MPA 834 Winter 2012:

1. MPA 834Winter 2012: Defence Decision-making

2. Aim To examine the relationship between policy and the defence administrative structure that determines national defence outcomes in Canada. In other words, to look at ‘who decides what and how they do so’ and why it matters to national defence.

4. William Jenkins defines public policy as: “a set of inter-related decisions taken by a political actor or group of actors concerning the selection of goals and the means of achieving them within a specific situation where these decisions should, in principle, be within the power of these actors to achieve.”

6. The Decision Making Structure • Policy is decided within defined structures composed of: • Actors with specific degrees of authority The Organization that join the actors The Decision-making process employed.

7. Defence Policy . … is the product of sets of decisions concerning inter-related national defence goalsand the means of achieving them taken by political, military, and public service actors working in a defined organization employing a dynamic formal and informal (but regularized) decision making process.

8. How do actors decide between choices? • Rational Actor Model • Organizational Process Model • Bureaucratic Politics Model

9. Rational Actor Model • According to this model actors attempt to discover the most rational answer to a policy problem and to act on it. • Policy, therefore, can be explained as free of prejudice, unitary, centrally controlled, completely informed, and value maximizing.

10. Organizational Process Model • “… deliberate choices and more as outputsof large organizations functioning according to standard patterns of behaviour”. • Policy, therefore, can be explained in organizational terms: i.e. organizational ‘tendencies,’ interests, and welfare.

11. Bureaucratic Politics Model • policy is determined in a ‘market’ “… by bargaining along regularized circuits among actors in organizations”. Policy, therefore, reflects the outcome of a struggle between individuals and organizations or bureaus and it is essentially political – the politics of groups and their interests.

12. From Whence Comes Policy? • What are the sources of policy? • What generates the so-called ‘policy process’? • What sustains some policies and defeats extant policies?

14. Four Types of Ideas • World Views • Principled beliefs • Causal beliefs • Essentially contested beliefs

15. World Views • … deeply embedded concepts in the culture that affect modes of thought and public discourse. • Such powerful cultural ideas as religious maxims and political ideas such as individual liberty, equity, national sovereignty, and ethnical superiority are types of “world views”.

16. Principled Beliefs • … ideas that specify criteria for judging right from wrong; the just act from the unjust act. • Such an ideas, often expressed in law, rules, and norms, changes policy once it has wide political support and a measurable criterion for implementation.

17. Causal Beliefs • Positive and negative ideas about cause and effect • They derive their power from the shared consensus of elites or authority figures like politicians, generals, religious leaders, teachers, and rock stars. • Casual beliefs get their power to change policies from the size of the consensus behind them.

19. Essentially Contested Concepts • “Essentially contested concepts involve widespread agreement on a concept (e.g., "fairness"), but not on the best realization thereof.” • They are “… concepts the proper use of which inevitably involves endless disputes about their proper uses on the part of their users." • They are disputes that “… cannot be settled by appeal to empirical evidence, linguistic usage, or the canons of logic alone "

20. Contested Ideas as Perceptions • Perceptions … “the way something is regarded, understood, or interpreted.” • “… aware of something through the senses.” • Perceptions may be false indicators of reality and even idiotic, but they can be powerful political motivators.

21. The governing model

22. MPA 834 • Policy is the product of sets of decisions concerning inter-related national defence goalsand the means of achieving them taken by political, military, and public service actors working in a defined organization employing a dynamic formal and informal (but regularized) decision making process. • MPA 834: Let’s have fun watching the dynamics of structure and policy in matters of Canada’s national defence.