Managing contested spaces: Public managers,obscured mechanisms and the legacy of the past in Northern Ireland

Introduction

It is increasingly recognised that societies moving out of conflict often struggle with the spatial and social legacies of violence and segregation (Bollens, 2000; Brinkerhoff, 2005). Such environments are often unstable. Initiating and sustaining the transition from conflict requires multi-pronged approaches aimed at building a sufficient anti-conflict infrastructure to act as a brake on renewed conflict (Bollens, 2012; Brinkerhoff and Brinkerhoff, 2002; United Nations, 2010). Security, effective delivery of public goods and services, managing political participation and ensuring accountability are all functions necessary for the effective stabilisation of fragile, conflict affected states and plural societies (Bissessar, 2009; Brinkerhoff et al., 2012). Achieving these functions frequently requires change at institutional, organisational and political levels (Brown, 1999; Murphy, 2013; O’Connor, 2014). The context, content and process of change often constitutes a significant blockage in the stabilisation, normalisation and peace building processes which such states are so greatly reliant on (Goldie and Murphy, 2010). Even if these core functions develop successfully, the dual difficulties of economic recovery and the risk of future conflict remain (Coakley and Todd, 2014; Collier et al., 2008). With a few notable exceptions (Fagan and Sircar, 2015; Raco and Lin, 2012) to date, little research has looked at the process of engaging in challenging institutional change, with the backdrop of violent conflict, trauma and political as well as organisational, resistance to change (Murphy, 2013).

The mechanisms of institutional, legislative and community based conflict reduction and peace building has been the subject of much of the literature around transition and conflict transformation (Bissessar, 2009; Bollens, 2011). Good governance, security sector reform and the development of active citizenship are all seen as significant in establishing peace, pursuing state reconstruction and preventing future conflict (Kasirova, 2014). Economic regeneration, political participation, legacy issues and what is euphemistically termed ‘living with the past’ are also important concerns as processes move forward (Berg and Schaefer, 2009; McDowell and Braniff, 2014). Contested space (Bollens, 2011; Calame and Charlesworth, 2009; Morrissey and Gaffikin, 2006; Yiftachel and Yacobi, 2003) represent a significant and sometimes daily challenge for those charged with managing public places. As institutional agents in such an environment, public managers perform a dual role of interpreting policy and implementing it within a contested political space and place. This is a challenging endeavour, often requiring public managers who have a skilled and nuanced understanding of the exogenous political environment and the equally important administrative context of their organisation (Goldie and Murphy, 2015). Existing studies have tended to focus on the role of elite level bureaucrats in sustaining conflict-managing mechanisms and decision making processes (O’Connor, 2014). Despite invoking the idea of institutional entrepreneurs as agents of change (DiMaggio, 1988), the institutional literature has also largely focused on powerful actors and neglected the role of managers in coping with and shaping the dynamics of change (Lounsbury and Crumley, 2007; Maguire et al., 2004). Thus, the role of managers (as agents of institutional change and implementers of urban policy) and the mechanisms facilitating political progress in public sector post-conflict contexts are not well understood (Bollens, 2000; Brinkerhoff, 2005; O’Connor, 2014).

Using witness seminars, a methodology developed to initiate focused discussions about issues such as policy development and implementation at pivotal moments (Allen et al., 2004; Todd, 2010), we trace the outworking of the mechanisms of institutional change through the management of contested policy implementation. We observe the combining and recombining of existing institutional knowledge and tacit political and community experience. The findings suggest that public sector managers are acting as ‘imaginative bricoleurs’ (Campbell, 2004) within conflict environments, employing diffusion and translation to navigate complex socio-political, legislative and spatial landscapes. The introduction of new elements into the situation through the emerging peace process have allowed managers to expand their repertoire and reach, and in some cases resolve, issues more effectively than political agents at the elite or social agents at a community level. New legislative provision has facilitated this process further.

In the sections that follow we begin by building a theoretical framework to further our understanding of the agents and mechanisms of institutional change and its interaction with complex conflict management dynamics. We then document the background to the case study (Northern Ireland) and the historic role of public sector managers through the Northern Ireland conflict. In doing so we highlight the processes by which managers have sought to innovate around difficult and challenging conditions during active conflict, on the hard climb of conflict transformation and the Gordian knot of post-conflict environments, ‘dealing with the past’. The paper concludes with some reflections on the previously obscured role of public managers in such environments, the usefulness of a mechanism based explanation, and the implications of this for public management and conflict transformation processes in the future.

Theoretical framework: The agents and mechanisms of institutional change

Public sector managers are faced with considerable demands during periods of violent conflict and in the transition to a less violent, but a still divided extraneous environment. Both stability and change are achieved though dynamic inputs from actors who reproduce the system over time (Weick, 1987). Rather than actors following rules, either consciously by imitation or coercion or unconsciously by tacit agreement, as assumed in some forms of institutional theory (DiMaggio, 1988; Jepperson, 1991), actors have interests, resources, or positions within the system and have the potential to change the system (Fligstein, 2001; Stone, 1989) by securing ‘enough co-operation among disparate community elements to get things done’ (Stone, 1989: 227).

In times of change new ‘cultural frames’ or ‘logics of action’ come into existence. Individuals frame lines of action, and mobilize people in the service of these action frames (Fligstein, 2001; Jasper 2004, 2006; Snow and Benford, 1988, 1992). Actors interact with knowledge of one another under a set of common understandings about purpose, relationships and the rules that govern legitimate action (McAdam and Scott, 2005). Actors develop shared understandings about relationships, the ‘rules of the game’ and institutional norms (Scott, 1994) that help to establish the boundaries and the appropriate ways of behaving (Lawerence, 1999). Socially constructed expectations and practices become disseminated and reproduced (Scott, 1994, 1995). We argue that public sector managers play a unique role in this process.

Specifically, public sector managers are central to the retention of institutional memory, which can be eroded during conflict involving population displacement, spatial division and ongoing violence. Managers embody how the organisations reflect, remember and learn from past initiatives (Akgün et al., 2012; Casey and Olivera, 2003; Walsh and Ungson, 1991). Their expertise and ‘institutional memory’ makes them key agents in conflict transformation (Casey and Olivera, 2003; McDowell and Braniff, 2014). Not only does their presence represent critical continuity in a fluid and volatile environment but their knowledge, networks and experience are invaluable when facing new, unprecedented challenges. For Aguilar (2002: 21) ‘few lessons are learned when the outcome is successful, given that nobody ever enquires into whether this outcome has really been achieved as a result of a political decision, or whether on the contrary, it has been achieved in spite of that decision.’ The challenge then for public sector managers is to draw on the past but also allow this learning to shape present and future decisions. In contested public spaces, this is often both necessary and unappetising. Jervis (1976) notes that it is telling ‘we cannot make sense out of our environment without assuming that, in some sense, the future will resemble the past’ (Jervis, 1976: 217). Understanding how such individuals and teams are able to sustain and indeed progress project and policy implementation in such volatility is a question of interest not only in relation to understanding past conflict, but to seeking to better equip managers in the future.

Campbell (2004) explains the process of institutional change through the mechanisms of bricolage, diffusion, translation (Campbell, 2004). Bricolage means making do with whatever resources are at hand (Weick, 1993) and ‘the process whereby actors recombine locally available institutional principles and practices in ways that yield change’ (Campbell, 2004: 65). These elements are often borrowed from other contexts, to create a new configuration of social activity (Weick, 1993). Campbell (2004) identifies two types of bricolage: substantive, involving the recombination of already existing institutional principles and practices to address existing problems (March and Olsen, 1989) and symbolic engaging in the recombination of symbolic principles and practices acceptable and legitimate inside a broad social environment. The key elements in bricolage are innovative and creative people – ‘the bricoleurs’ (Campbell, 2004). Diffusion involves the spread of ideas, structures and practices, often via networks and translation involves the modification and implementation of ideas to work in specific local contexts (Campbell, 2004). In the context of conflict transformation, we can see that such new elements might be legal frameworks, international learning or wider trans-territorial agreements that impact themselves on the conflict through the introduction of new actors, practices, new systems or new resource possibilities. We argue that these mechanisms are central to the process of change in societies emerging from ethno-national conflict and the building of an anti-conflict infrastructure.

A focus on mechanism-based explanations (Davis and Marquis, 2005; Falleti and Lynch, 2009) offers a possible route to a better understanding of how managers have been able to cope with and shape change. Mechanism-based explanations pay attention to the roles of context, processes and causality and are particularly relevant to making sense of complex environments (Campbell, 2004; Davis and Marquis, 2005; Falleti and Lynch, 2009). By providing the ‘nuts and bolts’ (Elster, 1989) and ‘cogs and wheel’s’ (Hernes, 1998) of wider analysis, mechanisms provide mid-level theory (Merton, 1968, Pawson, 2002) that better explains social, political and organizational change, and adds texture and detail to better inform understanding of what are otherwise obscured processes. Mechanisms are not variables or attributes and thus not always directly measurable (Hedström and Swedberg, 1998). Mechanisms in both the social and physical sciences may be invisible (Hernes, 1998). For example gravity may be unobservable but it does not prevent us from understanding, appreciating and researching its effects. Research can help produce theories of the mechanisms that explain outcome patterns. To better specify and explain such mechanisms necessitates narrative based studies (Davis, 2006) which retain the type of ‘thick description’ (Geertz, 1973) of complex social phenomena, such as public sector organisations in a historical context of entrenched conflict.

Public sector managers in Northern Ireland

While the Northern Ireland conflict has been the subject of much scholarly activity, the role of Northern Ireland’s public sector and the impact of the conflict on the sector are much less well understood. Since the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement in 1998 the Northern Ireland public sector has been dominated by the implementation of institutional reform, the active refinement of consociationalist government and the innovation of ambiguity in the political process (Goldie and Murphy, 2010). The public sector has often found itself implementing, managing or at a minimum responding to a range of challenging new socio-political and still contested environments and with it an implicit recognition that the public sector had a role to play in facilitating progress in conflict transformation (Bollens, 2012; O’Connor, 2014).

Post-conflict related instability, an engrained geography of division, and the legacy of the past has acted as a significant drain on the public and security sector spending in the post-1998 landscape (Nolan, 2014). Public managers are often tasked with responding to or managing difficult environments that emanate from a society that remains deeply segregated – fractious commemorative parades need to be policed; the construction of illegal memorials require a response from local government and the Department of the Environment; murals painted onto the properties managed by the Housing Executive present considerable challenges and the contested renaming of parks or streets after political figures needs to be legally assessed. As one participant noted: ‘Never, ever underestimate the power of symbolism. The small stuff is far more important symbolically than the big stuff. Managing in this environment is ‘an art, more than a science’ (Former Chief Executive, Northern Ireland Local Government, 26 June 2013). In a post-agreement context where patterns of conflict and systems of spatial and political segregation shape the relationships between public bodies and society, but also between and within different public bodies, the challenges for addressing persisting conflict-related dynamics remains not only a priority but a defining aspect of their functionality and operationality.

The local Government sector has often faced the worst of daily conflict and been confronted with the ever present concern of service provision in a divided society context. Whilst incidents of physical intimidation and violence often go unrecorded (Jarman, 2005), previous studies have shown that service delivery in local councils (Dickson and Hargie, 2006), social work (Campbell and McCrystal, 2005; Pinkerton and Campbell, 2002) leisure services management (Bairner and Shirlow, 2003) and adult education (Nolan, 2007) has been hindered by ethno-national conflict and division. Some of the most pervasive challenges for public-sector managers have centred on managing the consequences of the conflict and the challenges of the peace. Phases of peacebuilding are commonly understood as dynamic and often progress and regress simultaneously (Macginty and Darby, 2000) and the role of public sector managers is further complicated by the shifting sands of the peace process. In the case study of Northern Ireland, we identify three environments of action that are overlapped and entangled. The first phase is characterised by active conflict beginning in early 1970s and ending with the paramilitary ceasefires of 1994. The second is the unsteady peace which followed the ceasefires and persisted through the Agreement of 1998, the devolution of power to the Northern Ireland Assembly and the policing transition process. Third is the present period, the challenge of living with the past in the present. Mechanisms themselves oscillate between the varying conflict environments. It is to these experiences that the paper now turns.

Actors’ experiences are analysed through three key lenses. The first bricolage in this context and which relates to organisational decision-making and action, which is deeply embedded in the reality of conflict and violence. The second, diffusion sketches out the process whereby new knowledge and people began to impact on the process, the third translation helps explain how new elements introduced into the process, like legislation and structures enabled managers to operate in different ways.

Methodological approach

The theoretical background informing this study outlined above seeks to explore a complex process of change and instability within public sector organisations operating in environments of violent conflict. As such, the methodology selected needed to be sufficiently flexible to capture diverse views and the participation of organisationally disparate individuals, to provide space for individual and group recollection and reflection and to explore complex organisational processes and institutional norms (Fligstein, 2001; Scott, 1994; Stone, 1989). Data captured the experiences of public sector managers, who were involved in and responsible for policy implementation in Northern Ireland, and whose lived experiences correspond to the management of on-going conflict-related public policy issues, building peace, managing segregated urban environments and responding to continued societal and political change. Witness seminars, developed as a technique to facilitate the creation of material or insights from recent history, allow for the exploration of carefully delineated research questions through focused discussion and provide the opportunity to better understand policy development and implementation at pivotal moments, making them a considered and methodologically innovative choice (Allen et al., 2004; Coakley and Todd, 2014).

Two witness seminars took place over a six-month period that was particularly marked by commemorative-related violence and increased pressure to reassess or measure the success of post-conflict transition. They engaged 30 public sector managers who hold or have held policy implementation roles in a range of public sector environments, from the early 1970s to the present day. Roughly, one-third of participants were recently retired, with two-thirds holding senior policy implementation roles at the time of the research. Participation was secured through a process of snowball referral and existing research networks (Saunders and Townsend, 2016). Individuals were invited to participate and suggest additional invitees from a range of Northern Ireland public sector domains, including health, housing, local government, policing and justice, higher education, arts administration and the equality and good relations sectors. In general, this resulted in a group of senior and middle managers most of whom had spent their entire professional lives within the Northern Ireland public management sector, and whose careers spanned periods of conflict and conflict reduction. Seminars were arranged in a neutral venue, ¹ with two experienced facilitators who both had previous research experience of organisational change during and after active conflict. Conducted as part of the wider research council funded research project, the seminars in design and implementation adhered to strict ethical guidelines in relation to participant’s anonymity, data management and storage, experienced facilitation and significant contact with participants beforehand to ensure that the research questions themselves did not raise or provoke difficulty or distress among the participants. However, it may be useful to note that participants were eager to engage and that the witness seminar format was particularly supportive to the discussion of what were sometimes sensitive and complex issues (Svorenčík and Maas, 2015).

The first seminar focused on the reality of managing through both communal violence and an emerging peace process and addressed questions such as: How did the reality of living with conflict impact on how the public sector did its business? How did organisations respond and what kind of support did it give to its staff to make those decisions? How was conflict managed on the ground? What impact have you seen from the peace process and what legacy has been left from 30 years of violence? The second on the management of legacy and commemoration sought to explore issues such as: How has the legacy of the past impacted the NI public sector? How do public sector organisations manage and relate to commemorative violence and conflict? How does commemorating the past impact on the streetscape? As one witness seminar participant put it ‘These are real issues that had to be dealt with. It’s a very difficult reality for organisations’ (Retired Senior Civil Servant in Devolved Government, 26 June 2013). The seminar process allowed participants to describe the nature of the political environment and how they measured their own contribution, resulting in a rich and novel dataset affording participants the opportunity to discuss issues that had previously been self-censored. One interviewee noted, ‘it’s complex and sensitive to put material into the public domain: that is at the forefront of our mind ’ (Senior Policy Manager – NI Arts Sector, 26 June 2013). All participants agreed that the role of the public sector managers in dealing with conflict and conflict transformation was ‘a story which has not yet been told’ (Retired Senior Civil Servant, Housing Sector, 26 June 2013). Seminars were recorded, transcribed and anonymised. Data were restructured to identify timescales and sectors, including inter-sector working and spatial links. Two researchers coded the data in relation to the types of political activity engaged in by the managers and discussed differences in interpretation, which were minimal. Codes included ‘engagement with local/regional politicians’, ‘engagement with press’, ‘engagement with community groups’ and ‘engagement with former paramilitaries’. Codes were further broken down to identify types of engagement such as ‘negotiation around public space’, ‘off the record briefings’, etc. For example a public manager recalling an off the record engagement with the political representatives of a paramilitary group, at a time when it was officially against policy to speak to the political representatives of paramilitary groups was recorded as ‘off the record engagement’. This facilitated a focus on change and organisational mechanisms which have otherwise been previously obscured by the wider political process or community engagement. Researchers were conscious of the political and sensitive nature of the material that was being disclosed by actors when discussing the complexities of managing and responding to, and potentially transforming conflict and division in post-agreement Northern Ireland.

Bricolage ‘Whatever you do, hold the ground’

Context is everything. You manage in the context you’re working in. Your staff are products of the environment you’re living in. Your politicians are instruments within the things that are happening outside, you do have to stress the need to adapt to that. You don’t have one tactic. You have to go where the fissures are in order to make progress. (Retired Senior Manager, Northern Ireland Local Government, 26 June 2013)

Such dangerous and unstable situations required creativity, innovation and political acuity. They required individuals at all levels to negotiate, often without internal or external support, the attendant organisational and personal risk. Another participant reflected on the pitfalls while being conscious of the longer-term impact:

Today’s creativity is tomorrow’s accountability. People are trying to work out all the time what the balance of forces they are actually dealing with and try to find that thing that might actually engage with it in a way that doesn’t bring the house down onto your head. But maybe creates another piece of the platform to keep moving. A huge amount of it was intuitive and was an immediate reaction to events which were at times, certainly for the organisations themselves, overwhelming. (Chief Executive, Northern Ireland Local Government, 29 October 2013)

Diffusion of knowledge, networks and new possibilities

One of the significant opportunities of the emergent peace process was development of new and powerful networks of knowledge transfer between those within Northern Ireland and those outside who had experience of similar contested societies and organisational challenges. The development of these networks was facilitated by the substantive financial investment in community and institutional programs aimed at peace building, infrastructural development and cross-border linkages. Since the late 1980s, an estimated four billion dollars in peace-focused grant aid has been invested in Northern Ireland, the majority of which has been directed towards the region’s civil society and local government sectors (Kelly and Braniff, 2016). ‘Peace monies’, as they came to be called, facilitated peacebuilding and conflict management work at a community and institutional level to build capacity, contact and knowledge exchange between people, groups and organisations in Northern Ireland and other areas where similar challenges arose (Braniff and Byrne, 2014; Kelly and Braniff, 2016).

For example the significant network building around policing, and particularly community policing capacity in the newly instituted Police Service of Northern Ireland, included an international programme of work and the involvement of senior policing figures from the USA and Canada in ‘remaking’ an accountable and acceptable police service (Ellison and Pino, 2012; McAllister, 2004; Morrow et al., 2013; Murphy, 2013). For example international exchange visits resulted in changed practice regarding inter-communal tensions around parading (Jarman, 2005) yet the impact of other interventions, especially at a community level appeared less obvious (Braniff and Byrne, 2014).

These innovative networks and the knowledge that went with them also presented new challenges. Many witness seminar contributors commented on the difficult transition from old established ways of working, to new unsteady paths. As one said, ‘It’s more difficult to do anything now than then’ (Senior Manager, Northern Ireland Devolved Government, 29 October 2013). The uncertainties of the new terrain with competing and contending pressures from internal political wrangling and external political pressures often forced the public sector in challenging directions. One key issue for many of the contributors is working with a society still in conflict while publically espousing a post-conflict label. As one participant observed: ‘The post conflict tag which we now have in some ways … actually masks a legacy of issues which are not resolved – which are ever present – there under the surface threatening to bubble up as occasions arise’ (Chief Executive, Northern Ireland Local Government, 29 October 2013). The description of Northern Ireland as a post-conflict context serves several purposes for the public sector: it helps to disguise the complexities of the sectarian and segregated society that Northern Ireland remains despite formidable investment at tackling these issues; it normalises the complexities of legacy issues such as victimhood and commemoration; it shifts focus from ‘dealing’ with conflict to transforming society.

Bricolage, diffusion and translation as the obscured mechanisms of public sector conflict management

This paper has drawn on the lived experiences of public managers from a range of sectors in Northern Ireland to attempt to determine the underlying mechanisms assisting public sector managers to cope with the consequences of both war and peace. Our finding suggest public sector managers as key agents, play are role of ‘imaginative bricoleurs’ (Campbell, 2004) in the resolution of conflict and the development of innovative solutions to intractable community difficulties. The most significant observation in relation to the observable outworking’s of these mechanisms is the nature of the interaction between the mechanisms themselves which in itself, reinforces and strengthens the impact. The bricolage of managers, using existing structures and accepted processes in innovative ways helps us to understand some of the difficult and controversial decisions that were made during the period of conflict both within organisations and in relation to communities.

The peace agreements and concurrent processes provided scope for a new set of ‘culture frames’ or ‘logics of action’ (Fligstein, 2001; Jasper, 2004, 2006; Snow and Benford, 1988, 1992) for the public sector organisations and their managers to develop innovative and creative responses to complex and entrenched issues. As agents for change in a society emerging from conflict, the public sector has found itself facing challenges which required organisational, political and spatial knowledge. Through the case study of Northern Ireland, central lessons become clear: firstly, understanding and approaching peacebuilding in divided and contested spaces requires attention to be paid to institutional forces they often steer the unsteady elite and community levels while developing ‘cultural frames’ for current and future practice; secondly, a better understanding of underlying casual mechanisms represents an opportunity to understand more clearly the role played by public sector managers; thirdly, in explaining how contested issues are confronted, tackled or negotiated, the explanations of agents and mechanisms of change shed light on the often over-looked nature of change processes, and why they at times fall short. Finally, returning to Campbell’s ‘imaginative bricoleurs’ the evidence points to a public sector which is more influential and actors who are afforded more agency than previously acknowledged within peace building efforts. The mutual reinforcing nature and the sequencing of mechanisms through the phases of conflict and peace gives us an insight into how such mechanisms operate over time. Thus, this paper makes a contribution to the public management literature by opening up the role and substance of public manager’s contribution to peacebuilding processes. In an increasingly unstable global environment, such an insight is significant in the development of the types of anti conflict infrastructures we see in the Northern Ireland case. The paper also helps to extend our understanding of how conflict transformation processes develop at different levels and highlights the previously largely unacknowledged role of mid level structures and their agents. In doing so it furthers the existing contribution of O’Connor (2014) and Birkerhoff (2005) to develop further an understanding of the role of the public sector in conflict affected states, and extends this work to the management of urban segregation, struggles over the public memorialisation of conflict and the ongoing challenge of contested spaces. Lastly, the paper attempts to answer recent calls to a return to mechanism based theorising in an attempt to better understanding causation and complex social processes (Campbell, 2004; Davis and Marquis, 2005; Falleti and Lynch, 2009) and adds to recent research on the role of government and policy in societies dealing with and transitioning from conflict (Fagan and Sircar, 2015; Raco and Lin, 2012).

Conclusion

This paper highlights the crucial role of public sector managers as agents of institutional change in societies emerging from ethno-political and inter-communal conflict. Drawing on Campbell (2004), we explain the process of institutional change in post-conflict Northern Ireland through the mechanisms of bricolage, diffusion and translation. We refer to these as ‘obscured mechanisms’ not only because mechanisms by their nature are hidden, but because the role of public managers in securing and building peace has been known, sometimes acknowledged but rarely understood as a significant aspect of the conflict transformation process. Drawing on data from a witness seminar initiative with public sector managers who were involved in and responsible for policy implementation, we find that public managers when faced with difficult, fast moving and often dangerous situations on the ground take decisions to both manage the immediate implications of that context but also develop long-term actions at a strategic level. Rather than conforming to institutional rules and expectations, actors have interests, resources, and positions within the system and can bring about change by securing the cooperation of others. Not only does their presence represent critical continuity in a fluid and volatile environment but their knowledge, networks and experience are invaluable when facing new, unprecedented challenges. Crucially, we find public sector managers are central to the retention of institutional memory, which can be eroded during conflict. We argue that in societies with a history of bloodshed and injury, militarisation, securitisation and segregation public sector managers embody how organisations and communities reflect and remember, and play a central role in managing contested spaces.