The Public in Public ManagementAndrew Graham

Plan for Today

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The Idea of Public Administration

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Policy, Direction: The Public Good to be Achieved:

the Policy Process

Resourcing the Policy

Objectives: the Budget

Process

Accounting, Evaluating

and Reporting

Delivery the Public Good: Operations,

Management and Control

How Does How Does ManagementManagementFit into the Fit into the

Public Public Policy Cycle?Policy Cycle?

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Policy, Direction: The Public Good to be Achieved:

the Policy Process

Resourcing the Policy

Objectives: the Budget

Process

Accounting, Evaluating

and Reporting

Delivery the Public Good: Operations,

Management and Control

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Planning, Design, Feedback, Feasibility

Planning, Design, Feedback, Feasibility

Budgeting, Staffing, IT, Infrastructure

Budgeting, Staffing, IT, Infrastructure

Service, Control, Operations, Monitoring, Adaptation

Service, Control, Operations, Monitoring, Adaptation

Measuring, Reporting, Revising

and Adapting

Measuring, Reporting, Revising

and Adapting

What is public administration?• Is it what governments do?• Is it direct action or indirect? Examples?• Is it public policy?• Is it defined and confined in law?• Is regulation public administration?• Is it patronage, spreading out the public purse?• Is it theft?• Is it collective protection of the weak and guardian of

fairness?• Is it a profession?• Is it just management? Can it exist without management?

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Defining characteristics of public administration

• Laws or legally founded rules that create the structure of the administrative apparatus of the state.

• Delegation through law of specific powers and responsibilities to the administrative apparatus to carry on the work of government

• Continuing democratic supervision of administrative activities through the executive which directs activities within the public administration apparatus...

• Accountability vested in the political executive to the legislature.

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Defining characteristics of public administration

• A non-political administrative apparatus that is subject to policy direction but not partisan.

• Forms of interaction between policy makers and policy implementers

• Forms of interaction among policy makers, implementers and those affected by the policies

• Delivery of services based on law and public resources

• Oversight of delivery by others

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Defining characteristics of public administration

• Continuity of accountability and public oversight even when the administrative apparatus is at arms length from traditional government or contracted to independent third parties (private or voluntary groups).

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Defining values

• Often confused with ethics• Ethics = what we view as right/wrong or good/bad

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The individual principles or qualities that guide

judgement and behaviour.

The individual principles or qualities that guide

judgement and behaviour.

Why values ?

• Concept of values fundamental to all aspects of government and administration

• Shape and inform behaviour• All decisions are value driven

• Different types of organisation will employ and encourage different types of value sets• Key part of organisational culture

• Absence leads to dilemmas - ethical, organisational, political

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Why values ?

• Determine the success or failure of reform• Significant changes over last decade

• Enduring, Adapting or Competing?• What can the different parts of the service tell us?

• Local v. central• Higher v. lower grades• Administrative v. technical etc

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Values and Public Service: the John Tait Framework

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• Democratic Values:• Loyalty to government• Non-partisanship• Equity• Candour to political masters• Discretion • Service to people

Values and Public Service: the John Tait Framework

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Emerging Values?

Emerging Values?

• Professional Values: • Excellence, economy and effectiveness• Objectivity and impartiality in advice• Telling truth to power• Fidelity to the public trust

• Ethical Values: integrity, honesty, impartiality, probity, trustworthiness, respect for law and careful stewardship of public resources.

• People Values: courage, moderation, decency, humanity, civility, tolerance, courtesy.

Values Tensions• Inevitable

• Growing number of tasks and expectations• Frequent ambiguity of goals and relationships

• Occur in relation to • Maintaining standards v. Adapting to new circumstances• Responding to needs of different stakeholders• Need for control v. need for discretion• Managing up vs Managing down

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Table Discussion: Tell a Story

• Discuss an experience that one member of the table had or that you saw in another organization where values were in conflict.

• Prepare to share it with the group.• We can then discuss such conflicts

with these stories.

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Bureaucratic Values: Are They Always Bad?

•What are the bad old bureaucratic values?

•Do these necessarily contradict the public interest?

Challenges to traditional values

• New modes of governance – state and market• Greater fluidity, stakeholders

• NPM or market-based reforms• Agencies – ORNGE, Cancer Ontario,LCBO• Generational shifts• More information, more openly available with less control over

its use

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What else?What else?

Seen but not Heard? Does the public manager have a personality?• Savoie, 2006, arguing that even Westminster

models vested roles in management to bureaucrats, but they remained essentially anonymous: this is changing

• Clearer in municipal government, hospital and educational administration

• Agencies are more visible• Emergence of more visible pubic administrators

working for government with a strong penchant for message control A

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Public Versus Private Management

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Public versus Private: a whole lot of difference?• Discussion:

1. What are the principles differences between public and private sector management and administration?

2. What are elements that are the same?

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1. Authority to revise the organization and key positions

2. Continuity of leadership to implement long range plans.

3. Excess funds distributed as a bonus or salary increase.

4. Objectives measured by results. (Profit)

5 Anonymity, isolation from the media.

1. Structure may be influenced by outside and special interest groups.

2. Time for accomplishment limited by the election process.

3. Punished for operating below budget.

4. Objectives measured by process. (Programs)

5. High visibility, pursued by the media.

Private Vs. Public Sector Management

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6. Reduce costs by selectively cutting specific projects.

7. Rewards for achievement.

8.Selects “Expert” board to set general operating policies.

9. Operations geared to effectiveness.

10. Top management evaluated by overall effectiveness.

6. Reduce costs by across-the-board program cuts.

7. Punishment for failure.

8. Must educate a volatile authorizing environment to the policy setting role.

9. Operations geared to efficiency and coverage.

10.Top management evaluated by dramatic incidents.

Private Vs. Public Sector Management

Sector Envy

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From a report by IFF Research, a UK HR research firm, reported in the Guardian, January 2010, http://www.theguardian.com/money/2010/jan/23/public-private-sector-grass-greener

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Is the private sector more efficient than the public sector?

Heretical View: Risk averse nature of private sector organisations• Commercial organisations are risk averse.

• Profit margins are easier to secure where there is predictability.

• But much of what the public sector does is relatively unbounded

• Public sector’s capacity for risk pooling and cross subsidy can actually permit it to take on more risk

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The Public Sector Landscape

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“Managers are always on “rough ground” where values, feelings,

affect, and ambiguities are simultaneously in play.”

- Fred Thompson, The Three Faces of Public Management, International Public Management

Review, 2008

Public Sector Management Landscape• Complexity• Interoperability• Inter-dependence• Contested results• Breadth of instrumentality • Contingency response and redundancy

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Does public administration have a values problem?• Today, a strong focus on what is wrong in public

administration• Do the values of efficiency and service actually conflict with

values of social support and community sustainability?• Do threats such as terrorism trump due process? • Is the value that public administration adds changing? From

social welfare to security interoperability?

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“Public management . . . is a world of settled institutions designed to allow imperfect people to use flawed procedures to cope with insoluble problems.”

- James Q. Wilson Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and

Why They Do It

Key Themes• At the heart of public

administration, even at times of change, is the notion of a predictable, stable support to the democratic process, even at times of change.

• “While reform, change, and adaptation of contemporary national administrative systems may be nearly universal, it follows centuries of reform, change, and adaptation that have resulted in national institutions whose function is to guarantee a certain stability and continuity in democratic governance.”Laurence Lynn, “Public Management: Old and New”

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Key Themes

•The capacity of a public administration to deliver the political will.

•The inter-relation between the formation of that will and its execution – the policy advice role of public administration.

•The tension between change and continuity, especially at the political interface

•Getting, using and accounting for the right mix of resources to get the job done.

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Tensions faced by public administrators

• Efficiency v. Effectiveness• reaching public goals or measuring activities?

• Responsiveness v. Accountability• responding to public needs or filling out reports?

• Difference between outputs and outcomes

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And then there is New Public Management……

What Changed• Hierarchical, bureaucratic principles

• far more diligently, far longer in the public sector. • Direct provision

• standard operating procedure. • Political and administrative separate

• policy or strategy the preserve of political leadership. • Professional bureaucracy

• employed for life, serve any political master equally

• New paradigm challenges fundamental principles of public administration

Old Models Fall

• Delivery by bureaucracy is not the only way to provide government goods and services.

• Flexible management systems pioneered by the private sector are being adopted by governments.

• Governments can operate indirectly. • Political and administrative matters intertwined• Public demands better accountability• Case for unusual employment conditions weaker.

New public management: central doctrines• No book but…

• focus on management, not policy• performance appraisal and efficiency• disaggregation of public bureaucracies• user-pay relationships• use of quasi-markets and contracting out to foster competition• cost-cutting; output targets; limited-term contracts; monetary’

incentives; freedom to manage.

NPM: implies• Substantial changes for personnel• Osborne and Gaebler:

• government needs to be ‘reinvented’• bureaucracy neither necessary nor efficient• other means should be used.

• “Entrepreneurial governments” promote competition between service providers.

• Pushing control into the community• Measure performance by outcomes.

NPM: the mission• Redefine clients as customers • Offer choices• Prevent problems before they emerge• Earning money, not simply spending it• Decentralise authority• Participatory management• Preference for market mechanisms• Energising all sectors — public, private and voluntary —

to solve their community’s problems.

NPM: the legacy• Much has changed in public administration as a result of NPM• Scattered and inconsistent• Some trends very clearly would have spun out on their own:

• Great focus on measurement• Greater involvement of private (profit and not-for-profit) in

delivery• Disaggregation of policy formulation• Rise of agencies and arms-length organizations within

government• Clear issues of how to exercise accountability for these• Novel financing arrangements • Transfer of risk to private sector

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Emergence of the New Governance• Concepts of complexity and globalization• An increasing number of public policy issues call for the active

contribution of many actors across and beyond government • Working in networks• Working through others

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Emergence of the New Governance• Government as steering not delivering• Concept of nudge• Value challenges: non-traditional relationships, less process

control leads to less outcome control, forces a concept of policy design based on reverse engineering

• A riskier landscape with less direct control• Concept of resilience and capacity to respond to

unpredictable outcomes and events

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Emergence of the New Governance: Value Challenges• Collaborative Values• Citizen engagement• Holding onto core values

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“Above all, it may be time to rediscover some very old concepts of the public good, collective interests, democracy, civics and

citizenship and to explore their meaning in the changing landscape of today’s reality.”

- Jocelyn Bourgon, Public Purpose, Government Authority and Collective Power

“Above all, it may be time to rediscover some very old concepts of the public good, collective interests, democracy, civics and

citizenship and to explore their meaning in the changing landscape of today’s reality.”

- Jocelyn Bourgon, Public Purpose, Government Authority and Collective Power

Coming Up: A Management Framework Must Address the Following Issues

• Mission, Vision, Values – more permanent• Objectives, goals, direction• Delivery Elements

• People• Finances• Infrastructure• Information and Knowledge

• Performance Indicators• Reporting and accountability

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