Walking on the Bright Side of the Road: Positive Public Policy and Decentralisation

The ‘positive’ movement in public administration and public policy (PPA/P) exhort scholars to ‘walk on the bright side of the road’ by exploring, understanding, and disseminating notable instances of good practice, promising developments, and policy success. ‘Positive’ scholars aim to study successful or standout examples of public governance to learn what should be supported and replicated, drawing on varied national cases to detect ‘pockets of effectiveness’. This broad approach offers an opportunity to redress an embedded reflexive negativity bias resulting from a documented tendency of real world policy interventions to fail to live up to the standards implied by abstract concepts and theories. In this spirit, this paper, drawing on a small number of case studies, seeks to advance two related arguments: firstly, that focusing on local and sub-national policy successes provides a rich potential evidence base to inform policy responses to shared societal challenges. Secondly, it argues that the efforts of many European countries to proactively territorially decentralise, through establishing new forms of local and regional governance, has itself been a success, and should be built upon in the years ahead through enhancing sub-national capacity to innovate.