Why do unlikely organisational failures happen? Major failures of public administration are rare in democratic states, yet they can have serious consequences when they do occur. We spoke to Professor Wolfgang Seibel about his work in identifying the causal mechanisms behind organisational failures across different areas of public administration, which could help inform improved prevention measures in future. Serious failures of public administration are thankfully rare in democractic states, yet this rarity by nature makes them difficult to analyse and learn from. There is a tendency in the social sciences to focus attention on statistically significant events when investigating organisational failure, yet Professor Wolfgang Seibel believes it’s important not to neglect rarer incidents, which require a different approach. “There is insufficient acknowledgement in the social sciences that we need to apply a different kind of perspective to deal with these rare but serious events,” he outlines. This topic is at the heart of Professor Seibel’s work in the DFG-funded Black Swans in Public Administration project. “Public administrations should of course try to avoid serious failures. The question then is, how do we develop generalisable factors that enable
us to take preventative measures, on the basis of a relatively small number of cases and observations?” he asks.
Causal mechanisms This methodological puzzle is a central part of the project’s work. Through case studies on specific instances of organisational failures, including the crowd disaster at the Love Parade music event in the German city of Duisburg in 2010, researchers aim to identify generalisable causal mechanisms. “We should be able to identify generalisable causal mechanisms, even though there are only a limited number of cases,” says Professor Seibel. When seeking to make generalisations it is essential to first precisely define the focus of investigation; Professor Seibel and his colleagues’ attention is centered on extremely serious cases of organisational
failure. “We’re not looking at failures in the sense of poor performance for example, but rather cases where the failure is crystal clear. In some of these cases the mismanagement of public administration resulted in the loss of human life,” he outlines. “The first point that can be generalised here is that it is highly unlikely that somebody would allow these organisational failures to happen just out of negligence.” There may nevertheless have been particular incentives in place that encouraged public officials to make compromises they would not normally consider. The result of this may be that the physical integrity of people is essentially made negotiable, putting safety at risk. “If we can identify those common incentives, then we can look at causal mechanisms that we may be able to generalise,” says Professor Seibel.
Hurricane Katrina was an extremely destructive and deadly Category 5 hurricane that made landfall on Florida and Louisiana in August 2005, causing catastrophic damage; particularly in the city of New Orleans and the surrounding areas. Subsequent flooding, caused largely as a result of fatal engineering flaws in the flood protection system known as levees[3] around the city of New Orleans, precipitated most of the loss of lives.
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Cars rest on the collapsed portion of I-35W Mississippi River bridge, after the August 1st, 2007 collapse. Photograph by Kevin Rofidal, United States Coast Guard [Public domain]
The aim here is to identify regular patterns of failure; this research builds on ideas from the field of welfare economics. “A business or firm produces goods for public consumption for example, yet it also may have negative externalities on the public, e.g., when it pollutes the air. The idea of welfare economics is that we need to strengthen the positive externalities and to reduce, or mitigate, the negative externalities,” explains Professor Seibel. “Both positive and negative externalities are related to the mechanism of internalisation, a mechanism that enables us to attribute particular external effects to particular causes.” The general hypothesis in Professor Seibel’s research is that in cases of organisational failure there are weaknesses of internalisation that contribute to a higher likelihood of negative externalities. It is important in these terms that public officials are answerable for their decisions and that clear lines of accountability are in place. “If there are reliable mechanisms to hold those in public administration accountable for negative consequences, then it is more likely that negative externalities will be reduced to a minimum,” says Professor Seibel. The wider aim here is to ensure that officials are incentivised to ensure that human security is always the top priority for public organisations, even when they are under financial or political pressure, whether it be to run a major event, or to keep the costs of maintaining public infrastructure down. “Resources may be scarce, or maybe accountability mechanisms are unenforced,” explains Professor Seibel.
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Case studies Researchers are now looking to gain deeper insights from case studies of organisational failure across various different areas of public administration, including mass events, transport and road safety, and infrastructure and construction. While the researchers cannot directly compel witnesses to provide their versions of events, Professor Seibel and his colleagues do have access to a lot of documents on these cases. “We have reports that are comprehensive enough to give us a good account of what happened,” he outlines. Researchers have trawled through official reports and other documentation on these cases, aiming to reconstruct the events and processes that led to organisational failure. “This information is the basis of our
beforehand, it nevertheless went ahead. “Public officials made the deliberate decision to ignore the risks, for the sake of running a big, potentially prestigious mass event,” says Professor Seibel. This had fatal consequences. “21 people died unnecessarily, due to a massive failure of public authorities, as public officials could easily have been aware of the risks involved,” continues Professor Seibel. “We aim to help enhance the knowledge base necessary to manage these types of activities and events effectively.” A degree of complexity is unavoidable in this, so it’s important that lines of accountability are clear and the parties involved communicate effectively. It is not complexity as such that is dangerous, believes Professor Seibel, but rather the presence of counter-incentives that prompt public officials to ignore the inherent risks. “That is when complexity becomes dangerous,” he stresses. The trend towards outsourcing and collaborative governance is also leading to increased complexity in other areas of public administration. “It’s important to carefully consider the implications when outsourcing the delivery of public goods and services. You want to guarantee the same control and coherence of vision as when those goods and services remain in the immediate realm of public authorities,” says Professor Seibel. “When accountability structures are compromised, that increases the likelihood of loss of control.”
Ambivalence of pragmatism The evidence gathered so far supports the externalisation hypothesis, yet no definitive conclusions have yet been made and research is ongoing. Alongside enhancing
We’re not looking at failures in the sense of poor performance for example, but rather cases where the failure is crystal clear. In some of these cases the mismanagement of public administration resulted in the loss of human life research. It’s primarily written, documentary information, from parliamentary investigative committees for example, that we can rely on,” says Professor Seibel. The 2010 Love Parade event in Duisburg is one of the cases on which Professor Seibel and his colleagues are focusing their attention, with researchers looking at the events leading up to the failure and trying to identify the contributing causal mechanisms. The cancellation of the 2009 event had heightened pressure to run the 2010 edition, and while safety concerns were raised
Black Swans in Public Administration: Rare Organizational Failure wlth Severe Consequences
Project Objectives
The project analyses patterns of organisational failure in public administration with severe consequences for the physical integrity of humans such inadequate maintenance of public infrastructure causing buildings and bridges to collapse, organizational failure in disaster relief, management deficits of child protection authorities leading to fatal child abuse, etc.
By rijans - Flickr: Dhaka Savar Building Collapse, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons. wikimedia.org/w/index. php?curid=26051590
Project Funding pragmatism when it comes to road safety, or the protection of young children,” points out Professor Seibel. “The question is – to what extent are staff at all levels of public administration aware of these limits and aware of the ambivalence of pragmatism?” A clear distinction can be drawn here between consequentalist and deontological ethics as decision-making frameworks. While in deontological theory the emphasis is on adhering to a set of pre-defined rules, consequentalism is more flexible. “Consequentalism means that you think in terms of what are the consequences of what you are doing. Can you justify those consequences according to a set of sort of normative, ethical yardsticks?” explains Professor Seibel. These yardsticks might be practical, financial or political, or based on some other consideration; many people
would approve of this approach. “Most of us would like public officials to think about the consequences of what they are doing and not just rigidly apply the rules,” says Professor Seibel. “The thing is that rules exist for good reason – and while it is unacceptable to stick rigidly to the rules in all circumstances, it is also unacceptable to bend and ignore them.” The leaders of public administrations have an important role to play here in identifying those areas in which people are justified in acting pragmatically, or where pragmatism is unacceptable. Allowing these boundaries to be blurred can have fatal consequences, as at Love Parade in Duisburg and the Grenfell Tower fire in London in 2017 for example. “There are limits to pragmatism, where public administrations have to rigidly enforce legislation,” stresses Professor Seibel.
The project is supported by a € 500,000 grant within the Reinhart Koselleck programme of the German Research Foundation (DFG). According to the DFG definition, the programme “enables outstanding researchers with a proven scientific track record to pursue exceptionally innovative, higher-risk projects”.
Contact Details
Project Coordinator, Professor Wolfgang Seibel Department of Politics and Public Administration University of Konstanz Universitätsstraße 10, 78464 Konstanz, Germany T: +49 (0)7531 88-3684 E: wolfgang.seibel@uni-konstanz.de W: https://www.polver.uni-konstanz.de/en/ seibel/professors/prof-dr-wolfgang-seibel/
Professor Wolfgang Seibel On 14 June 2017, a fire broke out in the 24-storey Grenfell Tower block of flats in North Kensington, West London just before 1:00 am British Standard Time. The devastating fire caused 72 deaths, including those of two victims who later died in hospital. More than 70 others were injured and 223 people escaped the inferno. Photograph by Natalie Oxford [CC BY 4.0 (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)]
Wolfgang Seibel is a Full Professor of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Konstanz. He also held roles at institutions in Europe, the US and South Africa. His recent work focuses on the theory of public administration and variants of drastic administrative failure and disasters.
the knowledge base required to help prevent serious administrative failures in future, Professor Seibel also hopes to contribute to the debate around the limits of pragmatism in decision-making. “On the one hand, public administration is dependent on flexibility and situation-specific decisionmaking. So, in this sense pragmatism means not just sticking rigidly to the rules, but considering the particular characteristics of a situation,” he explains. However, there are also situations in which rules and regulations must be strictly enforced. “We cannot accept
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Black Swans in Public Administration
2013 Savar building collapse, Bangladesh. On Wednesday, 24 April 2013 in the Savar Upazila of Dhaka, Bangladesh where an eight-story commercial building named Rana Plaza, collapsed. The search for the dead ended on 13 May 2013 with a death toll of 1,129.
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