Strategies for Governing

Reinventing Public Administration for a Dangerous Century

Alasdair Roberts

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501745591
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Affari pubblici e amministrazione

With the fields of public administration and public management suffering a crisis of relevance, Alasdair Roberts offers a provocative assessment of their shortfalls. The two fields, he finds, no longer address urgent questions of governance in a turbulent and dangerous world. Strategies for Governing offers a new path forward for research, teaching, and practice. Leaders of states, Roberts writes, are constantly reinventing strategies for governing. Experts in public administration must give advice on the design as well as execution of strategies that effective, robust, and principled. Strategies for Governing challenges us to reinvigorate public administration and public management, preparing the fields for the challenges of the twenty-first century.

PART I

Key Ideas

Chapter 1

SUMMARY OF PROPOSITIONS

This is a summary of propositions that are emphasized within the proposed macro-level approach to public administration. These propositions are examined in the following chapters.

• Today, and for the foreseeable future, the fundamental unit of political organization is the state.
• Every state is a constituent of an international system of states.
• Every state asserts the exclusive authority to regulate life within a defined territory.
• Every state has leaders; that is, a relatively small group of people who have substantial influence over the ordering of state goals and the means by which those goals are pursued.
• Generally, leaders try to
  • maintain and improve their own positions within the state apparatus;
  • increase power and legitimacy within the state system;
  • increase power and legitimacy within the state’s own territory; and
  • increase national prosperity.
• In addition, leaders ought to advance human rights for the population that is subject to their authority.
• Conversely, leaders may construe as threats or problems any developments that jeopardize the pursuit of the above goals.
• The behavior of leaders is guided by governance strategies that describe priorities—that is, the ordering of goals—and the means by which those priorities will be pursued.
• In general, these aspects of the governing environment must be taken into account as leaders set priorities and decide how those priorities will be pursued:
  • The distribution of power within the state system.
  • The composition, distribution, and movement of the governed population.
  • Patterns of economic activity.
  • The geography and climate of the governed territory.
  • The inventory of social and physical technologies.
• Leaders implement governance strategies by designing, consolidating, administering, and renovating institutions—that is, laws, organizations, programs, and practices. Every state consists of a complex of institutions that expresses a strategy for governing.
• Crafting and implementing governance strategies is difficult for these reasons:
  • Goals are not always compatible, so advancing one goal sometimes means compromising another.
  • There is uncertainty about which policies are most likely to advance goals.
  • The existing body of institutions, laws, and practices must be accommodated.
  • The environment for which the strategy is designed is turbulent, so priorities and methods frequently need to be reconsidered.
  • The analytic capacity of leaders and executive agencies is strained by the complexity of strategy-making.
• Governance strategies are varied, fragile, and ephemeral. They are designed to accommodate specific conditions, and they must be adjusted frequently as conditions change. This means that institutions, laws, and practices must also be renovated frequently.
• There is an unavoidable conflict between the need to consolidate institutions, laws, and practices, and the need to preserve adaptability.
• The proper timeframe for studying the evolution of governance strategies and the institutions, laws, and practices that express such strategies is at least generational. Shorter timeframes create an illusion of robustness and stability.
• The U.S. experience in crafting and implementing governance strategies is not exceptional.
• Scholars and practitioners in the field of public administration should be experts in the overall design, construction, administration, and renovation of those institutions that constitute a state. They should use this expertise to help leaders craft governing strategies that are effective, durable, and normatively defensible.

Chapter 2

ACKNOWLEDGING THE STATE

The following chapters explore some of the concepts and propositions that should be central to a macro-level approach to public administration. The first step is to acknowledge the fundamental unit of political organization in the modern world: the state.

In several scholarly disciplines, the importance of the state is taken for granted. Many political scientists regard the state as “the natural container of politics.”¹ No concept, say Colin Hay and Michael Lister, “is more central to political discourse and political analysis.”² Similarly, the sociologist Anthony Giddens calls the state “the pre-eminent power-container of the modern era.”³ Specialists in international relations regard the state as “the primary unit of political aggregation in world affairs”⁴; political geographers regard it as “the basic building block of the world political map”;⁵ and international lawyers regard it as the “primary unit of political and economic organization.”⁶

And yet the concept of the state is largely omitted from conversation in public administration, the field most directly concerned with the translation of political aspirations into governmental action. This was not always so. Up until the early 1950s, scholars in public administration routinely talked about the state. In an 1887 essay that is now regarded as a “founding manifesto” for the new field, Woodrow Wilson said that the concept of the state was “the conscience of administration.” Any “science of administration,” Wilson insisted, had to be connected to a theory about the appropriate role of the state.⁷ Public administration, Marshall Dimock agreed in 1937, was simply “the state in action.”⁸ But this way of thinking fell out of fashion decades ago. Today, entire textbooks in public administration are produced without reference to the concept of the state. The field operates without acknowledging that the United States is a state that is also part of a community of states or that a main concern of American policymakers is executing tasks essential to state survival. In American public administration, the state is the ghost in the text: it is always there, but its presence is not recognized.

What is a state? Many have attempted definitions. Max Weber famously described the state as “a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”⁹ This definition is imperfect. States never achieve a complete monopoly on the use of force within a given territory. It is enough to gain “effective control,” in the argot of international law. Indeed, states may hobble along even when their hold over much of their territory is tenuous. (These are sometimes called fragile states.) Weber’s reference to the “legitimate” use of force also creates difficulties. If we put that aside for the moment, it would leave us with a hard bottom line: that a prerequisite for existence as a state is the capacity of authorities to suppress rivals for power within well-defined borders. This is roughly accurate, although it could be argued that survival as a state also depends on the accomplishment of tasks other than the attainment of effective control (chapter 5).

Another approach to creating a definition emphasizes the composition of a state in addition to the tasks that it must perform. For example, John Hall and John Ikenberry defined the state as “a set of institutions” that maintain authority within a territory.¹⁰ Hall later joined with John Campbell to provide a more extensive explanation:

In the most generic and ahistorical terms, the state is a set of institutions designed to maintain order in a given territory and protect its population from other states.… The institutions of states typically include decision-making bodies (e.g., councils, senates, parliaments, tribunals), defense and security apparatuses (e.g., armies, navies, militias, national guards), and a set of laws and enforcement mechanisms (e.g., police, councils of elders, judiciary)—all of which are to some extent in the hands of an elite set of rulers and their staff.¹¹

Other scholars have offered similar definitions. Some describe the state as a complex or ensemble of institutions that jointly exercise supreme authority within a territory.¹² S. E. Finer described the state as “an organ served by specialized personnel” such as “a civil service to carry out decisions and a military service to back these by force where necessary.”¹³ Theda Skocpol has defined the state as “a set of administrative, policing, and military organizations headed, and more or less well coordinated by, an executive authority.”¹⁴

This approach to a definition, which emphasizes the way in which the state is constituted, could be modified in two ways. Institutions consist of people who fill roles and execute routines. It is a friendly amendment, therefore, to define the state not just as an institutional complex that performs certain tasks but also as the group of people who populate those institutions and share responsibility for those tasks. Similarly, people must have a shared understanding of what those institutions are trying to do and how they are supposed to work. The substance of the state consists not just of institutions and people but also these shared understandings.

The state has another critical aspect: it possesses a status or standing referred to as statehood. The conferral of this status is the final and critical step in transforming an institutional complex into a state. Not only must an institutional complex wield authority as a matter of fact; its right to exercise authority must also be recognized by other actors. The most critical form of recognition comes from other states and is guided by principles of international law. An institutional complex that wins this sort of recognition—and thus becomes a state in the eyes of the international community—is less likely to be attacked, is free to engage in diplomacy with other states, and is entitled to join international organizations. At the same time, the authority of this institutional complex needs to be accepted by the governed population. This is usually what we mean when we talk about legitimacy, the word used by Weber.¹⁵ People within a territory must acknowledge that an institutional complex has the right to rule. There are practical reasons why this is so. States cannot govern through the use of force alone.¹⁶ Leaders depend on “habitual obedience of the bulk of the population.”¹⁷ Samuel Finer once suggested that cultivating such obedience is “the principal art of government.”¹⁸

It is helpful to distinguish the concept of the state from three other concepts. First, there is a difference between state and government, and especially central government. In the United States, for example, the central government is certainly an important part of the institutional complex that constitutes the state—but that complex also includes fifty state governments, forty thousand local governments, and fifty thousand special-purpose governments.¹⁹ In addition, there are private organizations—such as political parties and contractors—that play a key role in governance as well as international organizations through which American leaders advance their interests abroad. These should also be counted as components of the state apparatus, if only on the periphery. Moreover, as I have noted, this whole apparatus must accomplish certain things before it can be counted as a state—such as effective control over territory and the attainment of standing.

An important question is how this institutional complex ought to be designed so that it is durable and competent in performing essential tasks. This is a query about the overall architecture of the state. The field of public administration, comprised of experts in the design and renovation of institutions, ought to have something to say in answer to this question. The substance of that answer hinges on our judgment about top-priority tasks and about what institutions can and cannot do. As I will explain later, these judgments relate to the overall strategy for governing.

A second conceptual distinction should be drawn between states and nation-states, even though these terms are often used interchangeably. A nation-state is formed when most of the governed population shares a language, culture, and history, and so constitutes a distinct nation. For many years it was asserted that a state could not survive unless its population constituted a single nation, and for this reason, political leaders often pursued policies to increase linguistic and cultural homogeneity.²⁰ Frequently,...