Seven questions for examining public revision capacity without reducing institutional judgment to a score.
My illustration entitled: “The Control Room with an Open Door” – a flourishing city’s control room opens onto a public square. Residents enter with research, tools and alternative plans. Being served by a system should include meaningful power to reconsider its direction.
What success cannot tell us
An essential service can perform well while leaving the people who depend on it unable to reconsider its direction. Reliable delivery, balanced accounts and satisfied customers provide important evidence about performance. They do not establish that affected people possess the knowledge, resources and authority to question the arrangement’s purposes or propose a workable alternative.
I propose the Reauthorism Test to examine that further question. Reauthorism holds that essential economic arrangements should sustain affected publics’ independently governed capacity to reconsider institutional purposes, rules and structures, including during success and after ownership changes. Essential arrangements are systems whose disruption or exclusion can seriously impair basic living conditions or economic participation, particularly where alternatives are weak.
The test is a qualitative diagnostic: a structured inquiry that produces reasons, evidence and unresolved questions. It offers no numerical weights, country rankings or universal pass mark. Its seven dimensions are proposed normative considerations, not findings demonstrated by earlier Reauthorism studies.
Evaluation already has substantial methodological foundations. The OECD’s 2021 guidance emphasises thoughtful, contextual application of evaluation criteria. [1] Elinor Ostrom’s work demonstrates the importance of examining diverse institutional arrangements rather than assuming that a single ownership category explains governance outcomes. [2] Neither source validates this test. They help explain why I favour examining institutional practices over assigning virtue to labels.
Define the arrangement before assessing it
Consider one hypothetical regional water service operated under a long-term concession. It delivers reliable water, generates healthy returns and meets its financial obligations. Customers receive rebates. A liaison panel meets regularly, but the operator controls its research budget and permits discussion only of service implementation. Transition documentation and obligations after a sale have not been independently examined.
An assessment would specify the concession, governing authorities, affected communities and review period. It would compare contracts, budgets, decisions, interviews and observed procedures. Each finding should distinguish supported capacity, documented constraint and unresolved evidence. A document not supplied is not automatically a document that does not exist; an untested procedure is not proven effective or ineffective.
1. Standing: who may participate or challenge?
I would ask who can raise an issue, request review, obtain representation or challenge exclusion. Evidence includes eligibility rules, appointment procedures, petition routes, meeting records and the experiences of people seeking access. Workers, users and neighbouring communities exposed to infrastructure harms may have different claims. Citizenship or customer status alone should not silently settle every boundary.
In the water service, a customer-only panel could exclude downstream residents affected by discharges. Documented rejection of their requests on that ground would establish a specific exclusion. An empty attendance list would establish much less: people might lack access, information, time or interest. Interviews and recruitment records would help distinguish these possibilities.
Archon Fung’s participation framework distinguishes who participates, how discussion operates and how it connects to public action. [3] Broad attendance therefore cannot alone demonstrate meaningful standing. Nor does standing necessarily entail an individual veto: information, representation, decision-making and legal challenge require separately defined powers.
2. Knowledge: can necessary information be obtained and understood?
The question is whether participants can investigate relevant purposes, performance and alternatives. Observable evidence includes disclosure procedures, usable operational records, explanations of financial assumptions, access to independent interpretation and responses to specific information requests. I would examine whether different participants can actually use the material, rather than count the documents published.
For the water service, accessible information about network condition, costs and investment options could support reconsideration. Repeated refusals to provide necessary evidence, unexplained inconsistencies or disclosure only in unusable formats would be warning signs. A technical report’s absence from a website would justify inquiry, not a conclusion that nobody can obtain it.
Interpretation must respect legitimate privacy, security and commercial interests. Controlled access for independent reviewers may be appropriate. Knowledge capacity does not require publishing every sensitive detail or making every resident an engineer. It requires sufficient independent understanding to assess consequential choices and challenge unjustified secrecy.
3. Independent Resources: can people investigate without incumbent permission?
Formal participation can be hollow when participants cannot afford advice or organisation. I would inspect funding entitlements, allocation rules, actual spending, application decisions and protection against retaliation. Evidence should show whether affected groups can commission expertise, compensate participation and investigate alternatives without discretionary approval from the institution under examination.
The operator-funded liaison panel presents a documented dependency if the operator may refuse research because it dislikes the question. That differs from merely not knowing whether such discretion exists. The assessment should identify the relevant clause or practice and seek clarification where the record is incomplete.
A Reauthorial Dividend could finance independent capacity, but a named fund is insufficient evidence. Its administrators might favour established organisations or protect their own positions. Conversely, a small budget need not imply inadequacy if shared expertise and accessible procedures meet proportionate needs. Funding must be assessed for usability and independence, alongside cost and accountability.
4. Authority Over Purposes: can goals themselves be reconsidered?
This dimension asks whether participants can question what the arrangement is for, rather than merely suggest better implementation. Evidence includes the review body’s mandate, admissible agenda items, powers of responsible authorities, recorded responses to proposals and routes for changing contractual or policy objectives. I would trace what happens to an actual request for reconsideration.
The water panel may discuss billing procedures while being prohibited from examining tariff principles, investment priorities or the concession’s structure. An express restriction would support a finding of limited authority. The service’s profitability would not answer that finding. Equally, a proposal’s rejection after fair consideration would not itself demonstrate powerlessness.
Authority can be distributed among elected bodies, regulators, worker representatives and affected communities. No single panel needs every power. The limit of interpretation is whether connected procedures offer a practical route to consequential decisions. Public discussion with no identifiable decision-maker is a warning sign, even when attendance is impressive.
5. Transition Capacity: could change occur without unacceptable disruption?
Revision needs practical feasibility. I would look for retained institutional knowledge, operational documentation, staff training, costed options, continuity plans, staged implementation and fallback arrangements. Evidence from exercises or limited trials can strengthen confidence, although a successful rehearsal cannot guarantee a successful transition under different conditions.
In the water service, unexamined transition documentation leaves capacity uncertain. A completed technical review might instead establish that vital operating knowledge is unavailable outside the incumbent. That would identify a concrete obstacle. Either finding should state what further investigation or preparation is needed.
Acceptable risk requires publicly justified service standards, qualified operational advice and attention to vulnerable users, with clear authority and challenge procedures. Transition costs and their distribution must be explicit. No previous restructuring is not proof of incapacity: people may deliberately retain a sound arrangement. Conversely, repeated appeals to continuity without examining feasible alternatives can conceal indefinite postponement.
My illustration “The Control Room with an Open Door” work-in-progress. The art represents that a system truly serves people when they retain the knowledge, resources and meaningful power to reconsider its direction, even while it prospers.
6. Rights Protection: what may revision legitimately impose?
Public authorship must protect individuals and minorities while respecting legitimate commitments. Relevant evidence includes non-discrimination safeguards, accessible complaints, independent review, privacy protection, treatment of workers and reasoned handling of contracts and property interests. I would examine remedies in practice, including their costs and delays, rather than accept their formal existence as sufficient.
A majority of water users might favour cheaper tariffs while shifting environmental harm onto a smaller downstream community. The assessment should examine that community’s protections and routes to challenge the burden. Service affordability also matters where participation or transition costs fall disproportionately on households already struggling to pay.
A lack of complaints does not prove rights are protected; people may fear retaliation or find remedies unusable. Nor does respecting commitments require freezing every settlement. Lawful change may involve notice, negotiation, compensation where justified and independent adjudication. This dimension records competing claims and reasons without treating every asserted interest as an absolute veto.
7. Successor Obligations: will revision capacity survive institutional change?
The final question concerns what survives a sale, merger, public takeover, cooperative conversion or contractual replacement. Evidence includes succession provisions, transfer of necessary records, continuing participation arrangements, protected resources and responsibility for preserving usable expertise. I would seek both explicit obligations and practical arrangements for carrying them out.
The hypothetical concession’s unexamined sale provisions warrant an unresolved finding, not an invented assurance or accusation. If the documents expressly allow independent participation funding to disappear upon transfer, that would establish a specific vulnerability. A broad promise of continuity would still require examination of enforceability and operational detail.
This is the proposed Successor Duty. Comparable revision capacity need not mean identical institutions or permanent office-holders. Future publics should be able to revise the duty through inclusive procedures, while incumbents should not extinguish it unilaterally. Any body administering revision resources must itself remain accountable and replaceable.
Read the findings together without manufacturing a score
The water service’s hypothetical record supports concerns about the panel’s research dependence and restricted mandate, while leaving transition and succession questions unresolved. Reliable delivery, returns and rebates remain valuable. They neither erase the documented restrictions nor resolve the missing evidence. The appropriate next step is targeted investigation and proportionate improvement, not an automatic demand to terminate the concession.
Dimensions can conflict. Broader information access can threaten privacy; protected funding can increase bills; rapid transition can weaken continuity or contractual fairness. Assessors should explain these tensions and plausible alternatives. Strong documentation cannot simply compensate for serious rights violations, and ample participation funding cannot create authority absent from the governing procedures.
The OECD and European Commission’s 2008 handbook shows how constructing composite indicators entails choices about weighting, aggregation and uncertainty. [4] My refusal to supply a total score reflects the danger of hiding philosophical judgments inside arithmetic. A reasoned account should identify constraints, uncertainty, consequences and possible remedies without claiming universal certification.
What would make the diagnostic credible?
Empirical work would be necessary before claiming reliability or usefulness. Researchers should develop an explicit assessment guide, pilot it across different services and governance forms, and ask independent assessors to examine the same evidence. Disagreements should be analysed to determine whether definitions, evidence requirements or contextual assumptions need revision. Agreement alone would not prove that the test captures meaningful authorship.
Interviews with excluded groups and observation of actual review processes could test whether documentary assessments reflect lived practice. Following institutions over time could examine whether identified capacities help people obtain reconsideration, including decisions to continue existing arrangements. Such research would need to distinguish the diagnostic’s contribution from political leadership, legal changes and other influences.
Established evaluation guidance already addresses these difficulties. The March 2020 Magenta Book supplementary guide on complexity discusses context, boundaries, multiple perspectives and combining methods. [5] These are methodological predecessors, not validation evidence for Reauthorism.
Assessment must also earn its cost. Begin with a proportionate review of existing evidence, then investigate consequential uncertainties. Publish the scope, assessors’ interests, evidential gaps and opportunities to correct factual errors. To resist gaming, examine how procedures handle contested requests, rather than rewarding polished charters, staged consultations or unused funds.
I would use the test to improve judgment, including judgment about the test itself. Its proposed contribution is to ask whether essential arrangements preserve materially supported reconsideration during success and through succession. A system can serve people well and still need stronger public authorship. It can also remain unchanged because informed, capable publics choose continuation.
Sources
- OECD, Applying Evaluation Criteria Thoughtfully. OECD Publishing, 15 March 2021.
- Elinor Ostrom, “Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems”. Nobel Prize lecture delivered 8 December 2009; published in Les Prix Nobel: The Nobel Prizes 2009, 2010.
- Archon Fung, “Varieties of Participation in Complex Governance”. Public Administration Review 66(s1), December 2006, pp. 66–75; first published online 9 November 2006.
- OECD and European Commission Joint Research Centre, Handbook on Constructing Composite Indicators: Methodology and User Guide. OECD Publishing, 22 August 2008.
- HM Treasury / Centre for Evaluating Complexity Across the Nexus (CECAN), Magenta Book 2020: Supplementary Guide — Handling Complexity in Policy Evaluation. March 2020.