State, bureaucracy and power - Reflections of a bureaucrat

2024-11-07 - Blog

There’s no point in denying it: I’m a bureaucrat.

As a career government worker, I’m part of the machinery of the state, for better or worse. I find the English expression “public servant” elegantly side-steps this reality and focuses on an idealized “public” that we ostensibly serve. The French expression, “fonctionnaire”, is perhaps more honest: I serve a specific function in the state apparatus. Part of my role is enforcing rules and maintaining the bureaucracy. I am, in one word, a bureaucrat.

Government bureaucracy is often seen as an annoying but necessary part of our collective life: a set of procedures, rules, forms and processes whose role is to allow us to live in society. But beneath that boring surface lies a deep power imbalance. We bureaucrats wield significant power. We’re an essential part of a system that often oppresses, discriminates and crushes people, armed with a plethora of seemingly incomprehensible rules they must follow.

Yet we can make a positive impact on people’s lives and help people get what they need from their government.

How do we navigate this apparent contradiction?

The power of the state and its bureaucracy

Allow me a personal/historical detour to illustrate how bureaucracy can be harmful.

While researching my daughter’s ancestry, I found out that they have tens of Acadian ancestors, both on my side and on their mother’s side. This led me to dig deeper in the history of Acadia.

At the beginning of the 17th century, French settlers arrived in today’s Nova Scotia and established a colony. They formed communities, villages, and reclaimed salty marshes for agriculture, on the land of the Mi’kmaq people. In 1713, the Utrecht Treaty forced France to cede all of Acadia to England. Between 1713 and 1755, Acadians were pretty much allowed to continue to live their lives by the new regime, and the population grew rapidly.

England required their new subjects to swear an oath of unconditional loyalty. The Acadians only accepted an “oath of neutrality” - they wouldn’t fight alongside France, but they wouldn’t fight alongside England against the French. This was unacceptable for the English authorities.

In 1755, the Crown decided to deport all families of French descent from Acadia. It was a massive tragedy: families split apart, losing everything they had built, thousands of them dead in the process. Some consider it the first state-sponsored act of ethnic cleansing in North America (John Mack Faragher, A Great and Noble Scheme). Acadians families ended up all around the world. Some of them found their way back to today’s New Brunswick and Quebec, and many French Canadians are descendants of these Acadians.

Why all this suffering? Because they stood their ground. Because they didn’t bow to the power of the state. Because they refused to “sign a form”, so to speak.

The example may be extreme, but the point stands: at its core, bureaucracy is about enforcing rules, often under the implicit threat of coercion. The violence of bureaucracy is not always physical (though it sometimes is); it’s also about systemic control, allowing or denying access, imposing fines, and even depriving people of their freedom.

We don’t have to go back to the 18h century. Closer to us, examples abound.

The tax system is a prime example of bureaucratic complexity. The Income Tax Act, along with its hundreds and hundreds of intricate regulations, rules, processes and court decisions, creates a maze that we are expected to navigate perfectly. Even a small mistake can have dire, life-altering consequences. Like often, privilege plays a massive role: literacy in English or French, access to accountants, and high income, to name a few, allow some to navigate the system and profit from it, while leaving less privileged people vulnerable.

Immigration is another one: bureaucrats have the power to alter the course of people’s lives on a daily basis. Failure to fill out the complex form in the “proper way” can mean delays, or worse, deportation.

These are not trivial - not following rules nearly impossible to fully understand can lead to significant hardship, from fines to imprisonment.

In my opinion, there’s a good reason some people don’t trust their government: it’s the only entity that can fine them, seize their property, or even deprive them of their freedom.

But bureaucracy is a bulwark against arbitrary decisions

If bureaucracy enables state power and causes harm, why do I remain a part of it? Despite its flaws, I believe a well-functioning state is necessary, at least in our current political and economic landscape. It can protect us from arbitrary power, which a healthy and transparent bureaucracy can help control and mitigate.

What’s the alternative to a bureaucracy governed by rules and procedures? Arbitrary decisions made by the powerful, unchecked discrimination, and unpredictable uses of authority. While it may seem contradictory on the surface, what often looks like arbitrary bureaucratic rules and procedures are needed to reduce bureaucrats’ individual power.

Take a second to imagine a world where representatives of the state could make decisions that affect you and your loved ones, without having to justify themselves or to follow a set of rules or guidelines. This would be far worse than the rigid structures of bureaucracy.

In the end, while bureaucracy can enable harm and state power, it remains an essential safeguard in liberal democratic states.

How do we tilt the balance in the right direction? What can we do as bureaucrats to temper the worst sides of bureaucracy and reinforce its good ones? How can we be less “fonctionnaire” and more “public servant”?

How to be helpful bureaucrats

Here are some things I think we can do as bureaucrats to counterbalance the power of the state.

Focus on desired outcomes, not on the rules

Rules that define a bureaucracy shouldn’t exist “for their own sake”: they’ve been put in place to implement some form of policy, some form of wanted result. It is our job to understand why a rule exists, to figure out what’s the desired outcome. Any public servant will tell you: there’s an impressive amount of rules and procedures that actually no longer facilitate their intended outcome. When we encounter such a rule, it is our job to challenge it, to highlight its lack of efficacy, and to try to help change it.

Don’t just hire and promote rule followers

To foster a culture where challenging inefficient rules and procedures is the norm, we need to stop hiring and promoting people solely based on how well they follow the established rules and procedures. We need to value and cherish a robust “challenge function”.

Hire diverse perspectives

To alleviate biases and to uncover gaps in our understanding of our service works, we need diverse teams. I’m thinking of diversity in its widest acceptance: diversity of cultural backgrounds, genders, ages, bodies, sexual orientation, ideological positions, etc. Under-representation perpetuates inequality by deciding whose voices are heard within the system. We need teams that reflect the people we serve.

Work in the open - Don’t gatekeep knowledge

Knowledge is power, as the saying goes. Don’t keep knowledge to yourself. Share learnings with others, inside and outside the government, explain your processes. Don’t refrain from celebrating where you’ve been right, but perhaps more importantly, don’t fear admitting where you’ve been wrong, where things didn’t work. Be open by default, so others can learn from your work.

Don’t just add new layers - Focus resources where they make a difference

It’s an age-old classic in government: when something doesn’t work, the go-to move is to make a case to get temporary funding for a “project”. This usually leads to brand new sectors, with multiple executives and hundreds of employees, adding to the already heavy structure. These new transformation teams have a mandate that competes with existing teams, and progress becomes excruciatingly slow. Instead of adding more layers, we need to focus on streamlining processes and creating leaner, more effective systems that deliver real results

Adapt new technology, but don’t fall for simple techno-solutionism

With the advancements of Generative AI, we seem to be at the beginning of a new era. It feels like we are on the cusp of enabling massive gains in productivity: from data analysis to conversation design to policy development, everything we do might be affected. We can’t afford to ignore these new possibilities. It would be like if we didn’t take advantage of the Internet 30 years ago. But technology alone isn’t a silver bullet. We still need to understand users, their needs, and what we want to achieve.

Put real people at the center of your work

It always comes back to this: consider how real people, in real life circumstances, interact with our services. Be aware of the challenges our systems often impose on them, and try to make things better. We have tens of relatively inexpensive ways of gathering real feedback, doing user research and conducting usability testing to inform what we do. There’s no excuse to make this an after-thought. Put real people at the center of policy making and service design.

Be humble and always ready to learn

And last but not least, we all could use a good dose of humility. As bureaucrats, we don’t have all the answers, we’re not “above” the people forced to navigate the complex systems we put in place. We have a duty to serve them, to give them the space to speak out, to listen to what they have to say, and to *act *on it. We should always be learning, always evolving, and striving to get better.

Build on the great work of others

While it may sometimes feel like things aren’t progressing fast enough in the public service, there are reasons to be hopeful: there are countless forward-thinking public servants who try to improve things, day in and day out.

There are many initiatives we can look up to and be inspired from. Just to name a few:

What I would like to see next is these examples multiply and become part of the fabric of how we do things, from policy development to service delivery.

We need to keep pushing. Every step we take in that direction brings us closer to the idea of a human-centered, effective and just bureaucracy. Together, let’s make sure the public service is a positive force to build a better society, and not a harmful machinery.

Note: This blog post was inspired by many different sources. Among them, David Graeber’s “The Utopia of Rules”, Jennifer Pahlka’s “Recoding America”, FWD50 conferences, and countless discussions with my fellow public servants.