Who Governs? And How? PDF

w h o g ov e r n s —...

w h o g ov e r n s — 7 a n d h ow ? Since the dawn of the human race, administration has been about build- ing expertise to accomplish complex tasks. Public administration has been about building expertise to accomplish tasks defined by govern- ment on behalf of the people. Within democracies, the challenge has been to translate public wants and needs into policy, to marshal exper- tise to answer the wants and provide for the needs, but then to limit that expertise so the very power required for effective administration does not threaten individual liberty. That frames a basic paradox for public administration in a democracy. It is a discipline focused constantly on a search for strong and stable tools, but the more successful it is the more it potentially threatens the democratic forces charged with controlling it. This paradox has frustrated public officials and scholars alike. Harry S. Truman famously once called for a one-armed economist. He was tired, he said, of constantly getting the “on the one hand” but “on the other hand” advice. This has been even more true of public administra- Copyright © 2002. Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved. tion. When public officials have wanted clear advice, they have tended to receive warnings about complexity. When they get strong recom- mendations, equally compelling arguments on the other side invariably emerge. The field’s traditional roots in America, in fact, have long been framed by the eternal conundrums—centralization versus decentraliza- tion, efficiency versus responsiveness. Public administration and its re- lated disciplines have struggled for greater precision, and some ap- proaches have indeed produced sharper theoretical focus. The various economics-based formal approaches, in particular, have struggled to push aside the field’s traditional tradeoffs for clear and replicable propo- sitions. But the field has never been able to move far from the basic, ir- resolvable tradeoffs, and that has frustrated managers and theorists alike. The problem flows in part from issues inherent in public administra- tion. When problems fall through the cracks—when fire companies cannot agree on whose jurisdiction is responsible for fighting a fire, or when intelligence agencies fail to share information adequately—calls Kettl, Donald F.. Transformation of Governance : Public Administration for Twenty-First Century America, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wwu/detail.action?docID=3318100. Created from wwu on 2019-12-26 16:15:41.  152 the transformation of governance for better coordination arise. Coordination is hard to achieve, however, because it is hard to get different agencies with different missions and different organizational cultures to work together.1 Moreover, agencies cannot simultaneously coordinate all activities at all times. They have to concentrate on something in order to build the capacity to do anything. In addition, coordination is expensive: it requires substantial investment by supervisors and public officials to build and nurture the required links. Coordination on some missions risks weakening capacity to achieve others. Strengthening coordination between and among agencies also is difficult to achieve without undermining the very strengths within each organization that policymakers hope to capitalize on. The problem also flows in part from issues inherent in American democracy. Public administration is not a freestanding entity; it is the creature of a political system and is designed to accomplish its ends. All of the tradeoffs that are endemic to American republicanism occur throughout public administration also. Public administration seeks to accomplish public goals, but American democracy is exquisitely de- signed to ensure that policy goals are neither defined in detail nor fixed for long. Furthermore, Americans have never been consistent in their eagerness for a strong government. The Bush administration in early 2001 had sought to pick up the Reagan administration’s downsizing- government banner. Soon after the September 11 terrorist attacks, however, presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters, “People need help, and in a time of war, it is principally the government that is Copyright © 2002. Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved. the best instrument to help people.”2 The United States does not have just one rich tradition shaping the relationships between public admin- istration, American democratic institutions, and the public. It has four, and the balance among them has constantly shifted. American public administration, in theory and practice, thus, is not so much a matter of finding stable models but in adapting its various tools to fit shifting political and administrative goals. It never has and never will be a field of study that systematically builds clear, replicable propositions. In practice, it inevitably will produce ammunition for crit- ics who will point to problems and breakdowns. Public administration is a complex business and problems constantly occur. Efforts to redress past problems plant the seeds for future ones. The emphasis on some values de-emphasizes others, and that spurs complaints. It is little won- der that Pressman and Wildavsky plaintively noted that “it’s amazing that federal programs work at all.”3 The constant tradeoffs and recur- ring complaints often seem to make public administration just as de- Kettl, Donald F.. Transformation of Governance : Public Administration for Twenty-First Century America, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wwu/detail.action?docID=3318100. Created from wwu on 2019-12-26 16:15:41.  who governs—and how? 153 pressing as Thomas Carlyle’s “dismal science” characterization of polit- ical economy. The tradeoffs and complaints, rooted in the very business of public administration and in the political forces shaping it, have become mag- nified by the increasingly fuzzy boundaries shaping the field. Adminis- tration draws its strength from boundaries: defining functions, building capacity, focusing narrowly on the job to be done, and getting it accom- plished. Fuzzy boundaries challenge public administration. The forces of fuzziness have multiplied, both within the bureaucracy, between bu- reaucracies, and between the administrative system and democratic in- stitutions. Devolution and globalization have tugged bureaucratic the- ory in opposite directions. The old tradeoffs between function and place have become sharper. Efforts to resolve the tradeoffs have become vastly more complex because of the hyperpluralism in the political system. On one level, these are issues facing public administration around the world. The special traditions and forces within American democracy, however, pose special problems for American public administration. In considering these traditions and forces, it is impossible to escape one profoundly important conclusion: At the dawn of the twenty-first century, neither the theory nor the practice of American public administration proved sufficient for the problems it has to solve. The same was true at the dawn of the twentieth century, and public administration underwent a major transformation, driven by the Wilsonian tradition, to catch up. The field needs to transform itself again, just as completely. Less clear is how Copyright © 2002. Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved. it ought to do so. Front-line pragmatists have been cobbling together new tactics on top of old ones. In the 1996 welfare reform, for example, neither the federal nor the state governments decided as a matter of policy that they would rely on nongovernmental organizations (ngo s) to manage the program. Faced with tough challenges, tight budgets, and a public not eager to expand public bureaucracies, the quasi-privatized approach was simply a pragmatic response to a pressing problem. In areas as far-rang- ing as environmental policy and local land use, ad hocracy trumped strategic thinking. Unlike reformers in New Zealand and the United Kingdom, who drafted white papers to chart a revolution, American of- ficials avoided writing a master plan. They worried less about plans than solving problems, less about theory than balancing challenging cross- pressures. Even at their most tumultuous, however, the struggles of American public administration have built on powerful foundations. The strong Kettl, Donald F.. Transformation of Governance : Public Administration for Twenty-First Century America, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wwu/detail.action?docID=3318100. Created from wwu on 2019-12-26 16:15:41.  154 the transformation of governance guiding power of the great administrative traditions meant that the rev- olutions were merely evolutionary and that no new idea was ever fully new. When Lyndon Johnson launched his “Great Society,” public ad- ministrators saw a theoretical foundation in ageless Jeffersonian debates about decentralization. When Ronald Reagan proposed to downsize government by privatizing key programs, they recognized the old Hamiltonian debates about the balance of public and private power. Richard Nixon’s failed plan to restructure the executive departments built on the Wilsonian traditions of government efficiency, while Bill Clinton’s reinventing government swirled around the old Madisonian balance-of-power battles. Public administrationists often contended that nothing was really new; they were not so much cynics as intellectual historians. Indeed, much of recorded history—from Moses’ struggle to organize the children of Israel in their flight from Egypt and Roman emperors’ efforts to conquer and organize the world—is a story of re- curring themes about organization and administration. In its relatively short life, American public administration has added two important elements to these ageless debates about administration. First, Americans introduced a self-conscious tension between individual liberty and government power. All basic values in the American repub- lic, including the role of public administration, rest in intricate balance. Second, the American Constitution mirrored this tension by balancing political power among governmental institutions. The genius of politi- cians was to find everything a lasting strategy to capture different polit- Copyright © 2002. Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved. ical values and to manage conflict among them. Public administration grew as endless twists on old ideas. Nevertheless, with the start of the twenty-first century, it was clear indeed that this time-proven approach to public administration had de- veloped large fissures. In their efforts to become more scientific, the so- cial sciences rejected the old approach as too relativistic and direction- less for the social sciences. One could always find some combination of old themes that fit new situations, but the theory could not predict what approaches would produce which results. Meanwhile, when practition- ers faced increasingly complex problems, they looked to public admin- istration theory for answers. It was scarcely the case that public admin- istration had nothing to offer. The field had deep roots in the nation’s great political traditions. But practitioners who faced tough new prob- lems found little there that appealed to them. Instead, they turned to journalists and other practitioners who told them how to “reinvent” their activities. Some sought the counsel of consultants grounded in pri- Kettl, Donald F.. Transformation of Governance : Public Administration for Twenty-First Century America, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wwu/detail.action?docID=3318100. Created from wwu on 2019-12-26 16:15:41.  who governs—and how? 155 vate-sector management practice. Theorists, however, worried that reinvention pushed public administration off its constitutional founda- tions and risked surrendering public power to private interests. The great insight of the founders was to discover that they could not control or end such conflict, but they could channel and manage it. As historian Joseph J. Ellis argues in Founding Brothers, the American re- public that emerged “was really an improvisational affair in which sheer chance, pure luck—both good and bad—and specific decisions made in the crucible of specific military and political crises determined the out- come.”4 The genius of the American revolutionaries was that they “found a way to contain the explosive energies of the debate in the form of an ongoing argument or dialogue that was eventually institutional- ized and rendered safe by the creation of political parties.” The political history that followed became “an oscillation between new versions of the old tension.” As a result, “the debate was not resolved so much as built into the fabric of our national identity.” Indeed, Ellis argues, “we are really founded on an argument” about what Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence really means.5 By the end of the twentieth century, the arguments had become more pointed and the oscillations more rapid. Moreover, the Constitu- tion and the politico-administrative system it generated had become less useful in capturing and channeling the conflict. In 1999, protesters in Seattle trashed much of the downtown to argue that the World Trade Organization was undemocratic. The world’s governments, they said, Copyright © 2002. Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved. were surrendering their sovereignty to large businesses. Globalization, in short, had created new policy venues over which the Constitution held less sway and in which important new decisions were being made. American governments devolved more decisions to state and local gov- ernments and, in many cases, they spun more programs out to ngo s. At the same time, however, these governments had not sufficiently strengthened their capacity to manage the devolution they created. In welfare reform, many program recipients and managers complained that devolution of welfare reform to the states and the states’ privatiza- tion of welfare management to ngo s had wrung the public interest from publicly funded programs. Far too much money went into profits for ngo s, they charged, and far too little into public services. Functionally organized governments—by health, environment, la- bor, and commerce, for example—strained to cope with the coordina- tion demands of a world with fuzzy boundaries, in which no important problem would agree to stay within the lines of any governmental agency. Kettl, Donald F.. Transformation of Governance : Public Administration for Twenty-First Century America, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wwu/detail.action?docID=3318100. Created from wwu on 2019-12-26 16:15:41.  156 the transformation of governance Coordination among government agencies has always been both impor- tant and difficult, but by the end of the twentieth century the problem had increased substantially. Cross-agency task forces and coordination teams became more important. At the same time, local officials and cit- izens worried as much as ever about how decisions made in far-off gov- ernment agencies would affect them and where they lived. Matching functional expertise with place-based impact is one of public adminis- tration’s eternal challenges, but increasingly fuzzy boundaries enor- mously complicated that problem. As American governments struggled to manage these forces, they fractionated their management approaches. They sliced programs more thinly to increase management control. They experimented with per- formance-based management as a substitute for traditional hierarchical authority. They privatized and contracted out. Ever-thinner slices, however, presented the grave difficulty of reassembling them into a co- herent whole. Perhaps even more important, they created new arenas for conflict and action that lie at—or beyond—the fringes of the American constitutional system, like devolution and globalization. American gov- ernment often had neither the administrative capacity nor the political institutions for channeling conflict and ensuring democratic account- ability. That is why twentieth-century governance increasingly grew out of sync with administrative practice and theory. Periodically throughout American history, and especially in times of great economic transformation, governance problems and public ad- Copyright © 2002. Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved. ministration theory have become mismatched. That was the case at the end of the nineteenth century, when the rise of business monopolies concentrated political power just as the people’s expectations for more public functions grew. Government risked being captured by narrow in- terests and becoming less accountable even as its role grew more im- portant. The Progressives charted a strategy for government to be more capable while becoming more accountable. Their approach—advanced hierarchy with authority-based control—fed a theory that increased ad- ministration’s power while holding it more responsible to policymakers. Through two world wars, the Great Depression, and the rise of the na- tion’s global power, that approach proved remarkably resilient. By the end of the twentieth century, however, the transformation of governance had rendered that approach obsolete. New economic forces—this time, global ones—threatened to capture public power. Government struggled to build the capacity to manage transformed strategies. Americans showed no eagerness to abandon the traditions that had guided political and administrative practice for more than two Kettl, Donald F.. Transformation of Governance : Public Administration for Twenty-First Century America, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wwu/detail.action?docID=3318100. Created from wwu on 2019-12-26 16:15:41.  who governs—and how? 157 centuries. Less clear, however, was how those traditions ought to guide political and administrative practice for the future. As boundaries be- came fuzzier, how could government effectively coordinate public pro- grams? As ngo s became increasingly important in governmental ser- vice delivery, how could government hold them accountable? How could the living Constitution adapt to manage and channel conflicts that strained existing institutions? Among these questions, one is most important. As responsibility for public programs becomes more broadly shared—where no one is fully re- sponsible for anything and many players are responsible for everything— how can American government pursue the timeless values that have guided the nation since its founding? This is an echo of the question Robert A. Dahl posed plainly in his classic 1961 book, Who Governs?: “In a political system where nearly every adult may vote but where knowledge, wealth, social position, access to officials, and other resources are unequally dis- tributed, who actually governs?” For Dahl, political power was pluralist, with power distributed among a wide range of interests, and dynamic, with patterns of power shifting over time.6 Dahl’s argument helped move polit- ical science from an institutional approach to politics—one that built the- ories of political power on the formal organizations empowered by law and the Constitution to make decisions—to a process-driven approach—one that analyzed political power by who exercised it and how. That approach helps frame the answer to how American government can best cope with the transformation of governance. Copyright © 2002. Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved. In many ways, Dahl anticipated by a generation a similar transforma- tion of the study of public administration. During the twentieth cen- tury, public administration prospered with a theory built on organiza- tional structure. Clearly framing administration’s role and function— and defining what its role was not—helped make government larger and more effective without sacrificing the pursuit of democratic account- ability. John Gaus’s 1950 article in Public Administration Review argued, “A theory of public administration means in our time a theory of poli- tics also.”7 To that we can add, “No theory of politics is complete with- out a theory of administration.” Building a theory of public administra- tion that is true to the realities of politics has become both more critical and more difficult because constraints on and expectations of public ad- ministration grew significantly in the last half of the twentieth century. Citizens and elected officials expected administrators to eradicate poverty, manage rapid transportation systems, provide high-quality, low-cost health care, and clean up the environment. On the other hand, building a theory of politics that embraces the central role of administration has Kettl, Donald F.. Transformation of Governance : Public Administration for Twenty-First Century America, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wwu/detail.action?docID=3318100. Created from wwu on 2019-12-26 16:15:41.  158 the transformation of governance become far more critical, because turning policy aspirations into reality has, by any measure, become more difficult. Indeed, more than ever be- fore, administration has become the essence of political reality. On many fronts, politics has become less a battle over what government ought to do and more a battle over how it can do it better and cheaper. the rise of a new governance If the problems of public administration seem daunting and the prospects for resolving them seem small, it is important to remember two things. One is that while many of the cross-pressures are new, the inescapable re- ality of making tradeoffs is not. The great strength of American democ- racy and public administration is its almost infinite ability to flex, trans- form, and adapt to new realities—and to do so in ways consistent with the nation’s enduring values and traditions. Indeed, American public admin- istration has been remarkable in its intellectual and pragmatic elasticity, to stretch its approaches without losing its basic norms. The other is that, despite the manifest problems, most of government works pretty well most of the time. The news media focus on news, and success stories rarely make the headlines. The Social Security Administra- tion, for example, correctly posts 99 percent of wage earners’ contribu- tions, and 82 percent of citizens rate the ssa’s service as “good” or “very good.”8 The U.S. Department of Transportation’s regulatory and grant programs have brought down the number of gas pipeline explosions.9 New Copyright © 2002. Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved. York City’s performance system has reduced crime and improved the pro- ductivity of city agencies.10 Problems dominate the news, not the system’s overall high level of performance, and that can make discussion of the transformation of governance seem a rather gloomy affair. Thus, the basic issue is not to rue government’s failures. Rather, given the constant and inevitable swings among traditions and strategies in American government, which approaches are most likely to help gov- ernment cope with the transformation of governance? What new ap- proaches must public administration forge to cope better with the in- escapable challenges facing government and governance? Americans have never been fully satisfied with the performance of their governments. Of course, performance can always be improved. Higher performance can always produce lower taxes or more service for the same level of taxes. Moreover, what Americans want often changes. At the core, Americans have always wanted more government services with- out having to pay higher taxes. But just how best to deliver those services and which problems government needs to solve have changed constantly. Kettl, Donald F.. Transformation of Governance : Public Administration for Twenty-First Century America, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wwu/detail.action?docID=3318100. Created from wwu on 2019-12-26 16:15:41.  who governs—and how? 159 If the nineteenth-century challenge was the rise of corporate power that threatened to swamp the public interest, the challenge at the be- ginning of the twenty-first century was the diffusion of administrative action, the multiplication of administrative partners, and the prolifera- tion of political influence outside government’s circles. American poli- tics has always been famous—or notorious—for the multiple channels it provides citizens to participate in the process and for the intricate bal- ance the constitutional framework provides. Citizens can seek redress from their local, state, or national governments. They can press their views in the legislative, executive, and judicial branches. It is a rare pol- icy decision in the American system that is ever truly final. The American political tradition, however, made government the arbiter of policy. Americans have always debated just how far government ought to reach into their lives, but those battles were fought with the ground rules the constitutional system established. These puzzles multiply Dahl’s basic question: Who governs—and how? How can we make effective public policy? How can we implement it well? And how, in the course of administration, can we pursue the goals of American democracy that have for centuries been the bedrock of the political system? The questions certainly are not new. Neither is conflict in how best to answer them. As Ellis pointed out in his study of America’s “founding brothers,” new oscillations in the old patterns de- velop. Each new oscillation presents new challenges of finding an equi- librium among the old cross-pressures. With the transformation of gov- Copyright © 2002. Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved. ernance at the end of the twentieth century, these challenges had grown. Meanwhile, the ability of America’s political institutions to find that new equilibrium—to channel and to manage conflict—had shrunk. Government thus finds itself with several complex, interwoven prob- lems. It faces new service demands from citizens, but citizens usually show little enthusiasm for paying higher taxes. It is deploying increasingly com- plex public programs, but no one really wants to increase the size of gov- ernment bureaucracies. To solve these problems, it has devised new man- agement strategies, but it is struggling to build the capacity to manage the strategies and to cope with unexpected side effects, such as a possible re- duction in social capital. Practitioners have struggled to cobble together new solutions to these problems—and to speed the learning curve so that they could quickly appropriate successful strategies from other practition- ers. However, unlike during the Progressive movement, when Wilson, Goodnow, and other thinkers helped lead the effort, theorists at the end of the twentieth century lagged behind the transformation of governance. Together, they struggled to devise new strategies for the new governance: Kettl, Donald F.. Transformation of Governance : Public Administration for Twenty-First Century America, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wwu/detail.action?docID=3318100. Created from wwu on 2019-12-26 16:15:41.  160 the transformation of governance to develop an effective government without sacrificing accountability, to pursue efficiency without sacrificing the public good. The transformation of governance thus frames five big issues: 1. Challenges. American government is stretching to perform tasks that no government has attempted before. Terrorist attacks demand new strategies for safeguarding travel, work, home, and play. New health threats, like mad-cow disease, easily cross international borders, while bio- engineered food presents unprecedented regulatory demands. The Internet and other tools for instantaneous communication and networking provide great opportunities but also new challenges. None of these prob- lems easily fits within the province of existing bureaucracies, and it would be hard to imagine how to create a bureaucracy that could encompass them. The challenges require new administrative strategies and tactics. 2. Capacity. Many of these challenges require government to develop and deploy new skills as well as to expand existing ones significantly. The capacity problem not only involves finding and hiring smart people but also means devising effective strategies to tackle the new problems of governance. As government relies more on nongovernmental partners to deliver services, it increases its own need to define sharply what it is try- ing to accomplish. It also increases its need for tools to supervise grantees, contractors, and other third parties who work on its behalf. Finally, government must be able to gauge the success of its complex chain of action. Because much of government remains deeply rooted in traditional command-and-control techniques and direct-service strate- Copyright © 2002. Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved. gies, it faces the twin task of escaping the bounds of its existing culture and building capacity to meet its emerging challenges. 3. Legitimacy. American government’s increasing dependence on non- governmental partners—and their increasing dependence on government programs and cash—highlight important problems for the legitimacy of public power. As Fritz W. Scharpf argues, the more government and its partners become interdependent, the more its policy options are con- strained and the more previous policies “become less effective, more costly, or downright unfeasible—which must be counted as a loss of de- mocratic self-determination even if new options are added to the policy repertoire.”11 Political interests help frame governmental policy but then also become important in administering it. That shifts the balance of po- litical forces, because some interests become far more tightly wired into both the making and the administration of governmental policy. It makes it harder for those outside this network to oversee that policy. And it changes government’s role from one of hierarchical supremacy to that of one player in a broader network. This disrupts the age-old notions of gov- Kettl, Donald F.. Transformation of Governance : Public Administration for Twenty-First Century America, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wwu/detail.action?docID=3318100. Created from wwu on 2019-12-26 16:15:41.  who governs—and how? 161 ernment’s role and of the workings of democratic accountability. How does influence over public policy work? Are all voices equal? What should government do when a place within the administrative network privileges some political voices over others? 4. Sovereignty. Government also needs to devise new strategies to en- sure that its voice is not just one among many in the network. Especially with the simultaneous rise of devolution and globalization, the federal government’s role has become far less clear. To rule effectively, govern- ment must first attain and then exercise sovereignty. It must be able to chart its course and ensure that that course is followed. Hyperpluralism, policy networks, devolution, and globalization have all greatly diffused power. Government might retain its legal position, but exercising prac- tical sovereignty amid such diffused power presents a major challenge to twenty-first century government. It requires government both to know what it wants to accomplish and to devise strategies for doing so. Government is not just one participant in policy networks, working on the same level as others. It has a responsibility to the law and to the pub- lic interest and must, therefore, ensure it has the capacity to steer the be- havior of the policy systems that produce public programs. 5. The public interest. Perhaps the strongest argument of traditional public administration is its particular focus on the public interest—the use of administration to pursue programs to advance the interests and to solve the problems of citizens. The Hamiltonian and Wilsonian tradi- tions, in particular, have always carried a heavy public-interest argument. Copyright © 2002. Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved. Administration needed to be strong enough to allow government to do what citizens wanted done. Of course, defining “the public interest” has always been the most daunting of practical and theoretical problems. The diffusion of sovereignty has made the tough job even tougher. Nevertheless, public administration—in all its competing theories and traditions—remains single-mindedly committed to what Waldo calls “the good life.”12 Indeed, White believed that “in its broader context, the ends of administration are the ultimate ends of the state itself—the main- tenance of peace and order, instruction of the young, equalization of op- portunity, protection against disease and insecurity, adjustment and compromise of conflicting groups and interests, in short, the achieve- ment of the good life.”13 The Brownlow Committee in 1937 echoed that argument by concluding, “By democracy, we mean getting things done that we, the American people, want done in the general interest.”14 Public administration thus stands among the highest traditions of American government—and squarely in the middle of its biggest tests. Its task is to rise to the challenge of the transformation of governance. Kettl, Donald F.. Transformation of Governance : Public Administration for Twenty-First Century America, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wwu/detail.action?docID=3318100. Created from wwu on 2019-12-26 16:15:41.  162 the transformation of governance strategies for transforming governance What would strategies for twenty-first century governance look like? American governments face three capacity problems: fine-tuning their traditional, hierarchical systems to work more productively in managing direct service systems; creating new nonhierarchical approaches for man- aging indirect service systems; and, perhaps most daunting, configuring those systems to operate effectively side by side, without the authority- based system disrupting the network and without the network disrupting the authority-based system. In particular, the expansion of both contract- ing out and federalism as administrative strategies brings new burdens. Capacity Government strategies, especially grants and contracts, do not manage themselves. Rather, they require the cultivation of new skills to specify program goals, negotiate good contracts, and oversee the results. Moreover, the contract system requires the development of markets that could supply the goods and services the government wanted to buy; re- placing a public monopoly with a private monopoly scarcely could increase the efficiency of service delivery.15 In assessing the government’s “high- risk programs,” the U.S. General Accounting Office identified contract management as one of its most difficult problems.16 The rise of this con- tractor workforce raises important challenges to the federal workforce and fuels its “human capital” problem. Comptroller General Walker argued, Copyright © 2002. Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved. “The problem is not federal employees, it’s the policies, procedures and legislative framework that guide federal human capital actions.”17 The rise of intergovernmental relations as both a political and an ad- ministrative system has complicated this problem. The federal government has long managed many of its operations through direct systems, such as Social Security and air traffic control. As the scope of its activities expanded through the last decades of the twentieth century, the federal government began relying more on state and local governments as front-line field agents to deliver federal programs, from interstate highways and an- tipoverty programs to Medicaid and environmental programs. The federal government relied on state and local governments in part because they pro- vided useful administrative intermediaries. The federal government also, however, relied on subnational governments to share decision-making and make government programs more responsive. The history of American federalism has always rendered the federal-state-local administrative rela- tionship complex. Federalism has long sought to define uniform national Kettl, Donald F.. Transformation of Governance : Public Administration for Twenty-First Century America, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wwu/detail.action?docID=3318100. Created from wwu on 2019-12-26 16:15:41.  who governs—and how? 163 policies and to give state and local government responsibility to tailor those policies to local conditions. Determining where federal goals leave off and local policy discretion picks up has long been a difficult puzzle. The rise of these strategies—contracting and intergovernmental rela- tions—requires the federal government to shape policy and measure re- sults without intruding on administrative flexibility. These activities re- quire greater skill in negotiation and information management than does direct service delivery. The federal government must develop these skills—enhancing its “human capital”—without undermining its ability to manage direct programs, which continue to rely on hierarchy and author- ity. When a department uses both strategies, such as the U.S. Department of Transportation’s air traffic control and highway grant systems and the epa’s enforcement and Superfund cleanup systems, it faces the task of constructing parallel administrative systems. These systems have vastly different organizational cultures but must be cultivated by the same senior management team. Building the skills to manage these strategies is a sub- stantial challenge. Leading them in parallel is an even bigger one. Add to that an additional challenge: America’s local governments have maintained more direct service delivery than the federal govern- ment. So not only must America’s administrative system develop paral- lel direct and indirect management systems. It must also accommodate the different rules of different levels of government, an issue as much political as administrative. Coordination Copyright © 2002. Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved. No problem is more central to administration than coordination. Hierarchy and authority have long offered two great advantages in solv- ing this problem. They allow top managers to break complex jobs into smaller, manageable pieces. They also allow top managers to assign pre- cise responsibilities to each administrator and thereby hold them ac- countable for results. With the transformation of governance, these ap- proaches had scarcely become less widespread or useful. Rather, they solved a smaller share of government’s management problems. As more organizations shared responsibility for producing results, American government at all levels sought additional strategies and tactics to sup- plement hierarchy and authority—to solve the problems that the tradi- tional approaches left unresolved. For example, the path-breaking welfare reform strategy Wisconsin Works (W-2) taught an important lesson about helping welfare recipi- ents get off welfare and into productive long-term employment. In Kettl, Donald F.. Transformation of Governance : Public Administration for Twenty-First Century America, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wwu/detail.action?docID=3318100. Created from wwu on 2019-12-26 16:15:41.  164 the transformation of governance three years ending in September 2000, the number of people on cash as- sistance had dropped by half. Most of the front-line work was done by for-profit and nonprofit organizations and, in fact, the typical welfare recipient never saw a government employee in the journey from welfare to work. In the program that became the model for the 1996 federal welfare reform legislation, devolution was the driving strategy. Reducing the welfare rolls was one thing. Getting welfare recipients into good jobs and keeping them there was quite another. As a 2001 Wisconsin state legislative audit report showed, one-third of the 2,129 individuals who left the W-2 program in the first three months of 1998 did not file a 1999 income tax return.18 Experts suspected that they were not earning enough money to file. Another third had incomes below the poverty level, while one-third had incomes above the poverty level when benefits from the earned income tax credit were included. Many partic- ipants cycled into and out of the program. A little more than one-fourth of those who left the program returned by July 2000. In Milwaukee, which had the lion’s share of Wisconsin’s case load as well as many of its most difficult cases, 42 percent of W-2 clients were back in the program because work had not worked out. What strategies proved most successful in getting people off welfare, keeping them off, and helping them climb above the poverty level? The W-2 alumni with the highest incomes were those who had received ex- tensive job training and other support services and then moved on to un- subsidized private-sector jobs. Those who went into subsidized jobs did Copyright © 2002. Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved. not fare nearly as well. Those with the greatest success benefited from “case management,” in which service coordinators working for one of the ngos pulled together job training, child care, housing and food support, health care, and the other services that families need to make the jump from welfare to work. Service delivery has become less a process by which government agencies convert inputs (including money, people, and expertise) into outputs and more a process by which many agencies, in government and outside, share responsibility for producing services. To the traditional command-and-control functions of management have been added new functions of building and managing partnerships. Although the job varies tremendously by level of government—direct service delivery continues to predominate in local governments while the government by proxy dominates federal programs—the functions of public manage- ment have subtly but dramatically changed since the Progressive era. In dealing with citizens, effective government managers are increasingly Kettl, Donald F.. Transformation of Governance : Public Administration for Twenty-First Century America, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wwu/detail.action?docID=3318100. Created from wwu on 2019-12-26 16:15:41.  who governs—and how? 165 case managers; in coordinating different agencies and programs, gov- ernment managers are increasingly service integrators. This heightens the value of the network approach that emerged in public management research during the 1990s. If it has not yet become a fully developed theory, it has at least provided an important step to- ward understanding the complexity of the service system and charting strategies for operating effectively within it. Moreover, the coordina- tion imperative increased the importance of information technology and electronic government.19 Information strategies and tactics that move seamlessly across those boundaries offer great potential.20 Control When demonstrators swarmed Seattle in 1999 to protest the meeting of the World Trade Organization, they joined the issues of globalization and democratic accountability. Amid the tear gas and broken glass, they argued that large multinational corporations and organizations like the wto were taking power away from citizens. If the proposition was de- batable, it was surely true that the rise of global trade and multinational organizations stretched the boundaries of constitutional government. Behind the headlines, the demonstrations focused attention on big is- sues: assessing the power of groups like the wto ; determining how to hold it accountable to democratic governments and their people; and structuring patterns of popular participation in critical decisions such organizations make. It was an important case of how constitutional Copyright © 2002. Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved. democracy had lagged behind the forces shaping critical decisions. Within devolved systems, similar issues surfaced without the glass- shattering impact of the Seattle demonstrators. As ngo s took on greater responsibility for service delivery, critics worried about how to hold them accountable. Government reformers countered that market-style contracts and incentives were the key. But when large declines in the Wisconsin welfare rolls produced big profits for the contractors, inter- est groups representing the poor complained that the money should have gone instead to provide better services to more welfare recipients. Since Dwight D. Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex—indeed, since George Washington warned the Continental Congress that military contractors were stealing desperately needed provisions from his troops—thoughtful observers have worried about the leakage of public power and money into private hands. In the American administrative traditions, the dominant approach to this problem has always rested in the delegation doctrine: voters elect Kettl, Donald F.. Transformation of Governance : Public Administration for Twenty-First Century America, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wwu/detail.action?docID=3318100. Created from wwu on 2019-12-26 16:15:41.  166 the transformation of governance public officials; they make policy; they delegate the management of complex issues to administrators; and the administrators are account- able through the chain of command to elected officials. In fact, the doc- trine of delegation tightly controls administrative behavior. In the pri- vate sector, managers may do anything not prohibited by law. In the public sector, managers may do only what the law allows. Responsive- ness to the public occurs from the top down through the electoral process. Elected officials have not always been eager to exercise their re- sponsibility, but the fabric of bureaucratic power in the American re- public depends on this relationship. The transformation of governance has unraveled that fabric, how- ever. Elected officials might delegate power to administer programs, but the real task of administration is coordination—weaving together separate programs into a sensible policy. That coordination results in responsibility shared among administrators at different agencies, at multiple levels of government, and among nongovernmental partners. Hyperpluralism means that no one is fully in charge of anything and that nearly everyone ultimately shares responsibility for results. That does not mean that accountability through the delegation process has evaporated. It does mean that it is less effective, both in drawing a clear link between policy decisions and the ultimate results and in ensuring that the administration of individual programs meshes to produce sen- sible policy. As in bureaucratic organizations that use hierarchy and control through authority, the traditional approaches have not disap- Copyright © 2002. Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved. peared. But the transformation of governance has created a powerful need to layer new systems on top of the old to ensure democratic ac-