Abstract
Time is of crucial importance in the actions of professionals in the public sector. Policy initiatives, processes or initiatives can be early or late, slow or fast, focused on a short or long time horizon, and stable or dynamic over time. The timing, sequence, speed, duration, and time horizons of
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governance efforts can play an important role in shaping their success and failure in public governance. Studying the temporal dimensions of governance thus makes sense academically. Likewise, enhancing the temporal awareness and action repertoire of public professionals – their ability to understand and use time – is a relevant endeavour for an applied academic field such as public administration. The aim of this study is to explore and develop a viable conceptual approach to time in public governance. This theoretical development starts with an exploration of the meaning of time in the context of public governance. It follows from this that time should not be treated as an object that is ‘out there’. In reality, time is an instrument of sensemaking. People actively impose temporal forms on the outside world, in order to be able to make sense of it and navigate in it. Therefore, time in public governance is studied here as a verb instead of a noun: as temporalising, instead of ‘time’. In this study, I explore the various forms in which temporalising public governance might be conceptualised, studied and interpreted. I do so by conducting 10 ten cases of strategic governance challenges and processes in the Netherlands. The cases cover a range of policy domains, questions to be resolved and kinds of actors involved. In each case, the research emphasis is on how the perspective of temporalising can be useful as both an analytical tool for scholars and as a reflective practice for public professionals. In a series of five paired cases, five initial sensitizing concepts are developed through action research. Grounded in the work of Argyris, Schön and Rein, I engage in reflective conversations with professionals to explore and develop forms of temporal sensemaking that are useful in strategic practice. The insights of this study are brought together in a preliminary theoretical framework in which the five central themes of temporalising governance are distinguished: timing, tempo, time horizon, time patterns and simultaneity. The implications of this framework and the case study insights for practice and science are discussed. The dissertation ends with a reflection on the question of what role temporalising could play in future research on public governance. I conclude that in practice, no forms of policy analysis or policy advice can escape the discipline of time. Accordingly, this dissertation can be interpreted both as call to arms to the field of public administration research and an attempt to nudge the reader to become more sensitized to and reflective about how public governance is and can be shaped by temporalising.
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