New Public Governance

A Regime-Centered Perspective

Douglas Morgan,Brian Cook

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317463849
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Affairs & Administration
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Written by scholars who have been at the forefront of the NPG debate as well as by scholar-practitioners, this book provides lessons learned from experience on how networked, contract-based and partnership-centered approaches to government can be undertaken in ways that preserve the values at the center of the American constitutional and political system.

PART I

DEVELOPING A THEORY OF GOVERNANCE FOR NPG: WHAT SHOULD BE AT ITS CENTER?

1

THE FOUNDATIONS OF NEW PUBLIC GOVERNANCE

DOUGLAS F. MORGAN AND CRAIG W. SHINN

Two sets of factors began to coalesce in the 1980s, calling into question some of the basic assumptions of the administrative state.¹ First, there was a resurgence of support for a smaller and less intrusive government that reduced the regulatory and financial burden on individuals and property holders (Green 2012; see also Green’s chap. 3 of this volume). This call for both smaller government and reduced government influence was reflected on a variety of fronts, including taxpayer revolts in several states that led to limitations on tax increases and spending. It showed up on the regulatory front as well, in the call for reduced restrictions on the rights of property owners to develop their land and on businesses burdened by environmental, occupational safety, health, and employment regulations (Cooper 2009). The appeal for less government was also fueled by the belief that the private and nonprofit sectors could provide many government services more efficiently with fewer funds (Cooper 2003). Underlying much of this call for smaller and less intrusive government was a growing philosophical belief that democracy was safer when government is smaller.

A second major factor challenging the viability of the administrative state was a concern by those who argued that the growing national debt and the escalating costs by state and local government for health and retirement plans for employees were going to break the bank (Walker 2007; Morgan et al. 2013, chap. 1).

Taken together, these forces for change have resulted in two movements that question the capacity for government to be the primary agent in solving society’s problems. The first movement, called new public management (NPM), took the business or market model as the standard for measuring government success and applied it in successive waves of administrative reform since the early 1980s. The second movement, called new public governance (NPG),² emphasizes the importance of taking a collaborative approach to the provision of public services, working with partners within and across the public, nonprofit, and private sectors. This model is more emergent and bridges communitarian aspects of the nonprofit sector with aspects of the market model. Neither model claims to be exclusive: Each one emphasizes different types of strategies designed to reduce the size, scope, costs, and inefficiencies of government.

In this chapter, we review the NPM and NPG movements and assess their implications for administrative practice, education, and research. We will carry out our review in four parts, looking at (1) the rise of new public management, its assumptions, and its accomplishments; (2) the distinguishing characteristics of new public governance, its assumptions, and its accomplishments; (3) the role of both NPM and NPG in the larger evolution of public administration practice, research, and education; and (4) the ongoing debate about new public governance.

THE RISE OF NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT (NPM)

A concerted effort has evolved over the last three decades to reframe the model of public administration from a rule-centered system of accountability to one that makes government run more like a business. This movement, called new public management (NPM), strives to make the services provided by government more responsive and accountable to citizens by applying businesslike management techniques with a strong focus on competition, customer satisfaction, and measurement of performance. General agreement exists among scholars and practitioners alike that these efforts to measure what gets done have produced a variety of worthwhile results. For instance:

• measures of efficiency and effectiveness have inspired managers, supervisors, and frontline employees to improve their capacity to diagnose and correct operational problems (Amnions and Rivenbark 2008);

• an emphasis on performance measurement has heightened interest in creating systems that improve the overall management and governance of political entities (Wholey and Harry 1992; Moynihan and Pandey 2005; Hatry 2010, 2002); and

• performance measurement systems have expanded to embrace an increasingly larger array of values, including (1) cost and efficiency measures; (2) effectiveness measures such as outputs, outcomes, and impacts; and (3) qualitative measures such as satisfaction, responsiveness, and quality of life (Stoker 2006; Jørgensen and Bozeman 2007; O’Flynn 2007).

But, regardless of what gets measured, there are two major weaknesses in using private-sector business principles to improve the performance of government: First, there is no common denominator—such as profit, market share, or return on investment—that can serve as the basis for comparison across the wide range of criteria that build trust and legitimacy among citizens in their political institutions. Furthermore, efficiency, effectiveness, and responsiveness to citizens (customers) are not the only legitimating possibilities under consideration. Values like fairness, equity, protection of rights, and transparency play important roles in determining the legitimacy of political institutions, processes, and outcomes (Moe 1994; Moore 1995, 1994; Moe and Gilmour 1995; Kelly 1998; Lynn 1998; Cooper 2003; Rosenbloom 2003; Hefetz and Warner 2004). How do you put these more elusive values on the same plane as those that can be measured more easily, and how do you create a common denominator that allows for meaningful comparisons?

The second apparent weakness in using private-sector models for improving government performance lies in the complex configuration and administration of government. The public sector is comprised of increasingly fragmented structures of authority that confound the possibility, and even the desirability, of moving in a straight line from goals and objectives to instrumentally and rationally linked performance measures. The proliferation of local governments (see Morgan et al. 2013, 115–118), coupled with the entrepreneurial push to outsource public service to nonprofit and private-sector organizations, shifts performance away from a single-minded focus on the efficient, effective, and customer-sensitive achievement of goals and objectives to a focus on achieving and sustaining agreements between and across structures of authority. This has been described as “leading in a power-shared world” (see Crosby and Bryson 2005b; Crosby 2010; Morgan et al. 2013; see also chap. 12 of this volume on polity leadership) and is the focus of an emerging body of literature called new public governance (Osborne 2010).

To summarize, the NPM agenda is based on a truncated view of the purpose of government. Government is not simply the agent of accountability to citizens or the agent of efficiency and effectiveness; it is also responsible for collecting the values of the community and creating integrated responses to these values across increasingly fragmented government systems (Kelly 1998; Lynn 1998). When the values of the community are in conflict, or when they are contrary to the interests of significant minorities, government officials have a fiduciary responsibility to make decisions that are in the larger public interest. This kind of accountability model has faded into the background with the emergence of NPM. In a previous day, whether it was the scientific management movement of the early twentieth century or the efficiency and effectiveness initiatives of the Brownlow Committee and Hoover Commission reports in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, the discussion of performance was framed within a larger context of the respective roles of the executive and legislative branches in making the overall system of government work (see especially Stever 1990, 1988; Cook 1996, 119–120). Performance was not stripped down to the simple issue of business efficiency and effectiveness; rather, it was treated as an important part of a larger set of governance issues that were vital to building trust and legitimacy in governing institutions and their leaders. This larger, more holistic and organic perspective has been missing from the principles of the NPM movement since its inception in the 1980s. Such concerns spawned the rise of the new public governance movement.

THE RISE OF NEW PUBLIC GOVERNANCE (NPG)

Concerns with NPM’s narrow instrumental focus generated a countermovement by practitioners and academics to place substantive political values more firmly at the center of the governance debate. This movement emphasizes three trust- and legitimacy-building characteristics of public governance that are ignored and/or undervalued by NPM. First, NPG is value centered; it argues that the goal of government is to promote the larger common good. Mark Moore has called this new emphasis “the public value approach” (Moore 1995, 1994; see also Smith and Huntsman 1997), while Stoker and others have called it “the collective preference approach” (Alford 2002; Stoker 2006). NPG is interested in advancing the value created by the whole of government activities, not just improved efficiency, effectiveness, or responsiveness in the implementation of a given program. This shift has broadened the objectives of performance measurement and management to include service outputs, satisfaction, outcomes, a wide array of substantive political values, and, ultimately, citizen trust and the very legitimacy of government itself.

A second characteristic of NPG is its emphasis on creating government processes that facilitate the generation of implementable agreements among wide-ranging stakeholders. These stakeholders may disagree on which courses of action will produce the maximum public value (Yang and Holzer 2006; Sanger 2008). This is because NPG views politics as the politically mediated expression of collectively determined preferences that the citizenry deems valuable (Moore 1995; Alford 2002; O’Flynn 2007)—a sharp contrast to the philosophy of NPM, which views politics as the aggregation of individual preferences. The consequences of this difference at a practical level are abundantly evident in the major steps the United Kingdom (UK) has taken over the last decade to reform the delivery of its social, educational, medical, and justice services to citizens at the local government level. In recent years, public officials in the UK have chosen to treat government performance not as a set of rationally planned objectives but as a process of political mediation among contending stakeholders. These stakeholders have very legitimate differences regarding the public values that need to be preserved to ensure the integrity of the larger public good. Such efforts have resulted in the creation of a wide variety of new policy instruments, negotiated agreements, and performance measures that would have been difficult, if not unthinkable, under NPM (Grint 2000; Salamon 2002; Brookes and Grint 2010; Osborne 2010, especially chaps. 16, 19, and 22; Koliba, Meek, and Zia 2011).

A final characteristic of the NPG movement is that it views the creation of the public good as a coproduction process involving the public, private market, and nonprofit sectors (see O’Toole 1997; Crosby and Bryson 2005b; Osborne 2010, 2008; Crosby 2010; Hartley, Sørensen & Torfing. 2013). Under this model, the role of government is not simply to regulate, distribute, or redistribute public benefits, but to serve as a catalytic agent to invest private and nonprofit stakeholders in shared ownership of the public good. This can take the simple form of community policing programs or a much more complicated form of networked governance such as watershed management over a very large geographic area involving multiple players and structures of authority. Such an approach is illustrated by the examples of the leadership role played by government in chapters 8, 11, 12, and 13 of this volume.

It is important to distinguish NPG’s approach from NPM’s approach to partnerships with the private and nonprofit sectors: The latter is interested primarily in using the private and nonprofit sectors to deliver a service cheaply, efficiently, and effectively (Osborne and Gaebler 1992; Osborne and Hutchinson, 2004), while NPG is interested in enhancing the capacity of local organizations as a means of building civic infrastructure and the overall capacity of a community to be self-authoring (Smith and Lipsky 1993; Banyan 2003; Smith and Smyth 2010).

The three characteristics of NPG discussed above emanate from a common belief that government performance must be viewed from the perspective of the organic wholeness of a political system in which the public, private, and nonprofit sectors work together to contribute to the distinctive way of life of a political community. This view emphasizes the synergistic influence of history, institutions, and culture in creating a shared system of values, as well as shared agreement on governance processes and structures, both formal and informal. A resurgence of scholarship that uses “polity” or “regime” as the unit of analysis for understanding performance, political change, governance, and leadership development has emerged since the late 1980s (Rohr 1989; Elkin and Soltan 1993; Stone 1993, 1989; Lauria 1997; Leo 1998, 1997; Johnson 2002; Ozawa 2005). We believe this framework is especially useful in understanding the role of local administrators in building bridges across sectors and organizations to leverage the maximum resources possible for the promotion of the larger good.

IMPLICATIONS OF NPG FOR PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AS A FIELD OF STUDY AND PRACTICE

In Table 1.1, we locate the place of NPM and NPG within the larger evolution of the study and practice of public administration through at least five stages of development. We call the first stage, shown in column 2, preclassic because it precedes the conscious creation of public administration as a formal field of study and captures what leaders are expected to do when undertaking nation building and state building. Studies of the role of public administration during these successful founding periods (in the United States and elsewhere around the world) document the importance of administrators who used their discretion to assist founding political leaders in building the trust and legitimacy of the political order. This was the genius of both Genghis Khan and Kublai Khan, who together united China and laid the foundations for the modern world (Weatherford 2004); of the founders of the Greek and Roman city-states; of Ataturk, who founded the Turkish Republic (Mango 2000; Bay 2011); of Mao Tse-tung, who founded modern China; of Ho Chi Minh, who reunited Vietnam; and of the American founders as well (cf. White 1948; Green 2002). All of these founders viewed the work of administrators as essential to government performance. They consciously recruited members of their administrative cadre based on (1) their competence in building systems, (2) their sensitivity to the needs and values of local citizens, (3) their ability to increase the reputation and trust in the larger political system, and (4) their ability to create and maintain a shared sense of common values and purpose. In short, the work of administrators was not seen as simply being instrumental and loyal but as being an integral part of shaping the meaning, value, and legitimacy of the political order itself. This makes the work of public administration—from its inception—political, constitutive, and value centered.

Column 3 of Table 1.1, labeled classic public administration, represents the emergence of public administration as a distinct field of study. It has its origins in the Populist and Progressive eras of the late 1800s and early to mid- 1900s. Salamon observes that classic public administration theory “posited a new type of institution, the democratic public agency, that would overcome the three major problems long associated with government bureaucracy—that is, excessive administrative discretion, special-interest capture, and inefficiency” (2002, 9). From the beginning, public administration has concerned itself with the business of (1) restricting government agencies to the administration of policy rather than the making of it, (2) the staffing of agencies based on competence rather than influence, and (3) management principles aimed at efficient dispatch of duties.

Represented by column 4 in Table 1.1, new public management became the dominant paradigm in the 1980s. There is widespread agreement that the NPM agenda has succeeded in accomplishing multiple goals, among them increasing government efficiency, improving service access and delivery to citizens, and downsizing government while expanding the private and nonprofit sectors (Brookes 2008, 3). NPM has strengths that are important to preserve for building citizen trust in government, including: (1) an emphasis on customer service; (2) the need to foster professionalism, managerial skills, and accountability in public administration; (3) and the important role of leaders in creating and maintaining high-performing organizations.

The critical responses to the deficiencies of classic public administration and new public management spawned new public governance, represented by column 5 in Table 1.1. NPG represents a shift in focus from what it takes to make thin...