An emergent consensus on public services.
| Author | Needham, Catherine |
The Relational State
Edited by Graeme Cooke and Rick Muir
IPPR, 2012
At the launch of the national evaluation of the Personal Health Budgets pilots in early 2013, the evaluation team expressed some surprise about how much people had valued the time spent sitting down with a professional to talk at length about their interests and needs--rather than this being merely the means to an end of a care plan and a budget (for the full evaluation report see Forder et al., 2012). Such a finding will not surprise contributors to this new IPPR collection on The Relational State. Although the editors make a claim for the novelty of the content--stating that it replaces the 'virtual silence across much of the centre-left on questions relating to public services and statecraft' (p. 3)--it is best seen as a culmination of work on public services emanating from a range of bodies. These include the IPPR itself, Demos, the Young Foundation, NESTA, the New Economics Foundation, Participle and the RSA. Together these works signal an emergent consensus on the value of relational accounts of public services: that 'recognising the importance of human relationships could revolutionise the role of the state', as the subtitle of the collection puts it.
The lead essays in the collection are provided by Geoff Mulgan and Marc Stears; they each provide a wide-ranging and provocative piece, followed by shorter articles on specific aspects of public services which situate them in the context of Mulgan's account of the 'relational state'. The editors are keen to highlight that there are key differences in what is argued by different contributors: this is not a single blueprint for action. Mulgan, for example, takes a much more instrumental view of relationships and a more interventionist view of the state than Stears. Mulgan, along with the editors and contributors such as Nick Pearce, seem to be explicitly looking for a new 'centre-left statecraft' for Labour, and to make peace with its governing legacy along the way. The editors position the 'relational state' argument as a 'blend of "Blue Labour" and "New Labour" thinking' (p. 10). Others such as Stears are less haunted by the 'dominant statecraft of the last Labour government' (p. 8) and more concerned about the democratic potential of a more relational politics. Whereas for Mulgan better relationships are a crucial element of achieving better outcomes in public services, in Stears' essay democratic relationships have intrinsic value. States themselves cannot be relational...
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