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Introduction to Governance, Government and Public Administration 1st Edition Franklin
A political dispute has been raging throughout the world for at least the last two decades over the relative e ectiveness of government and private action, and of di erent levels of government, in addressing public needs.
Largely overlooked in this dispute, however, has been the extent to which actual public problem solving has come to embrace the collaborative actions of governments at multiple levels and both government and private institutions. The vehicle for this has been the development and widespread adoption of a host of alternative instruments of public action through which governments at di erent levels and private organizations—both for-pro t and nonpro t— have joined forces to meet human needs. Included here are grants, contracts, insurance, regulation, loan guarantees, vouchers, corrective fees, and tax expenditures. Taken together, these instruments have altered public management in rather fundamental ways, severing the nancing of government action from the delivery of public services and creating complex networks that merge the activities of national and local governments and public and private organizations in increasingly inventive ways. Unfortunately, however, neither the training of public managers nor the popular
discourse about government operations has yet come fully to terms with the resulting transformation.
It was this realization that led me, along with a handful of other analysts, to call more than two decades ago for the development of a more systematic body of knowledge about the varied “tools” of public action in widespread use, and about the system of “thirdparty government” to which they had given rise. Since then, considerable headway fortunately has been made in formulating such a “tools approach” and creating the base of knowledge required to put it into e ect. At the same time, the proliferation and utilization of tools have clearly outpaced the formulation and dissemination of knowledge about their characteristics and demands. What is more, the deep ideological divide between supporters and opponents of state action has continued to foster a rhetoric that obscures the extent to which public and private action have fused. As a consequence, practitioners, policymakers, and the general public alike still nd themselves ill equipped to cope with the challenges that public problem solving now entails.
This book is designed to take a major step toward lling this gap. It represents the most comprehensive e ort yet attempted to pull together in one place a systematic description of the major tools now being used to address public problems both in the United States and, increasingly, around the world; to identify the major tasks that each of these tools entails, the circumstances for which each is best suited, and the kinds of challenges that each involves; and to
examine the most important crosscutting issues that many of these tools pose. More than that, the book formulates a framework for coming to terms with the very di erent style of public problem solving that these di erent tools have made possible. Called “the new governance,” this framework emphasizes the collaborative nature of modern e orts to meet human needs, the widespread use of tools of action that engage complex networks of public and private actors, and the resulting need for a di erent style of public management, and a di erent type of public sector, emphasizing collaboration and enablement rather than hierarchy and control.
While I am responsible for whatever shortcomings this volume may exhibit, numerous individuals and organizations share responsibility for any merits it may have. First and foremost is Dr. Paul Posner of the U.S. General Accounting O ce, who rst encouraged me to update and expand my earlier book on this topic, Beyond Privatization: The Tools of Government Action, which was published by the Urban Institute Press in 1989. Dr. Robert Long and the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, for which he works, saw the connection between this work and the broader initiative that Kellogg was launching in the area of nonpro t management and provided generous nancial support that enabled this project to proceed. Scott Fosler, then of the National Academy of Public Administration; Dr. Richard Nathan of the State University of New York at Albany; Jonathan Breul, of the U.S. O ce of Management and Budget; Melissa Middleton of the University of Minnesota; and
former governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts agreed to serve on an advisory committee to oversee the project and assist me in identifying collaborating authors. An outstanding group of analysts familiar with the various “tools” of public action, although not always with the “tools concept,” then agreed to prepare chapters on the di erent tools or on a variety of crosscutting themes that many of the newer tools have posed, and to take part in what turned out to be an extended “pro-seminar” on the nature, character, and implications of various tools conducted over more than a two-year period via e-mail, memorandum, and in-person meetings as drafts were developed, reviewed, and revised. Christopher Collins and his colleagues at Oxford University Press had the vision to understand the promise of the resulting product when it was still a glimmer in its creator’s eye and to stand by the project through its extended gestation and development. Finally, helping me keep track of all this activity and ensure that the entire e ort kept moving was Dr. Odus V. Elliott, a research associate of the johns Hopkins Institute for Policy Studies. To all of them I owe my deepest gratitude.
The public sector is not widely credited as a source of innovation in society. Yet, the proliferation of forms of action linking governments at di erent levels and public and private actors that has occurred over the last forty to fty years must certainly rank as one of the foremost social innovations of all time, making it possible to respond collectively to a wide range of human needs in a way that nevertheless engages private energies and capabilities. Surely
this innovation and the challenges to which it has given rise deserve more attention than they have received thus far from practitioners, scholars, and the public at large. The dawn of a new millennium is a tting time to come to terms, nally, with this “new governance.” I hope that this book will provide the means to ensure that this occurs.
—Lester M. Salamon
Annapolis, Maryland
March 2001
DIRECTORY OF PARTICIPANTS
EDITOR
Lester M. Salamon is a professor at Johns Hopkins University and director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies. An expert on public management and the nonpro t sector, Dr. Salamon previously served as the founding director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Policy Studies, as the director of the Center for Governance and Management Research at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., and as deputy associate director of the U.S.
O ce of Management and Budget. His recent books include Global Civil Society: Dimensions of the Nonpro t Sector (Johns Hopkins, 1999); De ning the Nonpro t Sector (Manchester University Press, 1997); Partners in Public Service (Johns Hopkins, 1995); and Beyond Privatization: The Tools of Public Action (Urban Institute Press, 1989). Dr. Salamon received his Ph.D. in government from Harvard University.
(CHAPTER 1, CHAPTER 4, CHAPTER 10, and CHAPTER 22)
ASSISTANT TO THE EDITOR
Odus V. Elliott is senior project administrator at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Policy Studies. He served formerly as academic
o cer of the Nebraska Coordinating Commission for Postsecondary Education, as senior program o cer of the Fund for the Improvement of Post-secondary Education, and as associate director for academic and student a airs at the Arizona Board of Regents. Dr. Elliott earned his Ph.D. in education and political science at the University of Arizona.
CONTRIBUTORS
David R. Beam is director of the Masters of Public Administration Program and associate professor of political science at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Previously, he held research positions with the U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (ACIR), the Naisbitt Group, Northern Illinois University, and United Airlines. His publications include the ACIR studies Categorical Grants: Their Role and Design and Improving Federal Grants Management. Dr. Beam earned his Ph.D. in political science from Northern Illinois University.
(CHAPTER 11)
Timothy J. Conlan is professor of government and politics at George Mason University. Among other works, Professor Conlan is the author of From New Federalism to Devolution: Twenty- ve Years of Intergovernmental Reform (The Brookings Institution, 1998) and coauthor with David Beam and Margaret Wrightson of Taxing Choices: The Politics of Tax Reform (Congressional Quarterly Press,
1990). Dr. Conlan earned his Ph.D. in government from Harvard University.
(CHAPTER 11)
Joseph J. Cordes is professor of economics and director of the Ph.D. Program in Public Policy at George Washington University. From 1989 to 1991, he was deputy assistant director for tax analysis at the Congressional Budget O ce. He is a coeditor of the Encyclopedia of Taxation and Tax Policy (Urban Institute Press, 1999) and has published more than fty articles on public policy and taxation. Dr. Cordes received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
(CHAPTER 8)
Ruth Hoogland DeHoog is professor of political science and director of the Master of Public A airs (M.P.A.) program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She wrote Contracting Out for Human Services (SUNY Press, 1985) and coauthored The Politics of Dissatisfaction (M. E. Sharpe, 1992), as well as book chapters and journal articles on urban administration, privatization, and public service delivery. Dr. DeHoog earned her Ph.D. in political science from Michigan State University.
(CHAPTER 10)
Ron J. Feldman is assistant vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. A former analyst at the Congressional Budget O ce (CBO), Dr. Feldman wrote CBO’s Controlling Losses
of the Pension Bene t Guaranty Corporation. He is also the author of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis’s annual report essay Fixing FDICIA: A Plan to Address the Too-Big-To-Fail Problem, and The Risks of Government Insurance Programs for the World Bank. Mr. Feldman holds a master in public administration from the Maxwell School of Syracuse University.
(CHAPTER 6)
Christopher Howard is the David D. and Carolyn B. Wake eld Associate Professor of Government at the College of William and Mary. He is the author of The Hidden Welfare State: Tax Expenditures and Social Policy in the United States (Princeton University Press, 1997), as well as articles in the Journal of Policy History, Political Science Quarterly, Public Administration Review, The American Prospect, and other journals. He earned his Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
(CHAPTER 13)
Helen Ingram holds the Warminton Endowed Chair of Social Ecology and is professor of social ecology and political science at the University of California, Irvine. She is coauthor of Policy Design for Democracy (University of Kansas Press, 1997) and coeditor of Public Policy for Democracy (The Brookings Institution, 1993). She earned her Ph.D. in public law and government from Columbia University.
(CHAPTER 20)
Steven J. Kelman is the Weatherhead Professor of Public Management at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He served as administrator of the O ce of Federal Procurement Policy in the O ce of Management and Budget, 1993-1997. Dr. Kelman is the author of Making Public Policy: A Hopeful View of American Government (Basic Books, 1988) and of other books and articles on the policymaking process and government management. He earned his Ph.D. in government from Harvard University.
(CHAPTER 9)
Donald F. Kettl is professor of public a airs and political science at the Robert M. La Follette School of Public A airs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is also Nonresident Senior Fellow at Washington’s Brookings Institution. Among other works, he is the author of The Global Public Management Revolution: A Report on the Transformation of Governance (The Brookings Institution, 2000).
Dr. Kettl earned his Ph.D. in political science from Yale University.
(CHAPTER 16)
Christopher K. Leman is a consultant based in Seattle, Washington. He has served as resident fellow at Resources for the Future, policy analyst at the U.S. Department of the Interior, and on the faculty of Brandeis University and the University of Washington. His writings have appeared in publications of the National
Academy of Sciences, National Association of Regional Councils, the Urban Institute, and in many journals. Dr. Leman holds a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University.
(CHAPTER 2)
John J. Lordan is senior vice president, chief nancial o cer, and treasurer of Fordham University and vice president emeritus of lohns Hopkins University. As a nancial management o cial in the O ce of Management and Budget, he developed and implemented regulations for administration of grants and contracts with state and local governments and nonpro t organizations. Mr. Lordan holds a master of public administration from Harvard University and a master of business administration from Boston College.
(CHAPTER 17)
Peter J. May is professor of political science at the University of Washington. His research addresses policy design and implementation of social regulatory programs. He is the author of Making Governments Plan: State Experiments in Managing Land Use (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) and Environmental Management and Governance (Routledge, 1996). Dr. May earned his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California at Berkeley.
(CHAPTER 5)
Ronald C. Moe is the specialist in government organization and management of the Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, and also a fellow of the Center for the Study of American Government, Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of numerous Congressional Research Service reports and of articles on government organization and management that have appeared in Public Administration Review and numerous other journals. Dr. Moe earned his Ph.D. in public law and government from Columbia University.
(CHAPTER 3)
B. Guy Peters is the Maurice Falk Professor of American Government at the University of Pittsburgh and distinguished research professor at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland. Among his recent publications are Institutional Theory in Political Science (Pinter, 1999) and Governance, Politics and the State (Macmillan, 2000). He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the Michigan State University.
(CHAPTER 19)
Paul L. Posner is director of budget issues for the U.S. General Accounting O ce and adjunct professor at the Master of Arts in Policy Studies Program at Johns Hopkins and Georgetown Universities. He has published articles on public budgeting, federalism, and tax policy issues and is the author of The Politics of Unfunded Mandates (Georgetown University Press, 1998). He is
a fellow in the National Academy of Public Administration and earned his Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University.
(CHAPTER 18)
Arthur B. Ringeling is professor of public administration at Erasmus University, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He is coauthor of Openbaar Bestuur, 5th ed. (Sampson, 1996), De instrumenten van het beleid (Sampson, 1983), and Het imago van de overheid (VUGA, 1993). Dr. Ringeling earned his Ph.D. in social sciences from the University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
(CHAPTER 21)
Peter H. Schuck, J.D. and M.A. in government from Harvard University, is the Simeon E. Baldwin Professor of Law at Yale University. He served as principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at DHEW from 1977-1979. Recent books include The Limits of Law: Essays on Democratic Governance (Westview, 2000) and Citizens, Strangers, and In-Betweens: Essays on Immigration and Citizenship (Westview, 1998).
(CHAPTER 15)
Steven Rathgeb Smith is an associate professor at the Daniel J. Evans School of Public A airs at the University of Washington where he directs the nonpro t management program. He is coeditor with Helen Ingram of Public Policy for Democracy (The Brookings Institution, 1993) and the coauthor of Nonpro ts for Hire (Harvard University Press, 1993). He is the editor of
Nonpro t and Voluntary Sector Quarterly. Dr. Smith earned his Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
(CHAPTER 20)
Thomas Stanton is an attorney and a fellow of the Center for Study of American Government at Johns Hopkins University. He is chair of the Standing Panel on Executive Organization and Management of the National ACAdemy of Public Administration, is the author of A State of Risk (HarperCollins, 1991), and serves on the advisory board of The Financier. Mr. Stanton earned his M.A. at Yale University and a J.D. from the Harvard Law School.
(CHAPTER 3 and CHAPTER 12)
Eugene Steuerle is a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and author of a weekly column, “Economic Perspective,” for Tax Notes
Magazine. He has served in various positions in the Treasury Department under four di erent presidents, including Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Tax Analysis. Recent books include Vouchers and the Provision of Public Services (The Brookings Institution, 2000), Nonpro ts and Government: Collaboration and Con ict (Urban Institute Press, 1999), and The Government We Deserve (Urban Institute Press, 1998). Dr. Steuerle earned his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin.
(CHAPTER 14)
Eric C. Twombly is a policy researcher at the Urban Institute. His numerous works include Organizational Response in an Era of Welfare Reform: Exit and Entry Patterns of Nonpro t Human Service Providers (George Washington University, 2000) and Nonpro t Human Service Providers in an Era of Privatization: Toward a Theory of Economic and Political Response, coauthored with Joseph J. Cordes and Je rey R. Henig (Quorem, 2000). He earned his Ph.D. in public policy from George Washington University.
(CHAPTER 14)
Janet A. Weiss is the Mary C. Bromage Collegiate Professor of Organizational Behavior and Public Policy and founder and director of the Nonpro t and Public Management Center at the University of Michigan. She has published widely in academic journals on the roles of information and ideas in the policy process. Dr. Weiss earned her Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard University.
(CHAPTER 7)
CHAPTER ONE
The New Governance and the Tools of Public Action: An Introduction
Lester M. Salamon
In economic life the possibilities for rational social action, for planning, for reform—in short, for solving problems—depend not upon our choice among mythical grand alternatives but largely upon choice among particular social techniques… techniques and not ‘isms’ are the kernal of rational social action in the Western world. 1
—ROBERT DAHL AND CHARLES E. LINDBLOM, 1953
Far-reaching developments in the global economy have us revisiting basic questions about government: what its role should be, what it can and cannot do, and how best to do it.2
—W
ORLD BANK, 1997
I. INTRODUCTION: THE REVOLUTION THAT NO ONE NOTICED
A fundamental rethinking is currently under way throughout the world regarding how to cope with public problems.3 Stimulated by popular frustrations with the cost and e ectiveness of government programs and by a newfound faith in liberal economic theories, serious questions are being raised about the capabilities, and even the motivations, of public-sector institutions. Long a staple of American political discourse, such questioning has spread to other parts of the world as well, unleashing an extraordinary torrent of reform.4 As a consequence, governments from the United States and Canada to Malaysia and New Zealand are being challenged to be reinvented, downsized, privatized, devolved, decentralized, deregulated, delayered, subjected to performance tests, and contracted out.
Underlying much of this reform surge is a set of theories that portrays government agencies as tightly structured hierarchies insulated from market forces and from e ective citizen pressure and therefore free to serve the personal and institutional interests of bureaucrats instead.5 Even defenders of government concede that we are saddled with the “wrong kind of governments” at the present time, industrial-era governments “with their sluggish, centralized bureaucracies, their preoccupation with rules and regulations, and their hierarchical chains of command….”6
Largely overlooked in these accounts, however, is the extent to which the structure of modern government already embodies many of the features that these reforms seek to implement. In point of
fact, a revolution has taken place in the “technology” of public action over the last fty years, both in the United States and, increasingly, in other parts of the world.
The heart of this revolution has been a fundamental transformation not just in the scope and scale of government action, but in its basic forms. A massive proliferation has occurred in the tools of public action, in the instruments or means used to address public problems. Whereas earlier government activity was largely restricted to the direct delivery of goods or services by government bureaucrats, it now embraces a dizzying array of loans, loan guarantees, grants, contracts, social regulation, economic regulation, insurance, tax expenditures, vouchers, and more.
What makes this development particularly signi cant is that each of these tools has its own operating procedures, skill requirements, and delivery mechanism, indeed its own “political economy.” Therefore, each imparts its own “twist” to the operation of the programs that embody it. Loan guarantees, for example, rely on commercial banks to extend assisted credit to quali ed borrowers. In the process, commercial lending o cers become the implementing agents of government lending programs. Since private bankers have their own worldview, decision rules, and priorities, left to their own devices they will likely produce programs that di er markedly from those that would result from direct government lending, not to mention outright government grants.
Perhaps most important, like loan guarantees, many of these “newer” tools share a signi cant common feature: they are highly indirect. They rely heavily on a wide assortment of “third parties”— commercial banks, private hospitals, social service agencies, industrial corporations, universities, day-care centers, other levels of government, nanciers, and construction rms—to deliver publicly nanced services and pursue publicly authorized purposes. The upshot is an elaborate system of third-party government in which crucial elements of public authority are shared with a host of nongovernmental or other-governmental actors, frequently in complex collaborative systems that sometimes defy comprehension, let alone e ective management and control. In a sense, the “public administration problem” has leaped beyond the borders of the public agency and now embraces a wide assortment of “third parties” that are intimately involved in the implementation, and often the management, of the public’s business.
Take, for example, the system for delivery of publicly nanced mental health services in Tucson, Arizona. Funding for such services comes from a variety of federal and state government programs. However, no federal or state bureaucrat ever comes in contact with any mentally ill person. Indeed, no federal or state bureaucrat even comes in contact with any local government o cial or private agency employee who actually delivers services to the mentally ill. Rather, the entire system is operated at two and three steps removed. The state of Arizona not only contracts out the delivery of
mental health services, it also contracts out the contracting out of mental health services. It does so through a “master contract” with a private, nonpro t local mental health authority called ADAPT Inc.
ADAPT, in turn, handles all dealings with more than twenty other local agencies that deliver mental health services in the Tucson area with funds provided by state and federal programs.7 While this may be an extreme case, the pattern it exempli es has been a central part of public-sector operations for well over a generation now.
What is involved here, moreover, is not simply the delegation of clearly de ned ministerial duties to closely regulated agents of the state. That is a long-standing feature of government operations stretching back for generations. What is distinctive about many of the newer tools of public action is that they involve the sharing with third-party actors of a far more basic governmental function: the exercise of discretion over the use of public authority and the spending of public funds. Thanks to the nature of many of these tools and the sheer scale and complexity of current government operations, a major share—in many cases the major share—of the discretion over the operation of public programs routinely comes to rest not with the responsible governmental agencies, but with the third-party actors that actually carry the programs out.
This development has proceeded especially far in the United States, where hostility to government has long been a staple of political life, and where the expansion of governmental programs consequently has had to proceed in a highly circuitous way.8
Contracting arrangements invented to ght the Revolutionary War and later elaborated to handle the far more complex tasks of product development during World War II were thus quickly expanded in the aftermath of that war to elds as diverse as agriculture, health, space exploration, and social services. Grants-inaid, loan guarantees, social regulations, insurance, and other indirect instruments have expanded as well. As Donald Kettl has reminded us, “[E]very major policy initiative launched by the federal government since World War II—including Medicare and Medicaid, environmental cleanup and restoration, antipoverty programs and job training, interstate highways and sewage treatment plants—has been managed through public-private partnerships.”9
Re ecting this, a study of a cross section of U.S. communities carried out by the present author in the early 1980s found that the majority of the government- nanced human services available at the local level was already being delivered by private nonpro t and for-pro t organizations as of that date, and this was well before the advocates of “privatization,” contracting out,” and “reinventing government” had proposed it. In particular, as shown in Table 1-1, government agencies delivered only 40 percent of these publicly funded services, while private agencies—both nonpro t and forpro t—delivered 60 percent.10
Instead of the centralized hierarchical agencies delivering standardized services that is caricatured in much of the current
reform literature and most of our political rhetoric, what exists in most spheres of policy is a dense mosaic of policy tools, many of them placing public agencies in complex, interdependent relationships with a host of third-party partners. Almost none of the federal government’s more than $300 billion annual involvement in the housing eld, for example, bears much resemblance to the classic picture of bureaucrats providing services to citizens. Rather, nearly $190 billion takes the form of loan guarantees to underwrite mortgage credit extended by private commercial banks; another $114 billion takes the form of tax subsidies that ow to homeowners through the income tax system; and more than $20 billion takes the form of housing vouchers administered by semiautonomous local housing authorities to nance housing provided by private landlords (see Table 1-2).
TABLE 1-1 Share of Government-Funded Human Services Delivered by Nonpro t, For-Pro t, and Government Agencies in Sixteen Communities, 1982 (Weighted Average)*
More generally, as re ected in Table 1-3, the direct provision of goods or services by government bureaucrats accounts for only 5 percent of the activity of the U.S. federal government. Even with income transfers, direct loans, and interest payments counted as “direct government,” the direct activities of the federal government amount to only 28 percent of its activities. Far larger in scale are other instruments of public action—contracting, grants-in-aid, vouchers, tax expenditures, loan guarantees, government-sponsored enterprises, insurance, and regulation, to name just a few. Including just the $376 billion in net additions to outstanding deposit insurance in 1999 and not the far larger amounts of pension, crop, and disaster insurance, a rough estimate would put the total monetary value of these activities in the neighborhood of $2.5 trillion as of scal year 1999, two and a half times higher than the roughly $1 trillion in direct activities in which the federal
government is engaged, and one and a half times higher than the amounts recorded as outlays in the federal budget that year. This highlights another interesting feature of many of these more indirect tools: they often do not show up on the government’s budget, which further helps to explain their attractiveness.
TABLE 1-2 U.S. Federal Housing Programs by Type of Tool, Fiscal Year 1999
TABLE 1-3 Scale of U.S. Federal Government Activity, by Tool of Public Action, Fiscal Year 1999
This reliance on third parties to deliver publicly funded services is not an exclusively American phenomenon, however. It has also been a classic—if largely overlooked—feature of the European welfare states, at least outside Scandinavia. In the Netherlands, for example, a erce con ict between secular and religious communities in the late nineteenth century over control of public education was resolved early in the twentieth century by a compromise under which the state was called on to nance elementary and secondary education but to leave the actual provision in the hands of private schools, many of them religiously a liated. As government was enlisted to assist in the provision of health care, social services, and even humanitarian assistance overseas, this same model was replicated in these other spheres, producing a widespread pattern known as “pillarization” under
which state resources are used to nance services delivered by private institutions organized along religious and, later, ideological lines.11 A similar phenomenon is also apparent in Germany, where the Catholic doctrine of “subsidiarity” has been enshrined in basic law, obliging the state to turn rst to the “free welfare associations” to address social needs before enlisting state institutions.12 Belgium, Ireland, Israel, and other nations also exhibit a similar pattern. Even France, long known for its centralized governmental structure and highly developed state welfare provision, dramatically increased its reliance on government contracts with private nonpro t institutions during the 1980s to implement a major decentralization of social welfare functions.13 The upshot is that many countries in western Europe have nonpro t sectors quite a bit larger than that in the United States, nanced largely through grants and contracts from the state, as re ected in Figure 1-1 below.14
II. THE NEED FOR A NEW PARADIGM
The proliferation of these new tools of public action has created new opportunities to tailor public action to the nature of public problems. It has also made it possible to enlist a wide assortment of di erent actors—governmental as well as nongovernmental—in meeting public needs. At the same time, however, this development has vastly complicated the task of public management. Instead of a single form of action, public managers must master a host of di erent “technologies” of public action, each with its own decision
rules, rhythms, agents, and challenges. Policymakers must likewise weigh a far more elaborate set of considerations in deciding not just whether, but also how, to act, and then how to achieve some accountability for the results. And the public at large must somehow nd ways to make sense of the disparate actions that are then taken on their behalf by complex networks of public and private actors.
One of the central conclusions of the new eld of “implementation studies” that emerged during the 1970s, in fact, was that the convoluted structure of many public programs was the source of many of the problems causing public programs to fall short of their promise.15
Regrettably, however, existing concepts of public administration and public policy o er little help in coming to terms with these dilemmas. Traditional public administration remains preoccupied with the internal operations of public agencies—their procedures for sta recruitment, budgeting, and task accomplishment. Indeed, a cardinal tenet of the eld has been that the management of public a airs is best left to neutral professionals organized in public agencies that are arrayed in hierarchical fashion and therefore able to achieve the needed specialization of functions so crucial to e ective operations and democratic control.16 Such concepts leave little room for the proliferation of new forms of public action featuring the wholesale surrender of key elements of discretionary authority over the exercise of public authority and the spending of public funds to a host of nongovernmental or other-governmental
