Analysing policy processes as multiple governance: accountability in social policy

There is a need to develop appropriate ways to analyse issues about complexity in the governance process and about accountability. The preoccupation with policy ‘stages’ need to be replaced with a more complex model of the way in which policy decisions are inter-related or ‘nested’. It is argued that a ‘multiple governance framework’, influenced by Elinor Ostrom’s ‘institutional analysis and development’ framework, offers a way to do this. The framework is illustrated using examples from English health and education policy, where there are opposed positions about professional autonomy and about local prerogatives, to show how this approach assists the analysis of issues like these.