Citizen-centred policy making under Rudd: network governance in the shadow of hierarchy?

The 2007 Policy Platform of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) asserted that
‘Labor will pursue new and innovative measures designed to foster greater
participation and engagement of the Australian population in the political
process’ (cited in Manwaring 2010). It seemed that Labor was following a trend
that many authors have identified as a move from government to governance—
more specifically to ‘network governance’,1
in which governments encourage
greater participation, especially by ‘expert citizens’ (see Bang 2005), in policy
making, recognising that they can at best steer, not row (see Osborne and
Gaebler 1992). Indeed, as Martinetto (2003:593) contends, this idea has taken
on a ‘semblance of orthodoxy’. In this chapter, we examine two major initiatives
taken by the Rudd government that were designed to deliver on this platform
promise: the 2020 Summit and the Community Cabinets initiative. Our aim is
to assess both the extent to which these initiatives marked a genuine move
towards greater participation and, more broadly, whether they reflect a move
towards network governance. We begin, however, with a brief discussion of the
literature on governance that we use to frame this chapter.