The Tools of Government

The Tools of Government attempts to provide new answers to the old questions What do governments do? Christopher Hood steps back from traditional description and presents an original view of government as a tool-using animal. He shows that all the basic activities of government can be analyzed as the exercise of variants or combinations of a quite limited set of basic instruments or tools. He distinguishes between detecting tools which pick up information and effecting tools which act upon a government's citizens, and demonstrates how each set draws on four key nodality or centrality in an information network; treasure; authority; and organization. After a discussion of the wide variety of ways in which these tools can be applied, illustrated with examples from a number of countries, the book goes on to consider how their application may be judged, in the light of criteria such as the ideal of using bureaucracy sparingly, A concluding discussion focuses on the limitations of government's tool box and how the use of tools may change over time.