Re-emphasising the importance of public encounters, ten years on: a review and an agenda

In recent political science and public administration scholarship – particularly in the last decade – there has been sustained focus in on the micro politics of service configuration, programme administration and frontline delivery. Whether couched in the language of ‘policy feedback loops’, ‘administrative burdens’ or ‘street-level bureaucracy’, influential streams of scholarship in this field reveal that the design and implementation of services, policies and programmes are laden with political implications. They suggest that the interaction at the frontlines of policy can serve to reinforce or undermine elite agendas, and empower or disempower citizens. However, they do not tell us much about what that interaction actually entails and how it matters. They tend to elide or ignore a valuable pocket of scholarship focused specifically on that interaction – work on ‘public encounters’. Our aim in this paper is to put the spotlight on ‘public encounters’, drawing on a steady growth of bespoke literature that has followed in the wake of Bartels’ (2013) revival of the concept. Besides the academic relevance of public encounters we want to argue that understanding the experience of how citizens meet the State is highly important in the context of declining trust in democratic states , persistent inequality and growing numbers of protest. On the one hand, public encounters offer opportunities for improved engagement between citizens and state agencies, relieving those who are most vulnerable and dependent on state support. On the other hand, done poorly they run the risk of deepening conflict and difference. In-depth analyses of public encounters at different scales and in various forms of governance offer highly necessary reflections on practice (Schon 1983) and provides public administration with an avenue for affective capacity building. We review these developments and debates with two key outcomes in mind. One is to underline the fundamental importance of public encounters scholarship for understanding developments and challenges in contemporary governance. Two is to underpin an agenda for governance research and reform. We point to promising ways in which prominent programmes for research and real-world reform might benefit from incorporating this empirical and theoretical emphasis.