One Workspace, Two Approaches to Governance
While I was in the Public Governance models’ lecture during my Masters, it was pretty much established in my mind, with great conviction, that the only way of governance I support and probably would want to take-up at future work assignments is the bottom-up approach. But soon enough, I started working which meant on-the-job learning and application of theory into practice, particularly in the case of public governance. I wouldn’t be wrong to say that I discovered various realities of public governance having worked at two drastically different levels, firstly in my previous job at a single Urban Local Body (ULB) level and in my current job as a Chief Minister’s Good Governance Associate in Haryana and representing the Chief Minister’s Office in Bhiwani district.
So, let me break down my interaction with the two approaches to governance in the simplest way possible.
What are the Bottom-up and Top-down approaches?
In layman terms, a top-down governance approach has a top tier of the governance hierarchy formulating a policy or an intervention starting from ‘what something is’ to ‘how something should be done’. All tiers in the hierarchy are bound to accept this model in implementation. Whereas, a bottom-up approach follows a rather non-centrist method in formulating and implementing a policy/intervention. In this approach, the lower tiers of governance like the citizens, local bodies, and civil society organizations contribute to decision-making, which is used in designing and implementation of a policy. Now, very obviously, there are pros and cons to both these approaches, which I further elaborate using examples from my work experience as a CMGGA in Bhiwani. First, let’s look at the top-down approach.
Saksham Haryana
Saksham Haryana is a good example of a state-level top-down governance model in every sense. Saksham Haryana aims at making primary and middle school students grade-level competent through systemic interventions. The project’s scope, scale, implementation, review and monitoring mechanisms have been designed by a team of professionals working with the Chief Minister’s office in collaboration with the state education department. The district administration, especially the education department officials at the district-level, block-level, and support staff are essentially bound to follow the directed process.
Some pros of this directed-by-the-centre approach have been that it helped the government of Haryana achieve some of the targets of the project in record time. It was possible to scale a set of tested and proven interventions, and then monitor and evaluate them, in an entire state with extreme governance challenges because of uniformity in implementation. In the first phase of the project, Saksham 1.0, targeted at six subject-grade combinations, all the 7 education blocks became grade level competent. The cons, to discuss a few, in the project were that interventions that ‘come from the top’ gave little autonomy to the local units to change the elements of implementation to suit their specific contexts. The officials at local are also prone to resort to unethical means of achieving the target due to the pressure from the top and competition across other units. However, the top challenge faced in a top-down approach is the constriction of a timeline. In any phenomenon involving systemic change and development, different units have different timelines of change, dependent on the local context.
Urban Local Bodies
There’s a good chance you have come across the tons of research available on why bottom-up governance is an ideal choice in an urban setting. This is because ULBs are our most basic unit of local-self-government and cities are full of active citizens and a civil society willing to contribute to the decision-making process. This was experienced during Swachh Survekshan this year across districts in Haryana. Under the Swachh Survekshan League 2020, I as a CMGGA have worked with the Bhiwani Municipal Council to develop and implement an action plan for solid waste management.
Devising an action plan for the district basis a broad set of guidelines for waste management provided a valuable opportunity of inculcating local context into governance planning. This method of solving for challenges in waste management works for almost all cities because Indian cities are organic in nature of their development. Each of them is at a different stage of urban development experience, resulting in each of them dealing with a unique set of challenges. Hence the action plan we devised for Bhiwani, with the involvement of ULB administration, sanitary inspectors, third parties, consultants and citizens of the district was an amalgamation of ideas that are specific for the ULB, making its implementation way easier and meaningful than say a centrally planned design. Autonomy in creating the action plan and implementation of the same allowed us to gear the plan towards establishing the infrastructure and put in place a waste processing mechanism creating the maximum impact in the limited time available.
However, there are a few issues with the bottom-up approach as well. I would like to express these challenges in the form of a set of questions, that frankly, I do not yet have complete answers to, and I would appreciate if the readers of this blog could contribute to answering:
- To what extent can we make design and implementation participatory, considering there could be technical aspects of policy?
- How reliable is this approach, considering local governments are vulnerable to local pressure groups, short-term interests and biases?
- Are the policies formulated through this approach scalable? Can this approach answer large-scale complex issues, for example, environmental problems?
- Can the top tier of governance effectively monitor and evaluate a bunch of locally made policies of change, given there would be limited common indicators across them?
Which approach is superior between the two?
The obvious answer that comes to my mind is: ‘a balanced combination of the two approaches’. A method where the top tier formulates policies and interventions that have enough flexibility for the bottom tiers to contribute contextual improvements to the extent the policy demands, and still fall into the purview of monitoring by the higher tiers, will be an excellent balance between the two approaches. This is often seen in policies implemented through ‘guidelines’. Guidelines play a vital role in establishing the scope and vision of what a policy is trying to achieve, with enough autonomy to the local tiers to drive the implementation in their context. This helps in policy achieving the optimum output and at the same time fall into the purview of monitoring mechanisms. There is no doubt that often the policies of the government are designed with a lack of several lenses that are a basic necessity not just in one state, but throughout India. Our policies and interventions can definitely be more inclusive in their design and implementation, staging a strong argument for the bottom-up approach of public governance.
However, there is not enough literature and data to establish clear causation between either of the approaches and successful implementation. Until there is visibility on this, the answer to one question drives this narrative: Who decides on which approach to adopt?
