| Popis: |
The closing chapter sets out the characteristics of a new civic bureaucracy which moves from exercising bounded rationality to promoting reflexive, place-based, discursive democracy. It reiterates the poor fit of present practice with contemporary challenges and suggests a new model of civic and ecological governmentality. The bureaucracy would have a new legitimacy – the neutrality of supporting the deliberation of the polity as a co-producing partner and reconnecting society to itself and to nature. The necessary changes in practice can draw on heterodox arguments in economics, organisational development and from sustainability science. The creation of a new civic bureaucracy can be informed by civic republican principles of the safeguards against domination and would address each of Foucault’s aspects of governmentality. It would need to go across all forms of bureaucratic function. The elements of the new bureaucracy would be deliberation and discourse, place-based working, unbounding of rationality, enabling not control, heterarchies and networks, and express new purpose and values. The chapter closes with the potential benefit of an express constitutional expression for bureaucracy and summary comparisons of the proposed and the traditional bureaucratic practice, organisation, and purpose. |
