any action or inaction (in other words, identify the simplest relevant system).

2. Identify the minimum number of values which cannot be ignored in deciding what results count as costs or benefits.

3. Identify the constraints which limit the policy makers’ powers of inter- vention including:

constraints imposed by the limitation of the resources at his disposal; constraints imposed by the need to preserve the stability of the sys- tem so identified; and constraints imposed by the demands of consistency with other current policies.

4. Identify points of diminishing or increasing return in pursuit of alterna- tive possible policies.

5 . Identify elements of risk and uncertainty, their possible range and relative importance, and their relation to various time horizons.

Vickers : Working Criteria for Policy Selection 61

6 . Identify relevant time relations, notably the lead times and fructifying times of various possible courses of action, and their relation to the time horizons beyond which crucial elements of risk and uncertainty defy estimation.

This kind of policy analysis is in my view of great although limited value. It will not of itself give one best answer or even any answer to the question of what the new policy should be. But it will so redefine the situation that policy makers and their constituents can identify both the facts and the val- ues which cannot be ignored when estimating the multiple, disparate, and conflicting costs and benefits which will flow from any solution. It is, of course, the function of the planner to minimize these conflicts and to find ways of realizing so far as possible values which at first seem inconsistent. But choice there must be. A policy, like any other work of art, depends on exclusion of whatever is inconsistent with what it is designed to realize.

In calculating cost and benefit, Western minds have been so long accus- tomed to expressing all in a common money of account that they find it difficult to understand how the mind compares disparates and weighs im- ponderables. Because we manifestly do so, the paradox must lie in the way we choose to express it. Nonetheless, it demands much closer attention. I will not burden this note with my views on the ways in which areas of human interaction come to be regarded as regulable by human control and develop and change the operative standards by which this control is regu- lated (this is manifestly a historical process on which I have written at length elsewhere*), nor will I repeat here my views about the ways in which disputes are resolved between rival criteria fighting for realization in conditions which make them competitive or conflicting. I will only repeat my conviction that policy making is not like playing chess. It cannot be reduced to calculation, not because (as in chess) the calculations would be too complex, but because in chess, the rules of the game and the meaning of success are unalterable data, while in managing human affairs at any level from the personal to the planetary, the rules of the game and the nature of success are precisely what have to be decided.

NOW AND REFERENCES 1. The Buchanan Report. Traffic in Towns. 1963. London. H.M.S.O. 2. The most recent of these are: Values, norms and policies, (Policy Sci. 4: No. 1 , March

1973); Motivation theory-a cybernetic contribution (Policy Sci. 18: No. 4, July 1973); and Policy Making in Local Government (Local Government Studies, Feb- ruary 1974).