|
Article Excerpt
Introduction
Eight years after the Y2K scare, when the world economy nearly came to a stop because of a computer bug, the World Wide Web has become ubiquitous, reaching the confines of developed nations as well as major cities in developing countries, and the computer's impact is being increasingly felt in all sectors of activity, from business to education, from entertainment to warfare. As information technology (IT) spreads, most of its development, specifically its industrial and regulatory dimensions, has been spearheaded by national governments--including their subgovernments and agencies. This paper compares implementation practices between two quite different policy environments confronted with the similarly ambitious goals of leading IT diffusion across a national territory.
While not focusing on any specific use of the Internet or on its technological characteristics and constraints, the implementation of nationwide Internet diffusion policies in the United States and France is analyzed using the advocacy coalition framework (ACF), a synthetic approach in implementation theory outlined by Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith. This comparative policy analysis also brings into focus recent debates in public administration, political science, or economic sociology in France and Europe as well as in the United States.
Some of the issues in these debates either have been related to the New Public Management perspective and the necessity to "reinvent the state" to adjust it to marketplace changes and business interests (Bezes, 2005) or have been pointing at the increased interpenetration of the two public and private sectors (Culpepper, Hall, & Palier, 2006; Dobbin, 2001). State and market institutions have long had their histories and differences. The proclaimed ideologies on the two sides of the Atlantic Ocean have also been expressed differently in the respective French and American economic organizations, particularly in the second half of the twentieth century (Bertrand, Kramarz, Schoar, & Thesmar, 2004; Johnson, 1973). With the recent and strong convergence between the political framework of representative democracy with the economic dispensation of the free market, the question of how much public management and state policies have retained a national character gets pointed relevance.
The present era of unprecedented globalization, characterized by the unstoppable power of world factors of demand and supply on national institutions and economies, and the exponential growth of the IT sector demonstrated by the pervasiveness of the Internet, provide a salient combination of circumstances in the discussion of implementation policies. In that context, the question is: what is the role of endogenous and exogenous factors in national policies implementation? This paper presents a contribution in this regard based on a common policy area, specifically the development of the Internet, while comparing countries with similar levels of economic output and more or less identical political institutions and economic philosophies, namely liberal democracies and free-market economies. The choice of France and the United States, besides their differences, derives from their equally democratic regimes, their close standards of living and their proximity in the Globalization Index, where the two countries have fluctuated between the 4th and 25th rank within the last six years (Kearney, 2007). The globalization index measures political, social, and economic globalization through various indices pertaining to factors such as IT connectivity, political engagement, personal contact, and economic integration.
Our research indicates that even with the same top-down approach to policy implementation, the institutional and historical factors are decisive when building advocacy coalitions at the national level. Our conclusions are presented in three sections.
For a program of the magnitude and depth of the Internet, which is the significant part and most visible face of information and communication technologies (ICT) all over the world, and will be referred to in that acceptation in this discussion, different actors (individuals or organizations) as well as different public and private institutions, have had to bind together policies and resources within national or international perspectives for promotion, implementation, organization, and regulation purposes in every country. We will sort them out as much as possible, identifying them as advocacy-coalition actors and policy subsystems in the ACF defined by Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith (1999). We lay the theoretical foundations by discussing the policy communities and subsystems in connection with the concept of social capital, central to belief systems at work in these coalitions and networks.
In a second section, our paper will try to point out the historical roots of these different beliefs, principles, and networks in public economic policy. The national belief systems in the United States and in France at the basis of either policy-making or implementation will be identified in the economic, industrial, and technological developments in each nation, of which the Internet is just the latest episode. We hypothesize here that the style of implementation of a particular policy does not lie in the nature of the policy (Ripley & Franklin, 1986), nor in its design (Keiser & Meier, 1980), but rather in the interests, values, and beliefs of the implementing actors. These appear to be the primary factors that affect the implementation's ultimate success or failure, especially as they determine such critical outcomes as resources mobilization and organizational capacity.
We will finally review the policy outcomes and suggest further research possibilities in technology implementation in a third section. The actions and measures taken in both countries indicate a convergent implementation in the face of different historical and institutional characteristics. The theoretical implications, based on this evidence, confirm that regardless of the outcomes and independently of the nature of the policy, implementation will be a success or a failure in relation to the policy system, its subsystems, and the core beliefs of actors. These are the key factors that inform resources, goals, activities, and finally policy achievements on a national level.
ICT Development and National Advocacy Coalitions
The Global Diffusion of the Internet (GDI) has been achieved through national and local programs that brought together a multiplicity of agents and principals over the course of three decades, starting with the U.S. military projects of the late 1960s up to the industrial expansion of the World Wide Web. The interactions, challenges and contrasts of these local, national, and global forces have been thoroughly documented (Chinn & Fairlie, 2006; Guillen & Suarez, 2005; Milner, 2006). Regardless of the differences in outcomes observed across the world at this stage of Internet development, our purpose is to focus on intracountry coalitions, operating as subgovernmental systems, or in Paul Sabatier's words, as "policy communities." These policy communities will be understood as "sub-systems--composed of bureaucrats, legislative personnel, interest group leaders [and] specialist reporters within a substantive policy area" (Sabatier & Jenkins-Smith, 1999).
The concept of "policy community" has been used in various areas of policy research, including policy formulation, policy adoption, and policy implementation. Its basic constitutive elements would comprise social capital, given as "obligations and expectations, information channels and social norms" (Coleman, 1988), and the network of relationships that can be leveraged by individuals or groups in order to achieve specific goals (Durkin, 2000) either as immaterial as cohesion in an American neighborhood (Forrest & Kearns, 2001) or as material as economic development in the distant Far East (Chen, 2005). The existence of policy communities is predicated not only on social capital but more precisely on the use of these common norms, expectations, beliefs, and relationships to address relevant issues and initiate collective actions. One of the dimensions of the globalization trend is the enlargement of the policy community on the one hand and the subsequent increase in adopting and sharing common practices and values on the other hand. This is apparent in the adoption of the Internet as a technological and economic tool and even more significantly in the way the penetration of this tool was implemented across nations.
The "policy communities" observed in...
|
