The primary contribution of this report is to promote greater learning and discourse about governance and transformation. There is a need for open and dynamic discourse about the purposes and tasks of the public domain and about public policy. All indications about public decision-making are that the likelihood for decisions to be implemented are much greater after it has been exposed to rigorous public debate and discourse. A process that encourages buy-in from those who are going to be affected by the decision is more legitimate and therefore will last better through the turbulent and difficult times of implementation.
There is a need for the creation of a learning society as the constitutive condition for a new moral and political order. Learning is the understanding that develops following reflection upon some puzzle in our experience about people, events and processes . The learning society is one which strives to place these values and processes of learning at the centre of the public domain, so that conditions can be established for all to develop their capacities, for institutions to respond openly and imaginatively to a period of change. It is also one where the differences between communities to become a source of reflective understanding.
A learning society, therefore, needs to celebrate the qualities of being open to new ideas, listening to, as well as expressing perspectives, reflecting on and inquiring into solutions to new dilemmas, learning from experience, co-operating in the practice of change and critically reviewing it.
Learning, however, cannot come about without a conscious endeavour on our part. Institutions and policy processes have to be created which encourage learning and openness to ideas. We need to move away from considering concepts and practices as the ”only best way of achieving“ success. Without appropriate structures that bring together communities of discourse, the conditions for learning will not exist: it is not possible to create the virtues of learning without the forms of life and institutions that sustain them. The preconditions of a good polity are justice, democracy and public action.
If the barriers to organisational learning are to be overcome, this will be through the strengthening and widening of access to the arena of public discourse and the political process that relate to it. As the search for meaningful solutions to the challenges facing public management intensifies, we need to deepen public engagement and open discourse. This is a contribution towards the questioning of supposedly ”objectively derived“ and ”neutral“ answers to the complex challenges facing our society today.
The key reasons why so many that sought to effect degrees of change on their respective societies have focused attention on the state is the scale and the power that the state is able to mobilise behind such changes.
The problem, however, is that the promise that the state offers to those who seek to change society is hollow unless the state is capable of being mobilised to act effectively in a disciplined fashion towards a pre-determined direction. This is the reason why so many journeys at changing societies have been accompanied by programmes to transform the state. At the heart of public service reform then lies not technocratic desires to pursue concern of academic disciplines, but rather creating the capacity for the state to act in a disciplined and decisive manner.
Despite the broad framework that underlies the reasons why people seek to change the state, the process of change is long and is in important respects technocratic. Good intentions do not simply translate into good outcomes. There is always a need for a process through which the translation is managed. Many honest attempts at transforming the state, by people as committed and as intelligent as us have failed. There are many lessons to be learnt from their failure. There are also lessons to be learnt from those who have succeeded. We should also allow ourselves the opportunity to learn from our own experiences in the past few years. We should reflect, document and debate. If we do not do this we will not generate knowledge at a pace rapid enough to match the needs of governance. We will be forced to keep repeating old poems simply because we have not given ourselves time to compose new ones. This is a challenge to people both inside and outside state institutions.
The scale and importance of an initiative like our public service transformation will benefit grately if the numbers of those contributing to the discussion are much bigger than only those that are directly affected. It is our hope in building the capability of the DPSA in generating and packaging information, and disseminating it within the public service and to the broader population, that we will play a small part in stimulating such discourse and learning.