The consensus after the stand-off on the Lokpal Bill is a single solution will not eliminate corruption. Similarly, one policy reform will not create the hundreds of millions of jobs required in the next few years to turn a demographic challenge into a dividend. For this too, many policies must be designed and implemented. Also, one big decision will not build the infrastructure we desperately need, for which actions are required on many fronts. To meet the major challenges faced by India, we need decisions in which many agencies and many stakeholders must cooperate. The problem is: if only the coalition cabinet would decide; if only political parties in Parliament would agree; if only civil society, government, and business could come to a consensus for reform. The inability to quickly take good decisions that will not unravel is inhibiting reform and growth. Obtaining consensus is a big challenge in all democracies, as the US’s recent experience attests. It is even more difficult in India, the largest and most diverse democracy in the world, with its many sections scrambling for inclusion and equity in growth. However the challenge cannot be avoided. Therefore participants in policy-making in India must learn and apply techniques of faster, consultative decision making.
Organizations and societies learn willy-nilly, even if not deliberately. Consensus often emerges from contention. And decisions become obvious when inevitable. ‘India will come through somehow, it always has’, is a common refrain. The problem with this ‘it will happen somehow’ approach is that it is uncertain and may take too long. Therefore questions before India’s leaders are: Can consensus-building be deliberately improved? Can decision-making be learned? Are there techniques and tools and best practices that can be applied? Fortunately the answers are affirmative.
Cultures of consensus-building and decision-making can be changed. If they were immutably embedded in national genes one would not observe, as one does, different cultures and abilities for decision-making in business organizations in the same country. Moreover, state governments within the same country have different performance cultures. Further, even within the same states and same organizations, cultures of consensus and styles of decision-making change under different leaders. Analyses of what changed and how the change came about provide the insights required for changing organizational decision-making abilities. We do not have to remain dysfunctionally argumentative Indians.
The first insight, which Mark Moore of the Kennedy School explains in Creating Public Value, is an essential difference between strategic decision-making processes for public policy contrasted with private enterprise. Shareholder value is easy to quantify; what the public values is more difficult to understand and measure because public policy stakeholders have more diverse needs and beliefs. Nevertheless, since the purpose of public enterprises (and government) is to serve the people, the people must be consulted and their expectations understood when policies are framed and decisions taken. Therefore, stakeholder consultation for strategy formulation has been added as a critical pre-requisite of the Results-Framework-Document (RFD) process being rolled out by the Indian government. With RFD, every ministry and department will be measured on its performance against objectives based on stakeholder requirements. Citizens’ Charters are another tool for the same purpose.
The second insight is that the quality of the process of arriving at decisions may be even more critical than the quality of the decisions. A perfect policy is worth naught if it cannot be implemented. In Managing Policy Reform, Brinkerhoff and Crosby recommend concepts and tools for decision-makers. They distinguish ‘stroke-of-the-pen’ policies from long haul processes of reform. Therein is the difference between the ‘second generation’ reforms that are pending in India, regarding governance, urban renewal, labor markets, land, etc and the ‘first generation’ untying of licensing in 1991. Three characteristics of long haul processes they point to are: policy implementation is not a linear, coherent process; no single agency can manage the policy-implementation effort; and new policies do not come (merely) with budgets. Policy reform, they insist, requires more attention to the building of the process by which the ongoing involvement of stakeholders, mobilization of resources and actions, and monitoring of process is done, than to the content of a single policy announcement. In One Economics Many Recipes, Dani Rodrik’s analysis of the industrial policies that have enabled some countries to build larger and more competitive industrial bases than others, he comes to the same conclusion: that process matters more than specific policy. Good process with involvement of policy-makers and stakeholders enables faster learning about what works and what does not and why, and also builds support for implementation.
The third insight is that for stakeholder consultations to be effective, and for participative policy evolution to work well, deliberations amongst the participants must be designed to arrive at shared insights and consensus on decisions. Listening is the key: listening especially to those with whom we do not agree. Too many debates in the country—in Parliament, in the media, and in seminars—are set up as debates to be won. With an antagonistic and often insulting way of debating issues, it becomes very difficult to arrive at a consensus amongst the adversaries thereafter. The Navajo Indians in the USA believe that if one ends a dispute with a winner and a loser, one dispute will end but another will surely have started, because trust will not be restored. Faster growth requires trust in institutions and in processes of reforms. Therefore debates amongst economists about whether the Indian economy will grow at nine per cent or 9.2 percent are academic unless good processes are installed and institutional reforms are made.