Governing for Collective Action

In The Study of Public Administration, Dwight Waldo (1955) argued that public administration was integral to collective action across societies. Public administration is indeed a large-scale social activity. One of Waldo's contemporaries, Vincent Ostrom (1973), was also inclined to view public administration as collective action, sometimes in the absence of governmental institutions. This theme of how public administration is conceived continues today as governance and governing are the larger enterprises in which public administration is embedded. Part 1 looks at public administration in the context of the larger developments that shape it today.

Although public administrators and public administration institutions are important elements in meeting needs across societies and solving public problems, the institutions of collective action and the language by which we describe them evolve rapidly. Ideas associated with the two prominent mid-twentieth-century intellects referred to above, Waldo and Ostrom, figure prominently in two contrasting descriptors Donald Kettl uses in chapter 1 for the evolution of public administration since the 1970s. Waldo's midcentury book, The Administrative State (1948), popularized the description of democratic governance for much of the latter twentieth century as an administrative state, where democratic institutions paradoxically share power with special political roles based on expertise and the workings of administrative institutions. Ostrom's (1971, 1973), analysis of self-governance in the democratic process and his critique of public administration's reliance on hierarchy and bureaucracy rather than popular sovereignty led Richard Stillman (1990) to characterize Ostrom's alternative as stateless administration. Kettl's argument is that today we have moved, full circle, from the administrative state to stateless administration.

In chapter 1, Kettl identifies four uniformities associated with the transformation from the administrative state to stateless administration: rapid change, evolutionary transformation, erosion of boundaries, and challenges to accountability and public law. He makes a compelling case for the transformation, and his premises are reinforced repeatedly throughout this book, especially in part 1.

Kettl's point about rapid change is worth repeating here: “Big ideas, about both the dangers of monopoly government and the power of information, spread fast and have driven reforms around the world, to the point that administrative reform has become a universal, even accelerating phenomenon.” Scholars and observers commonly refer to “the” new public management. If truth be told, new public management has changed repeatedly since we first began to refer to it—reify it—in the 1980s. The essence of Kettl's argument is that what we know today as new public management is likely to be far different from what it was when introduced, and the reality of new public management is changing even as we invoke it as a symbol of change.

The reality of rapid change echoes throughout part 1. In his assessment of the changing American intergovernmental system in chapter 2, Laurence O'Toole characterizes it as “dynamically in flux,” pointing to the “array of instruments and cross-governmental linkages.” Barbara Crosby, Melissa Stone, and John Bryson describe in chapter 3 the drivers that have made partnerships across organization and sector boundaries a strategic response to many of society's most difficult public challenges. Both O'Toole and Crosby and her associates point to the transnational extension of cross-governmental linkages and partnerships that have emerged across the policy landscape. Jonathan Koppell contends in chapter 4 that the increasingly transnational nature of our responses to public problems is driving the creation of novel institutions and systems of administration that are quite different than their domestic counterparts. Koppell brings into view one reason that administrative reform is, in Kettl's terms, an accelerating phenomenon: new governance forms are increasingly intersecting with traditional forms and change is a by-product.

Environments and the strategies designed to cope with them may change rapidly, but as Kettl notes, transformations in government's tactics are evolutionary. Regardless of how destabilizing change may be for complex systems—and the institutions, organizations, and people defining them—accommodating change is not instantaneous. O'Toole offers a demonstrable reason for why change is evolutionary in the context of the American intergovernmental system, which is that features of the system make it more challenging than ever before to manage. Crosby and associates offer another reason that helps explain evolutionary transformation: the stochastic nature of the change process associated with cross-sector partnerships. Crosby and her coauthors note that cross-sector collaborations have produced valuable outcomes for the partners, but others have foundered. Learning about effective practice takes longer given the stochastic process. Crosby and associates offer advice about coping with the stochastic process: “As a collaboration forms, organizers should attempt to align governance structures and processes with environmental conditions, but recognize that they may need to change as time goes on and environmental shifts and shocks occur.”

Probably the most prominent pattern of change Kettl identifies is erosion of boundaries. Since the 1980s, in concert with the rapid growth of the public sector and greater openness to indirect policy tools, scholars and practitioners have observed the blurring of boundaries between public and private. The prominence of erosion of boundaries today is not unexpected: the blurring of boundaries was an emerging reality acknowledged by contributors to the second edition of this book (see, among others, Milward, 1996; Cigler, 1996).

Although Waldo's administrative state was a public administration based on boundaries, stateless administration is most certainly a public administration where boundary erosion and boundary crossing are endemic. The theme is prominent and repeated frequently in the chapters by O'Toole, Crosby and associates, and Koppell. O'Toole notes both the vertical and horizontal extensions of intergovernmental relationships, which are reflective of boundary erosion. Crosby and associates suggest that institutional environments help to drive boundary erosion because of the presence of government mandates requiring collaboration to implement programs. Koppell calls attention to an important irony associated with erosion of boundaries globally. Although we have come to understand that many of the most significant public problems that confront us today are transnational, public administration as a field remains focused on institutions within single, national jurisdictions. Thus, responding to public problems demands less attention to the boundaries that limit prospects for creative, effective solutions.

The fourth pattern Kettl identifies—challenges to accountability and public law—may be the most daunting facing public administrators because of how it undermines traditional authority relationships. Kettl articulates the accountability logic that sustained the administrative state: “Clear lines of authority tell public administrators what to do, how to do it, and who to do it with.” The institutions and rules that will replace traditional forms of accountability and public law are still being formed. New and evolving accountability regimes are likely to look quite different from the clear lines of authority that once guided public administrators. Koppell offers one glimpse into the future with an example from global governance organizations. He observes that these organizations are constructed with compromised accountability in their superstructures, allowing them to accommodate shifting interests in ways they remain valuable and relevant. This ambiguity may be a trademark of accountability and public law constructed to accommodate rapid change, evolutionary transformation, and erosion of boundaries.

The second edition of this book noted that the old public administration orthodoxy had passed, but a new orthodoxy had not replaced it. This third edition may represent a new orthodoxy coming into clearer focus. Public administration has risen to the challenges that have confronted it in the past. We can hope it will continue to cope with future challenges successfully because the quality of public and private life depends on their resolution. This book is devoted to exploring these challenges and providing public administrators with insights and tools to deal with them.