Effective Governance Requires Clear Missions, Shared Goals, and Collective Action

Governance enterprises cannot be effective unless they know where they are headed. Effectiveness is not random; it begins with a clear mission, vision, and goals. The contributors to this book emphasize clear missions and goals but also recognize that goal ambiguities are sometimes strategic and sometimes resolved through governance processes. Richard Walker, Chan Su Jung, and Gong Rok Kim identify the menu of options for strategically resolving ambiguity. They focus on strategic leadership in effective governance enterprises and remind that strategic management is not a single tool, but rather a set of considerations—including goals, processes, content, stances, and actions—designed to maximize governance effectiveness.

The contributors also identify more subtle, less direct means for establishing visions, missions, and goals. One avenue, addressed by Anne Khademian and Fatima Sharif, is by managing relations with legislative and executive actors in ways that produce consensus, reaffirm agreements, and clarify goals. So effective governance in this sense requires some goal sharing among elected and nonelected (administrative) actors. Michael Howlett, Ishani Mukherjee, and Jeremy Rayner continue this theme in governance's relation to policy design and implementation. The likelihood that a governance arrangement will produce an effective public program requires consensus on design-level input from policy planners, administrators, and legislators. Of course, policy designs affect not only the formal auspices, institutional structures, and rules that govern a public program but also the implementation of a program.

Rules and institutional arrangements more broadly were the focus of Elinor Ostrom's (2009) astute attention because she cared deeply about developing and sustaining collective action to solve social problems—a goal common to most contemporary governance arrangements. Ostrom was interested in these arrangements at multiple levels, from microlevel operational situations to more meso- and macrolevel collective and constitutional choice situations. The contributors to this book offer perspectives across these levels. At the micro- and mesolevels of collective action, for example, several contributors highlight the role of the tools of governance.

Both direct and indirect tools are required in the vast majority of today's governance arrangements (Salamon, 2002). Direct service remains a staple in the curriculum for training new administrators. Sean Nicholson-Crotty discusses grants-in-aid, a critical indirect tool of collective action. Contracting is another key tool of collective action, and Zach Huitink, David Van Slyke, and Trevor Brown remind us that third parties perform much of the work in today's governance enterprises through contracts. Grants and contracts are indirect tools in which originating governments can strongly influence results through the quality of their management and monitoring. But other collective action tools may offer governments less leverage unless they are managed proactively. Coproduction and social enterprise are two such tools, and Tony Bovaird and Elke Loeffler review keys to effective design and management of coproduction. Wolfgang Bielefeld tackles social entrepreneurship, noting that entrepreneurship for public good occurs in the public sector, nonprofit sector, for-profit sector, and collective and multisector settings. Because this entrepreneurship takes many forms, understanding factors that drive success and failure across these various manifestations directly informs effective governance.

At more macrolevels of collective action, several contributors define the contemporary landscape of effective governance and how it is changing, including a discussion of implications for the tools used at more microlevels of collective action. Donald Kettl begins by arguing that the definition and scope of effective governance will likely continue to evolve as new governance forms increasingly intersect with traditional forms. Environments, but also the strategies public administrators use to cope with them, are driving the transformation of collective action. These changes include even more macrolevel factors as one considers Jonathan Koppell's contribution. Koppell argues that the increasingly international nature of governance enterprises is spurring the creation of unique institutions, rules, and administrative arrangements that compete with and overlap domestic counterparts.

But even domestic arrangements are not insulated from transformation. Laurence O'Toole describes intergovernmental relations, which many might prematurely consider a relatively insulated tool of direct governance, as “dynamically in flux.” New forms of partnership are one manifestation of the flux. Barbara Crosby, Melissa Stone, and John Bryson highlight the drivers that have made intra- and cross-sectoral partnerships a useful strategic choice to engage some of more challenging contemporary public problems.

Across these levels of collective action, we reiterate that a striking pattern of change is that which Kettl describes as the erosion of boundaries. The prominence of sector-based boundary erosion is not unexpected, and we saw evidence of such blurring in contributions to the second edition of this book. However, the pace and scope of that blurring are increasing. Newly forming rules, laws, and institutions are overlapping traditional (i.e., largely direct government) forms of collective action. These legal and accountability regimes—even as they evolve—are critical to effective governance. We take up these and other topics in the next section devoted to designing accountability.

Effective Governance Is Designed for Accountability

A theme emphasized repeatedly is that governance effectiveness is enhanced by effective design of legal and accountability systems, organizations, programs, and control systems. A common thread implicit in many of the contributions was the successes and failures of governance at all levels of collective action. Accountability emerges as a unifying theme from these and other chapters that explicitly extend the question of designing governance enterprises to ensure governance effectiveness.

The efficacy of design is not new to the field. Woodrow Wilson's (1887) seminal essay was devoted largely to the question of how efficient and effective administrative institutions should be designed to serve the purposes of a democratic society. The Progressive movement was devoted to a series of new political and administrative designs, including the council-manager plan. Herbert Simon pioneered thinking about public administration as a design science—devising “courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones” (1969, p. 55). The “new” public administration of the 1970s evoked a strong design component (Levine, Backoff, Cahoon, & Siffin, 1975). More recently, the reinvention movement (Osborne & Gaebler, 1992), privatization (Hefetz & Warner, 2012; Wise, 1990), the new economics of organization (Moe, 1984), quality management (Walton, 1986; Schmidt & Finnigan, 1992), systems thinking (Senge, 1990), and governance transformation (Kettl, chapter 1; Pollitt & Bouckaert, 2011) have sensitized us once again to the importance of design for effective governance.

Phillip Cooper's chapter challenges us to begin with foundational, constitutional principles as a blueprint to reinforce and empower administratively responsible action. In one sense, Cooper explains the explicit role of law in advancing responsibility because responsibility is “concerned with ensuring that public service professionals operate within the bounds of the authority provided by law and do not violate the rights of those they are assigned to serve.” In an equally important sense, though, law not only channels and constrains effective governance, but also empowers effective governance in that it serves as an important mechanism of change. Law as a mechanism of change calls forth visions of it as a design principle in the implementation of effective policy (see Schneider & Ingram, 1990b). Another important aspect of empowerment that Cooper notes is the role of law in bolstering the legitimacy of governance enterprises. This legitimacy can only be achieved, of course, by concerted design: adhering to the rule of law.

While formal law may mandate certain aspects of accountable governance enterprises, Gregory Porumbesu and Tobin Im argue that they should be supplemented by the objective of transparency. Designing accountable governance on the value of transparency may go beyond the requirements of law, but the authors convincingly argue that transparency is an essential tool to promote an infrastructure of administrative accountability. The potential of transparency reflects rapid developments in information technology and citizen engagement and empowerment. Tina Nabatchi, Jack Becker, and Matt Leighninger engage the latter topic in their chapter. They argue that citizens should be a conscientious factor in the design of governance arrangements. Certainly not all citizen engagement is created equally or for the same purpose, and these authors envision effective governance enterprises that integrate a variety of citizen participation modes to achieve more fulsome levels of accountability. Public administrators are therefore encouraged to be more thoughtful about citizen-related features used to design accountability infrastructure.

Effective Governance Measures and Monitors Results

At the conclusion of his chapter, Harry Hatry poses the rhetorical question: “If one does not know the score, how can one play the game?” Effective public enterprises “know the score” by measuring and monitoring results. As Hatry recounts in his chapter, significant attention to performance measurement in public administration has at least a seventy-five-year history, dating to Ridley and Simon's (1943) path-breaking Measuring Municipal Activities. Hatry's chapter reflects the substantial progress governance enterprises in all arenas have made toward effective performance measurement. The demands for a more results-driven public sector will stimulate further development of valid and useful performance measurement.

Kathryn Newcomer identified a variety of techniques used to evaluate the effectiveness of public programs. Effective governance enterprises wisely employ multiple methods to assess the overall results and outcomes of a program and improve its operations. In contemporary governance arrangements, public institutions must often balance competing claims from many stakeholders, including legislatures that appropriate funds and taxpayers who pay the bills. Thus, feedback from many types of stakeholders is an essential part of the process of measuring and monitoring results. Because public performance is often messier, less tangible, and multilateral, governance enterprises must pay attention to cues and nuances in their environments and constituent actors to understand and interpret their performance. Discussed throughout this book, effective governance enterprises measure and monitor results by keeping close to the legislature (chapter 9), courts (chapter 5), citizens (chapter 8), employees (chapter 21), collaborators (chapter 12), and peers (chapter 2).

Effective Governance Systems Steward Resources

An emergent feature of effective governance, while not necessarily directly accessible from individual contributions but discernible from the collectivity, is resource stewardship. Resources come in a variety of forms, including money, people, information, organizations, political power, and social capital. We use stewardship here in a special way, to denote both shared responsibility among governance enterprise participants for resource acquisition and their commitment to the appropriate use of these resources.

As both experience and political rhetoric remind us, money alone solves few public problems. And even if it did, the willingness of people to commit their resources to governance enterprises is declining. Effective governance enterprises must rely on a range of resources contributed by a variety of participants. The constitutional structure of the US government and other governments impose certain demands on resource stewardship.

The evolving complexity of stewardship stems from recent shifts to even more complex governance arrangements that include private corporations and private nonprofit agencies, citizens, and other government institutions—each with its own demands for resource stewardship. Regardless of arrangement, fiscal resource stewardship alone is not sufficient to produce the results the public demands.

Information, typically a less tangible resource, must also be marshaled. The formula for acquiring information resources is complex. It relies on both communication flows within and among governance enterprises and formal information systems. James Garnett; M. Jae Moon and Eric Welch; and Ines Mergel each summarized lessons for effective communication with and among stakeholders and ways for managing information.

Organizational, political, and social resources must be merged with financial, human, and information resources in hopes of meeting the extraordinary demands imposed on public enterprises. How are these other resources created? This question has no easy answer, but the contributors again provide insights. For example, Sergio Fernandez is highly attentive to the processes that align organizations with new and changing objectives. The ability to fully use organizations as resources is a function of overcoming normative resistance to change.

Norms can also be important resources in the political and social realms. Bielefeld's idea of social entrepreneurship, Nabatchi et al.'s call for citizen engagement, and Mergel's discussion of social media strategies are all tools that can be employed in governance enterprises to cultivate political and social norms as forms of social capital.

Technical Skill

An effective public administrator commands the specialized activities that are assigned as part of an organizational role. One of the hallmarks of modern organizations and, by extension, modern public administration is the expansion of specialized activity and knowledge. Administrative effectiveness necessitates some capacity to perform expert tasks. Technical skill implies a proficiency in a specific kind of performance, particularly one involving methods, procedures, or techniques (Katz, 1974).

Some contributors to this book have explicitly addressed the importance of technical skills for administrator effectiveness; others have recognized their importance implicitly. We have discussed the importance of resources to governance enterprises. Fiscal resources—if they are to be fully used—require technical skill. Alfred Ho and Yilin Hou both illustrate this need in their respective chapters on performance budgeting and revenue administration. An administrator's failure to attend to the technical aspects of developing and running revenue systems and budget management can seriously erode the financial viability and public confidence in a governance enterprises.

Because technical skills are the most concrete aspect of administrator effectiveness and have held such a central role in public administration thought over the years (Kaufman, 1969), it is equally important to put them into perspective. Although technical skills are a requisite for effectiveness in virtually every administrative position, their relative importance usually declines as a public administrator ascends an organization's hierarchy. By the same token, technical skills are never likely to be the only characteristic that discriminates between effective and ineffective performers at any level in an organization. Indeed technical abilities can infuse and advance other skill sets. Perhaps the best illustration is Jared Llorens's chapter on public personnel compensation. Llorens simultaneously illustrates the technical and human skills needed to develop effective compensation systems.

Human Skill

Human skills are complex and difficult to summarize. At a minimum, they involve an awareness of self and of how one's actions affect others; perceptiveness regarding the motives and sensitivities of others; recognition of one's responsibility to the group, genuineness in relations with others; and the ability to bridge competing cultures, resolve conflicts, and negotiate (Katz, 1974; Ring & Perry, 1985). Effective public administrators must possess the human skills to integrate people into all types of collective endeavors.

The situations in which a public administrator must employ these human skills are extensive. The situation probably most identified with human skills involves the problem of motivating public personnel to achieve high performance. Using their human skills, public administrators seek to develop member identification with and commitment to organizational goals and to ensure their satisfaction with the rewards and incentives the organization offers. David Pitts and Sarah Towne shed light on the potential performance benefits of managing diversity well. So too, Wouter Vandenabeele and Nina Van Loon underscore that managing differences often requires a deeper understanding of individual motivation. While there has been strong scholarly interest in public service motivation, Vandenabeele and Van Loon call for human skills that can properly integrate and leverage context-sensitive motivation into the particular “value chain of public service delivery.”

The importance of human skills for the public administrator reaches into the political environment as well. Relations with legislators (chapter 9) and citizens (chapter 8) are potential sources for confrontation unless the public administrator brings the appropriate orientation and skills to the situation. Perceptiveness and empathy, that is, being able to identify with other parties and understand their position, is a necessary starting point for constructive, productive administrative relationships. But divergent interests and confrontations are inevitable. In these situations, public administrators must have the skills to limit and manage conflict and to negotiate solutions when necessary (see Lisa Blomgren Amsler's chapter on negotiation).

A public administrator's capacity to function effectively within the complex network, intergovernmental, and coproduction and implementation structures (see, e.g., chapters 1, 2, 3, 10, 12, 13, and 16) relies heavily on the human skills that Rosemary O'Leary discusses. Public administrators must develop cooperative linkages with peers, subordinates, politicians, competitors, and constituents to be able to gather and get information vital for working effectively within the governance enterprises. In a very real sense, the effectiveness of administrators may be a direct reflection of their effectiveness as collaborators.

A human skill whose importance is accentuated by organizational size, social cleavages, and network structures is communication. As James Garnett noted, communication in the public sector is different because government is often situated in the middle of information networks. Within such networks, communications skills become essential tools for operating effectively.

Reflecting on the situations in which human skills are important demonstrates the tenuousness of the public administrator's position. Although government is the chief coercive institution in our society, it is obvious that much of what happens in government depends on cooperation rather than coercion. As agents, public administrators are therefore relatively helpless unless they can wield informal influence. Thus, they need to develop their human skills to provide the glue to bind people together in cooperative action.

Conceptual Skill

Conceptual skill involves the public administrator's ability to see the big picture—conceiving how decisions, events, and people are linked together in time and space. Conceptual skills are to the administrator what effective design is to the larger governance enterprise. Each helps to unify and coordinate the administrative process.

Katz (1974) suggests that conceptual skill involves recognizing how the functions of an organization are interdependent and visualizing the relationship of the organization to its broader context. In government, this means being able to envision the relationship between one's own organizational activities and broader agency and government goals, recognize the implications of action for many attentive groups and the general public, and anticipate the consequences of action or inaction through time.

Like human and technical skills, the situations that require well-developed conceptual skills are numerous. Conceptual skills are a necessary resource for effectively understanding and managing the multiple accountability relationships inherent in collaborative management. If there are challenges in achieving strategic vision in a single organization, Michael McGuire and Chris Silvia demonstrate the conceptual difficulties of achieving shared vision and purpose in collaborations. They observe that “partners in a collaboration work to achieve their individual organization's goals as well as a shared, collective goal. The goal itself may be different across organizations involved in the collaboration.” Because of the additional layers of vision, collaborative managers must actively manage collaborative awareness, boundaries, constraints, communication, and external constituents. These facets illustrate key conceptual skills that today's public administrators must have. The ability to conceptualize a collaborative arrangement in operational terms at an early stage must be complemented by an ability to conceptualize it in technical and human terms as well.

Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Skills

Many of the skills the effective public administrator employs can be acquired by education (e.g., technical skills such as budgeting) or practice (e.g., human skills such as giving effective feedback and listening). As Robert Denhardt and Maria Aristegueta illustrate, others are acquired by introspection, reflection, and self-awareness. Among the intrapersonal skills they identify that are central to effectiveness are establishing a personal vision, becoming more creative and innovative, dealing with ambiguity and change, and improving sense of self.

There are more externally oriented interpersonal skills as well. In the increasing numbers of governance situations requiring collective leadership, discussed by Sonia Ospina and Gabrielle Foldy, administrators must sense the need for collective leadership and have the ability to manage the cognitions of multiple audiences. The authors explain that this “broader lens of leadership means [a] shift from considering…individual attributes and behaviors of leaders…to also considering the processes and conditions that help members of a group or organization…work together to achieve their common vision.”

Responsiveness to Democratic Control

The effective public administrator not only complies with the letter of the law but strives to facilitate all aspects of democratic accountability by promoting an informed citizenry, contributing to open debate of issues, and respecting the ultimate choices of citizens and their representatives. Carrying out the law is the first test of democratic responsiveness. As Stephanie Newbold reminds us, failure to carry out the law often brings severe consequences; for public administrators to violate the law is illegitimate and undermines the foundations of constitutional democracy. The public administrator's exposure to liability is a reflection of how highly we value these constitutional principles. With Cooper (chapter 5), Newbold encourages administrators to be legally proactive—continually reflecting constitutional fluency in their actions. In part this reflects the fact that legal systems are but one mechanism for encouraging democratic responsiveness. External accountability structures, leadership, and organization culture also influence whether democratic values are honored or breached. The effective public administrator recognizes these influences and strives to use these mechanisms to further the goals of a democratic society.

While formal control systems create an environment for accountability, they do not ensure that public administrators will respond to the needs and interests of citizens and their representatives. The public administrator who perceives and properly interprets environmental cues about popular control has probably also successfully internalized the values and ethical precepts of democratic governance. This is where skills of self-accountability come into play.

Focus on Ethical Decisions and Moral Impact of One's Actions

Despite the ambiguities often inherent in their positions, effective public administrators have a keen interest in results. As stewards for scarce collective resources, public administrators are obligated to achieve results.

Achieving results has always been a core value in public administration. Among the results that have historically attracted the most attention are efficiency, effectiveness, and equity. But the effective public administrator's concern about results does not end with these three. He or she must be mindful of the moral and ethical dimensions of action as well. Thus, effective public administrators are cognizant of the ethical use of office. They are also aware of the consequences of institutional decisions and actively engaged in mitigating the undesirable consequences of administrative institutions.

Effective public administrators are interested not only in the obvious moral consequences of their actions, but the more subtle, less perceptible consequences as well. In deliberations about tax policy, for example, the effective public administrator recognizes that decisions about taxes are not neutral but have important distributive, economic, and social consequences. It is the public administrator's role to help focus public debate on these consequences of taxes as well as on their revenue capacity and collectability.

Brian Williams and Liza Ireni-Saban fully engage these issues in their respective chapters. In pursuing self-accountability, modern public administrators have no simple formula for making ethical choices. Williams supplies an encouraging array of ethical considerations to guide some of these choices that include both leadership and followership. Ireni-Saban supplies an international discussion of codes of ethics that reminds administrators the world over of the varied (but perhaps insufficient) efforts to institutionalize precepts of “ethical competence.” In part, these codes of ethics reflect a push toward the professionalization of public administration.