The policy guru and economist Marianna Mazzucato has produced another book well worth reading. The Common Good Economy: A New Compass, attempts to provide a strategic perspective framework for policy development that avoids some of the limitations of the dominant economics framework of Cost Benefit Analysis, the focus on the economic commons of Elinor Ostrom’s 1990 work or the neglect of growth and process in Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics. Mazzucato’s ‘compass’ has many advantageous over its rivals.
Unlike much of economics, Mazzucato’s compass acknowledges that behind any policy there should be, and in my view always are, notions of the common good that go beyond technical economics descriptions of market failure. Furthermore, the first four chapters of the book are devoted to drawing various conceptions of the common good from different traditions and making her take on the common good clear. This foundation allow Mazzucato’s work to be in conversation with those coming from very different perspectives and avoids closing down discussion of policy purposes. Of course, Mazzucato is definitely coming from a particular perspective and the insights that she has developed in her other books inform the second half of the book where she develops the five elements that need to surround the common good to keep policy on track.
The first element for guiding public policy is the importance of a sense of Purpose & Directionality. The concepts of directionality and quality encourage thinking beyond sterile anti- / pro- growth arguments. The ‘mission’ idea avoids splitting policy into the many divisions that often leads to short-sighted mismeasured goals executed without any sense of the overall value or purpose. Mission is key to keep the policy going and rally support for it.
Co-creation & Participation is stressed as the second element essential to fulfilling missions for the common good. Missions require contributions from many different stakeholders and such participation will only be sustained if there is collective governance. The myth of private individual and corporations operating in a separate totally independent sphere is rightly dispensed with. Complex interaction between the state, corporations and the individuals is acknowledged as a necessary element of policy to manage.
The third element – Collective Learning & Knowledge – is closely related to co-creation as it stresses the need to share both data and other forms of knowledge, such as indigenous knowledge, in pursuing policy: This interaction of knowledge types is essential if the classical blindness of central planning is to be avoided. Neither centralising in the form of private monopolies of collective knowledge or government’s top-down commands are useful.
The fourth element, Access for all & Reward sharing stresses the need for common good policies to be authentically involved in providing common benefits. Mazzucato points to the necessity of such sharing not only to be in the outcomes of policy but also in its processes. This is essential not only for a policy’s success but also because growing inequality is contra to the common good itself.
The fifth element is the need for Transparency & Accountability which involves setting rules, developing the capacity to govern, ensuring mechanisms for transparency and developing good measures. Here development in human rights law, incorporation of common good elements into constitutional law, resisting the hollowing of public service capabilities, open government and measurement techniques all come into play.
What is meant by each of these elements, and how each is important is further drawn out in various case studies in the third part of the book. Many exciting public good projects from around the world, from the Notting Carnival in London to Urban transformation in a borough of Mexico City are discussed. These case studies are used to illustrate Mazzucato’s compass but also provide some inspiration in themselves along with ideas on how to promote common good projects in different contexts.
Mazzucato’s ‘compass’ certainly provides many useful perspectives and concepts to think about public policy. With five points around a core ‘common good’ the compass metaphor is a bit strained, especially when one points of the compass is ‘directionality’ and travel to all points of the compass are necessary to keep policy on track. Nevertheless, this book provides a broad range of relevant concepts and processes to keep policy on track for the common good. Mazzucato’s framing draws on, and allows conversations, with economics, human rights and the strategic management of such projects. It is more general than Elinor Ostrom’s 1990 work, facilities more participation and debate than the more prescriptive Raworth’s Doughnut and liberates its user from the denial of the common good embedded in most mainstream economics work. The compass does not quite provide the compelling framework for making and monitoring public policy that might have been hope for but it definitely moves us in the right direction, and is a major step along the way.
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