Public Administration: Key Issues Challenging Practitioners

© 2012 Michael Anthony Tarallo. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 4/4/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4685-5970-5 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4685-5971-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4685-5972-9 (sc)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012906012

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

ABSTRACT

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

ENDNOTES

REFERENCES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

To my wife, children, and family

ABSTRACT

How public affairs are run depends upon the degree of authority and control central government decides to relinquish to regional and local governments, and the extent to which it favors citizen involvement in the governing process. Public administrators do not operate in a vacuum. The context within which decision-making takes place greatly influences public administrators’ approach to public issues. Consequently, what government decides to do and how it decides to carry it out affects the lives of people and how people perceive their role in the unfolding of public affairs.

While public administration varies from one country to another, public administrators inevitably face similar challenges. Running a government is not easy; it is complex, dynamic, contested, supported, subject to special interests, both demand- and supply-driven, just to name a few. In executing government functions, public administrators unsurprisingly contend with major decision-making questions. While obviously not exhaustive, this book addresses some key issues challenging practitioners. These challenges include questions on what gets included in the policy agenda, questions on policy response to problems through adoption and/or adaptation of exogenous policies, questions on the dangers of displacing policy goals, questions on transferring government activities to specialized agency, questions on decentralizing powers to regional and local governments, questions on combating corruption, and questions on managing public resources.

It is widely recognized that policy implementation is much more challenging than its design. Nonetheless, it is the manner in which public administrators address these challenges that creates opportunities for a more effective long-term policy prioritization, design and coordination, a more effective and inclusive public governance, and a more effective use of public resources for the delivery of needed public services.

Chapter One

Introduction

How public affairs are run depends upon the degree of authority and control central government decides to relinquish to regional and local governments, and the extent to which it favors citizen involvement in the governing process. Public administrators do not operate in a vacuum. The context within which decision making takes place greatly influences public administrators’ approach to public issues. Consequently, what government decides to do and how it decides to carry it out affects the lives of people and how people perceive their role in the unfolding of public affairs.

In Valuing People: Citizen Engagement in Policy Making and Public Service Delivery in Rural Asia (2012)¹, I argue, echoing what many scholars sustain, that it is by creating an environment where citizens are given democratic space to exercise ‘voice’ that government can truly reflect the will of the people, even in between elections. While the institutionalization of the electoral mechanism is by all means a fundamental pillar of democratic society, it is certainly not enough. Despite its merits, in fact, the mechanism falls short of truly empowering and engaging citizens in the decision-making process in matters that matter to the people rather than the elected representatives alone. But can citizen engagement fare well in a country where basic public institutional systems are not fully developed? Or is it the reverse case – can citizen involvement, instead, bring about functional public administration systems? What are really the core principles of the more recent democratic awakening we have witnessed around the world just in the last year? Are the ‘awakened’ people calling for a change of and in government with better run institutions and better provided public services alone or are they really demanding to have a direct say, a voice, in decision-making in addition to just voting in elected officials? The events represent a great opportunity for citizen engagement; anything less, however, would constitute a half-baked solution. Even if government is better run and public services are provided more efficiently, where does that leave the ordinary person? Are elections and more efficient governments alone truly reflective of the spirit of democracy? When do ordinary individuals cease to be regarded as customers, recipient of services, and when do they begin being citizens, co-designers of services needed? This is exactly what sets Public Value Management abysmally apart from the New Public Management philosophy in running government and public administrations. Just as individuals can and, more importantly, should be more engaged in public affairs, even government needs to see it this way. In fact, it is certainly up to the government to create an environment where ordinary citizen can play an influential role in decision-making both at the policy level and the delivery of public services.

While government remains central to society, scholars and practitioners have debated over which public administration approach best addresses public issues. In so doing, they draw, to varying degrees, from experiences from past and existing models. The Weberian bureaucracy, though tendentially out of style, is still practiced around the world.With regards to New Public Management (NPM), some authors go as far as saying it ‘is dead’² while others, instead, argue that while ‘on the defensive by now…NPM is very much alive and very much kicking’³. NPM remains ingrained in the operationalization of government but under a highly contentious debate vis-à-vis the principles of Public Value Management (or New Public Value, Public Value, or New Public Service, to name a few). The commonality among these models is that they each ‘reflect different circumstances, different needs and different philosophies about the role of government in society.’⁴

While the compliance-driven Weberian model (or ‘old’ or ‘traditional public administration’) focuses primarily on rules and processes, New Public Management model is concerned with efficiencies and business-like effectiveness. Drawing from a number of theories – public choice theory, principal-agent theory, transaction cost economics and competition theory – NPM is regarded more of ‘an umbrella term’⁵, or more of a kind of ‘shopping basket’ of public administration reforms⁶ than ‘a coherent analytical framework’⁷. What connects these definitions, however, are a set of guiding principles widely agreed among scholars⁸. Shifting away from the rigidities of traditional public administration (Weberian model), Hood (1991)⁹ argues ‘that NPM offers an all-purpose key to better provision of public services’ and it does so by relying on principles of (i) hands-on and free-to-manage professional management, (ii) formulation of explicit standards and measures of performance, (iii) greater emphasis on output controls, (iv) disaggregation, (v) competition, (vi) private-sector style of management with greater flexibility in hiring and rewards, and (vii) greater financial discipline and parsimony. In essence, the perceived role of government shifted from a direct service provider to more of a coordinator, a concept Osborn and Gaebler (1992)¹⁰ refer to as ‘steering not rowing’.

NPM stands for a ‘leaner, and increasingly privatized government, emulating not only the practices but also the values of business’¹¹. In line with NPM approach, with small government comes disaggregation – meaning the act of decentralizing government functions to arms’ length agencies (a process known as ‘agencification’). The irony is that the NPM approach results in an increased number of administrative units and an enlarged scope of government¹². Furthermore, with agencification, NPM has also created duplication of expenditures and more bureaucratic leadership positions. As a case in point, in the United Kingdom, a ‘2004 efficiency review conducted for the Treasury concluded that £20 billion of cost savings could be made within four years from a range of measures, including a shift to smarter procurement, carried out by few major procurement centres instead of independently by 270 departments and agencies at the national level’¹³.

In view of complexities inherent with agencification, there is also evidence of a government’s move towards the recentralization of decentralized functions. One of such efforts was the recentralization of ‘major departmental amalgamations at central or federal levels such as the