1. business and industrial
2. business operations
3. human resources

WHAT IS PUBLIC MANAGEMENT FOR?
The Welfare of the People
Above All
Barry Quirk
Too much is made of the difference between public sector
management and management challenges in the private sector. Public
sector management is much the same as any other management. From
day to day it involves the effective operational management of service
activities. It also involves the strategic management of services: the
shape of their design and the nature of their delivery as well as how
they should be improved for the better. Finally, public service
management involves a major dose of leadership—that blend of
competence, confidence and alchemy that seeks to turn a mass of
critical people into a critical mass of people.
However, two features of public sector management do distinguish
it from the rest of the management discipline:
•The close political context of management action.
•The pervasive requirement for fairness in the design and delivery of
services.
An appraisal of these two distinguishing factors will help us answer the
question, ‘what is public service management for?’
Working in a Political Environment…
The particular demands on public managers of working closely with
politicians has received recent and helpful comment and guidance
from my own professional body (Solace, 2006). It is true that senior
public sector managers work directly to elected politicians to whom
they are accountable. This is one of the key links in the chain of
accountability of public services. The visibility and democratic
accountability of national and local politicians provides both ambition
and energy to public institutions, as well as a personalized channel for
the public to continue to hold public services to account. For just as the
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market and competition acts to discipline private firms, so
accountability acts to discipline public organizations.
But I do not feel that this form of accountability serves to explain
what public service management is for—it just explains how it is
performed. Moreover, while the fact of management accountability to
politicians personally rather than to citizens impersonally
distinguishes the weekly working life of public sector managers from
those of private sector managers, it has to be said that (aside from the
coalitions and factions of partisan politics) it is not so very different to
the close and direct accountability of many private sector managers to
their boards. The close relationship between many senior executives
and the chairman and non-executive board members who represent
the broader body of shareholders is analogous to the relationship
between public officials and elected politicians. And I greatly suspect
that the tensions between a private sector board and its executives is
every bit as ‘up close and personal’ as between elected politicians and
public officials.
But accountability to elected politicians is not the only prism
through which public managers are held to account or required to
give an account of their decisions and actions (Quirk, 1997). Public
service managers need to fully disclose their activities, processes and
outcomes and be continually open to enquiry from the public.
In the public sector, two issues need to be straight if the
managerial and political domains are to mutually support each other.
First, it needs to be clear who is deciding—elected politicians or
appointed officials? Second, it needs to be clear as to whether advice
to politicians (on ‘what is to be done and how’) is to be fully disclosed
and transparent to external enquiry. Deciding who decides public
questions is complex in government because of the implications of the
long-standing convention of ministerial accountability to Parliament.
This is not the case in local government where officials are required to
have their own constitutional personality and are required to advise
both the political executive and those exercising oversight and
scrutiny.
Fairness…
The second distinguishing feature of public management is more
substantive—this is the pervasive sense of fairness and justice
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WHAT IS PUBLIC MANAGEMENT FOR?
throughout public policies. This sense of fairness permeates all
issues of public service design and delivery. The following two
questions illustrate the point:
•Is it better to deliver an efficient public service that is ineffective
or an effective public service that is inefficient?
•Is it better to deliver an effective public service that is inequitable
or an equitable public service that is ineffective?
Plainly when presented as starkly as this, effectiveness is primary to
efficiency; while, arguably, equity trumps effectiveness. The
second answer is arguable as the twin aspects of equity and
effectiveness are often closely aligned in public service delivery.
But there are examples of effective public services (urban policing
for example) which have encountered serious problems in the
public eye because, while they are perceived as being delivered
effectively, they do not appear to have paid sufficient regard to
equity considerations. When push comes to shove, it is usually the
case that public services place fairness first, effectiveness second,
and efficiency a close third (Quirk, 2005).
However, a key problem with public sector approaches to
fairness is that it is too often viewed as a process variable when it
ought to be viewed as an outcome variable. This may be why public
organizations can often become silted up by internal process
disputes about fairness, when instead they should be ever anxious
about whether they are delivering fair outcomes. Services are
usually in the public sector because fair outcomes are paramount;
effectiveness is then central to achieving desired outcomes; and,
finally, efficiency is crucial to ensure that optimum use is made of
scarce public resources to achieve more outcomes.
But what is a fair outcome when public goods are being
allocated, public ‘bads’ are being regulated and competing claims
are being mediated? Fairness in public service delivery cannot be
reduced to some simple measure of equity in outcome (although
such measures help). Fairness is often about how the ‘public
interest’ is addressed and resolved. And, in the public realm, a
sense of fairness includes whether the public consent with how this
has been done or at least can safely and peacefully express dissent
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with how it was done.
In each and every social problem that public managers are
trying to solve, there are varied and diverse interests. Public
service managers need to use the compass of the overall public
interest when deciding on courses of action to take or lines of
advice to offer.
Common Cause, Contribution and Purpose…
Every organization needs managers to plan, budget, organize and
review. And every organization needs managers of people,
resources, projects, tasks and processes. In all people-intensive
organizations, managers need to focus the attention of others on
those critical factors that are central to ensuring organizational
success. And they also need to shape people’s behaviour so as to
achieve common cause. This common cause is achieved not simply
by managers encouraging collective endeavour (‘It’s better if you
work with others rather than work alone’) but, rather, because
individuals themselves realize that they are unable to achieve big
outcomes through just their little actions. Part of the role of all
managers in all organizations is to promote the intrinsic benefits of
strong co-operation. In my view, it is essential for management
leaders to achieve this sense of common cause across their
organization—whether it is in the private sector or the public
sector. But responsibility for managing people requires leaders to
recognize individual’s personal contribution and not simply focus
on the overall common agenda or on how people’s efforts compare
one to another.
People may look for comparison (‘am I doing well compared to
others?’) but ultimately they want their personal contribution to be
of value and not just compared. No one has etched on their
tombstone—‘he was better than his brother’! This deep
psychological need for the recognition of one’s contribution
underlies people’s anxiety of league tables and comparisons
generally; even though comparisons are inevitable and usually
both healthy and useful. As a manager of other people, the ‘rule of
thumb’ should be to first acknowledge the value of someone’s
contribution before appraising how their efforts compare to
others.
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WHAT IS PUBLIC MANAGEMENT FOR?
Valuing contribution may be crucial, but contribution to what?
Most managers would say ‘contribution to organizational purpose’.
But they would be wrong. People want to contribute to far wider
goals than the narrow objectives of any organization. And this is
where public service organizations have a massive motivational
edge on their private sector counterparts. In local government this
is easier still. The common cause that conjoins those who work in
local government is the welfare of the local community. The
purpose of local government is unavoidably crystal clear—‘to
improve the quality of life and quality of life-chances of people who
live in this locality’. A focus on place and on people in the place.
Why is this so important?
A recent book by Zohar and Marshall (2004) has highlighted the
vital importance of harnessing people’s intrinsic motivation to
heighten organizational effectiveness. The authors develop further
the argument of Daniel Goleman (1996) that successful managers
need to call on their emotional intelligence to build a broad
repertoire of leadership styles. But emotionally intelligent
leadership (however difficult it is to achieve) does not of itself
generate organizational effectiveness. Zohar and Marshall argue
that organizations succeed best when the people that comprise
them understand deeply the ‘spirit’ of the organization: not just its
rules and procedures but, rather, what the organization is for! And
if they personally can connect with this organizational purpose and
it resonates with their own sense of personal purpose, then their
organization will fly.
So if as a public service leader you can crystallize what your
organization is for (not always as simple as it seems), and you can
connect your workforce’s need to contribute personally to this
wider purpose, you will outperform any private sector
comparator—so long, of course, that your many strategies and
your multitude of internal accountabilities are designed effectively
and delivered efficiently. ■
References
Goleman, D. (1996), Emotional Intelligence (Bantam Books, New
York).
Quirk, B. (1997), Accountable to everyone. Public Administration,
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Vol. 75, No. 3, pp. 569–586.
Quirk, B. (2005), Localizing efficiency. Local Government Studies,
Vol. 31, No. 5, pp. 615–625.
Solace (2006), Managing in a Political Environment (London).
Zohar, D. and Marshall, I. (2004), Spiritual Capital (Bloomsbury,
London).
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WHAT IS PUBLIC MANAGEMENT FOR?
WIPM4?
Clive Grace
Having been asked to consider ‘what is public management for’ by
email, I couldn’t hear the tone. So I canvassed possibilities, Trussian
style*:
•Was it suggesting a degree of pointlessness—‘So WIPM actually 4?’
•Was it pugnacious—‘But WIPM4, then?’
•Or was it Pythonesque—as in ‘So WIPM4 eh, nudge, nudge, say
n’more, say n’more’?
•Or even ‘So apart from better services, happier customers, and an
altogether excellent quality of life, WIPM4?’
This was not entirely a blind alley—in the course of this muse I made a
crystallizing distinction between what public management does (or,
more accurately, what it should do), as contrasted with its purposes and
its intended outcomes. While there appears to be an emerging
(progressive) consensus around the first (the operational level), there
is much less agreement on purpose and outcome (its strategic
function).
The progressive orthodoxy centres on the twin doctrines of New
Public Management on the one hand, and the issues of trust and
values in public life. Between them these produce the characteristic
qualities attributed to ‘good’ public management. These include the
idea that there is both a moral and a practical dimension to public
management, and also underpins notions of citizen engagement and
inclusivity as being good for getting things done as well as good in
themselves. It extends to an emphasis on leadership as a critical part
of management, but leadership of an empowering and
transformational character, rather than heroic and ‘merely’
transactional. It embraces the role of public management in building
*Lynne Truss (2003), Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to
Punctuation (Profile Books, London).
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public value and keeping in view the welfare of the people. And it
engages with the political sphere in terms of handling the politician/
manger interface, and the wider agenda of policy-to-delivery.
I have little to add and less to dispute with that orthodoxy, as far as
it goes. It is true that when I look at public management as, inter alia, a
former local authority chief executive, I see it at as needing to go
beyond the unfolding continuum of the orthodoxy as ‘administration’
giving way to ‘management’ and then ‘leadership’. It has to get into
the territory where leadership evolves into active orchestration of the
networks, partnerships, and forces for improvement, such that better
services and a better quality of life have to be ‘co-constructed’. And
when I reflect on my time as a regulator, I see that much of public
management can be captured in a mirror image of the regulator’s
mantra of ‘holding to account and helping to improve’. But these are
embellishments—the sheer variety and range of what is covered by
the term ‘public management’ permits many nuances on its main
themes.
But when we turn from what public management should do, and
towards its purposes, then the orthodoxy ought to be transcended.
What is fundamental is that the purposes and intended outcomes of
public management need to be re-thought for each epoch and society,
and in each of the many contexts in which it is called upon. What
public management ought to be for (rather than ‘what it should do’) is
a conscious and reflexive enterprise which engages with the particular
problems of the society, service or locality to which it is applied, in
order to uncover and articulate the purposes and outcomes it should
serve. Thus what is critical is not particular purposes or outcomes for
public management, or any list we might devise—albeit that in a given
society at a given time there may be high levels of agreement about
what should be on that list. It is, rather, the conscious process itself.
This is easiest to witness comparatively and historically. Within the
UK, the purposes of public management have changed radically over
the course of public services from the 1950s to the present day. In a
nutshell, that period covers the creation, development,
universalization, crisis, and renaissance of comprehensive public
service provision. How far the ‘real’ problems of each era were in fact
identified and addressed is a moot point, but what is clear is that they
were very different in character, kind, and quantity at the various
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WHAT IS PUBLIC MANAGEMENT FOR?
stages. Nor is it certain (and it is definitely not entailed by this
analysis) that governments of the day understood the problems which
public management needed to address better than public
management itself.
But even staying within the present era and the boundaries of the
UK, we can see that public management needs to think and re-think
the problems it should tackle. Moreover, that is a task for all levels at
which public management functions, and not just for the top—an
injunction which supports the dominant theme within the current
orthodoxy of ‘inclusivity and empowerment’, but also questions the
limit of that given the need to reconcile focused vision with the
multiple meanings which can arise when many voices speak at once.
Thus, delegation and empowerment in a context of corruption
and inadequate control systems have a radically different meaning
and importance. Innovation and excellence when performance is
barely adequate may be the right outcome for a particular public
service to strive for, but the elements of the equation for change which
can achieve that may be better orchestrated for an alternative
purpose, at least in the short term. ‘Aim for the average’ may not have
quite the cache of ‘we will be the best’, but it may ultimately be the
better route to achieve excellence.
It is the need to re-think the purpose of public management in its
context (and if not continually, then at any rate regularly) and to
articulate that purpose which brings it not just close to politics but
actively engaged with the political process. It is certainly true that it
falls to public management to translate policy into delivery, but public
management is more than that. It is an active part of the dialectic of
progress, rather than a mere machine to make things happen.
This is a way of reflecting on public management which was more
difficult ten years ago, and maybe even five. Modernization has
opened minds as well as doors, though there is a long way still to go.
In many places and at many levels the engagement of public
management with the ‘problems’ it should make its purpose to resolve
will be organized around familiar themes of better services, better
communities, stronger citizens and so on. For others, the problems
will lie in an emerging agenda of the radical application of new
technologies; the co-creation of community cohesion in a world of
global tension and terror; building new settlements as great places to
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live from now into the 22nd century; driving change through cultural
transformation; or fundamentally re-designing services around
customer needs.
So, in asking WIPM4? in any particular public service, I say that it
is for tackling the problem which that service has been given to
resolve. That may sound obvious, but for each public service the
answer cannot be derived from theory, or simply from a professional
body of knowledge. Nor, very often, can it even be found in the
originally declared aims and purposes of that public service, for such
declarations frequently bear only a very imperfect relationship with
the actual problem which a service has to engage both here-and-now
and going forward. Rather, identifying the problem which public
management in a given public service is there to solve needs to be an
active process of inquiry and interrogation. And what should then
follow is an active process of commitment and engagement with that
problem.
Little wonder, then, that the practice of public management at its
best admits few callings which are intrinsically more interesting, more
valuable, and potentially more worthwhile. ■
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WHAT IS PUBLIC MANAGEMENT FOR?
Public Value Creation—
That is What Public
Management is For
Colin Talbot
Public Versus Private Management
A hardy perennial of policy towards public management, which
resurfaces every few years and in some places (for example HM
Treasury) never seems to go away, is that it is just the same as the
private sector, and private sector managers ought to be brought in to
make it work better. However, more than a moment’s serious thought
and you notice this is just a little bit contradictory—if public and
private management are fundamentally the same, then why would
private sector managers automatically be better at managing than
public sector managers?
Does something happen to managers in the private sector that
makes them better than managers in the public sector? Or do the
people who are drawn to private sector management have different
characteristics, talents, and values from those drawn to the public
domain?
The truth is that, as one wit put it many decades ago: management
in the public and private sectors are fundamentally the same in all
unimportant respects. That is, of course, there are similarities or we
couldn’t apply the generic term ‘management’ (or in an earlier age
‘administration’) to both. And there are plenty of differences within
both sectors. And there is a fuzzy boundary between them, what is
‘public’ and what ‘private’ is the subject of many a happy definitional
hour for some. But like ‘high summer’ and ‘the depths of winter’, we
know that the public and privates sectors are different, even if the
boundaries are sometimes blurred. Indeed, some would argue
increasingly so—but usually only through a one-sided look at the
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evidence. The fundamental difference remains.
Public Managers and Public Representatives
So what are public managers for? Let us consider the second term
first—‘managers’. Managers, as distinct from what? The most obvious
issue in the public sector is managers as distinct from representative
politicians. At a personnel level, this boundary is not always obvious—
is a US elected sheriff a manager or an elected representative? But,
generally, the dividing line is reasonably clear: politicians are elected
representatives who are supposed to set policy while managers are
appointed, ‘permanent’, officials who implement it (and advise
politicians on it).
There is a very long history of both theoretical and empirical
challenges to this policy–administration dichotomy, but as with the
public–private divide much of this misses the point: however fuzzy the
boundary, policy-making as a democratic activity and policy doing as
a managerial activity are conceptually distinct enough to make most
modern democracies work more or less well by sticking to them. The
policy–administration divide is, to paraphrase Churchill, the worst
possible alternative, except for all the others.
Managers, in this system, are not and cannot be ‘just managers’—
they are always juggling between managerial imperatives and political
ones, at every level of the system. Whether they are front-line
managers of education or health services or mandarins in Whitehall,
politics is always lurking in the background of every decision, even
seemingly purely managerial and technical ones. Want a new
computer? You have to go through a whole, auditable, equitable,
publicly-accountable process usually involving open, competitive
tendering. Does your private sector counterpart have to do this—not
likely.
Public Managers and Professionals
The second main divide is between managers and the rest of the
people who actually work in the public sector—especially
professionals. The latter group are important because in the modern
welfare state there are essentially only two components to the ‘welfare’
bit: taking money off some people and giving to others, and delivering
‘human services’ (health, education, social services etc.). The latter
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WHAT IS PUBLIC MANAGEMENT FOR?
make up by far the largest chunk of people working for the state
and they are usually professionalized—in the case of health
extremely so. One of the characteristics of most public sector
management is the perpetual, unresolvable, friction between
management and professional groups (and the overlap between
the two).
The Heroic Juggler
So public managers work in a web of fuzziness and tensions
between the political domain on one side and the professional/
service delivery domain on the other. They have to wend their way
through this potential minefield to produce ‘successful’ public
organizations. These contradictions can produce creative tensions
in the hands of the best public managers and destructive conflicts
in the worst cases.
But how much is really in the hands of the heroic public
manager? How big a ‘decision space’ do they occupy? And to what
extent do their decisions really influence outcomes? The answer
for the public sector is that the scope for the exercise of managerial
power is limited, considerably more limited than in the private
sector. A senior public manager cannot usually change the mission
and strategy of their organization without the consent of political
authority—a private manager can. A public sector training
manager cannot send their staff off on a residential training course
in Morocco because its cheaper (and nicer) than Milton Keynes—a
private sector one can.
Despite these limitations, the assumptions about the ability of
public managers to influence outcomes in the public sector are
truly superhuman. Take education as an example: a common
thread running through education policy is that it is only the local
leaders in schools who count. So, find good headteachers and put
them in charge of failing schools (‘superheads’), or dramatically reengineered ‘charter’ schools, or expanded multi-school units. Of
course, what you really identify are headteachers of good schools—
not necessarily the same thing as generically good headteachers.
Put them into a failing school, specialist school with a radically
different governance structure or much larger merged school over
several sites, and they may well fail. This is because success is not
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just about personal attributes of managers, it is also about
context—the nature of the organization they work in.
Public Value Creators
Public value is a notion which has been gaining considerable ground in
the UK. In essence it is the idea that public activities create value when
they satisfy public desires for services and outcomes in a way which
adds to the value of the resources they consume. But public value also
asserts that it is not just the services or outcomes but also the way in
which they are produced, including the trust and legitimacy placed in
the producers, which form an integral part of value. A common
nostrum of recent years has been ‘the public don’t really care who
produces services or how, they just want delivery’. The public value
approach says that people do care about who produces public services
and how, because they value things like equity, due process and
probity in the public domain in a way they wouldn’t necessarily in the
private sphere.
So public managers have to create public value. They have to do it
in highly politicized and often professionalized contexts. They are
hemmed in by all sorts of constraints which result from the very
publicness of their organizations. My friend and colleague from the
US, Beryl Radin, calls this being the ‘accountable juggler’. Combine
this with what they are for and you get the ‘accountable public value
juggler’. That’s what public managers are for. ■
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WHAT IS PUBLIC MANAGEMENT FOR?
A Necessary Evil?
Francis Terry
Ten years ago, the American political scientist Mark Moore wrote a
book on Creating Public Value. In this, he challenged the assumption—
implicit in British and American politics of the 1980s—that
government is ‘an unproductive sector’ or almost a necessary evil. He
argued that managers in the public sector are entrusted with resources
to deliver certain goods for the benefit of society as a whole and they
use the authority of the state to compel individuals to contribute
directly (through taxation) to providing these resources. But resources
are, as a rule, only grudgingly conceded by politicians. It is not enough
therefore to say that public management is about producing results
that are in some sense generally valued: the public sector has to
demonstrate that these results are worth the cost of the private
consumption and the unrestrained liberty that is foregone.
From this premise, Moore develops a bold and yet subtle
characterization of the public manager’s role, which goes some way
beyond merely executing the decisions of elected politicians with due
regard to economy, efficiency and effectiveness. In his view, there is a
creative and pro-active aspect to the role, which requires public
managers to use imagination and entrepreneurship in achieving
public value. That means actively managing relationships with
politicians, contributing to the public agenda on their own initiative
and helping to shape the way services are organized and delivered.
The basic point is that politicians may know what they want to
achieve, but public managers are better placed (or should be) to know
how to deliver it. The inference drawn by Moore is that political
management (i.e. managing relationships with politicians) must form
a key part of what public managers do.
Allowing for the fact that Moore’s view is rooted in American
experience, it may yield some important insights for public
management in Britain today. For one thing, it raises the question of
whether we have got the balance of responsibility right, between
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politicians and officials, for managing public services. Since politicians
are in no position to manage services, they have resorted to repeated
restructurings in the hope that these will somehow substitute for
better management; they have idealized the attributes of private
management often in complete disregard of the intrinsically different
quality and context which characterizes public management; and they
have undermined the importance of cultivating public value by
buying—sometimes at excessive cost—an inferior service from private
providers.
The civil service has, since Sir Andrew Turnbull launched it in
October 2004, been developing an initiative on Professional Skills for
Government. There seems to be some doubt as to whether this chiefly
means appointing more experts from a private sector background to
jobs in Whitehall, or whether it signals the evolution of a new style of
professionalism in public management which is genuinely sui generis.
It ought to be the latter, and the new National School of Government
will, one hopes, be leading it.
Moore’s text is replete with examples of how public managers have
been confronted by politicians with commitments and goals which
were clearly legitimated through the ballot box, but for which the
route to successful implementation is unclear. The challenge of public
management is to deliver results which combine both a recognizable
political credit for the instigators of the policy and a noticeable positive
difference which the citizen can experience at the individual level. It
may be that a private sector partner can, in the right circumstances,
help to achieve this ideal combination; but the public manager has to
be the architect of that partnership and the intermediary with the
political process at all stages. Otherwise, confusion of purpose leading
to greater inefficiency, possible corruption and public discontent will
flourish.
Part of the skill in public management is trying to ensure that
commitments and goals stipulated by politicians are translated into
realistic programmes of action. For that, some degree of trust and
discretion is needed. Politicians need to respect the advice they are
given (which must be of the highest order, and preferably offered in
terms of a range of options), and they need to have confidence that
public managers can fulfil what is offered. Unfortunately, British
governments of recent years have too often discounted the advice
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WHAT IS PUBLIC MANAGEMENT FOR?
they were given by officials—preferring instead the nostrums of
special advisers, or external reviews by captains of industry and
foreign experts while undermining the role of public managers.
Policy-making seems at times to be a matter of trial and error, while
public opinion has grown cynical; in turn, government has lost
respect.
One of the problems with present thinking about the provision of
public services can be simply illustrated with reference to the
collection of domestic waste. People generally like clean streets, fresh
air and an absence of vermin; but these benefits are not able to be
purchased directly because nobody ‘owns’ them and they are
unpriced. As a result, people have no incentive to contribute to the
production of these goods by disposing of rubbish in suitable places.
To deal with this problem, society has asserted ownership of it and
compelled citizens to pay, chiefly through the council tax, for it to be
managed.
The principle behind this is to secure the benefits of public health
and amenity for all; it is not simply the provision of a service for
collection of rubbish where payment happens to be made in some way
other than at the point of sale. It is therefore inappropriate to speak—
as so much of the rhetoric does nowadays—as if householders are
merely customers, and the local authority (or its contractor) is
delivering a paid service. Public value is established by the imperative
of maintaining public health.
Yet, while sanitary streets may be recognized as a public necessity,
good ideas in themselves do not constitute an adequate justification
for funding them from taxation: they must meet a political test. And
once representative institutions have assumed the responsibility for
securing a desirable goal, citizens expect in a liberal democracy to see
fairness in the distribution of benefits and the burdens of payment.
The benefits must be deployed generally and for the good of all.
Correspondingly, the organization and management of a refuse
collection service (and there are many other analogies in health,
education, transport etc.) is not just a matter of efficient production
and distribution. Once public authority is invoked, which is inevitable
when taxation is used, issues of fairness and accountability are present
and the public manager has to ensure that these are adequately
safeguarded.
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Several aspects of the public manager’s role, stemming from the
true nature of public services themselves and the distinctive situation
in which public managers operate, have been neglected in current
thinking and debate. There has also been a shift towards the
abrogation of collective responsibility for providing and improving
public services. In turn, the role of the public manager has been
devalued and disparaged. In harnessing the much-vaunted
disciplines of the private sector we are also at risk of undermining the
principles on which public services are founded. Contracts, even
though drawn up by public managers and sanctioned by politicians,
cannot fully compensate for this risk.
Is the balance likely to move back towards a restoration of
collective responsibility? Despite Moore’s eloquent arguments, I
doubt it. In a world of spreading prosperity and better educated
citizenry, perhaps it is reasonable to expect that more of us will
directly buy the health, educational and environmental services we
want. But when we collectively face threats to our quality of life, which
from time to time seems almost certain to happen, public managers
will be expected (on behalf of government) to respond. Energy
shortages, terrorist threats and bird ’flu are just the latest examples of
such threats. ■
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WHAT IS PUBLIC MANAGEMENT FOR?
Public Management and
the University
Michael Clarke
Universities, particularly the like of mine, are no longer public
institutions in the real sense of the term. We sit on the boundary
between the public sector (reinforced by the conventional view of
higher education as a public good, combined with core funding
from the Treasury via the Higher Education Funding Council), the
third sector (we are an educational charity) and, increasingly, the
private sector (with a new emphasis on diversified income from
private sources, entrepreneurial behaviour and delivery in a global
competitive marketplace). My task in these next paragraphs is to
explore the particular contribution of public management to the
world of the university.
A major university like Birmingham is a complex, plural
institution. It is engaged in a variety of functions and activities,
often with differing objectives and often with inherent conflict
between them. It is about teaching—with a range of subjects
varying from the professional (for example law, business and
medicine) to the pure scientific or the liberal arts; about
fundamental research, some of it ‘blue skies’, some with an
emphasis on knowledge transfer and some contracted by a
particular and specific customer; and then there are expectations
about its civic function and its role as a major institution in its
community.
Like many large and complex organizations it is built of silos; in
this case, of disciplines, departments, institutes, centres and
schools. And alongside these are a range of support services, most
of which would be familiar in any local authority or National
Health Service trust or Whitehall department. It does not have a
command-and-control structure.
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The Academic Marketplace
We are exhorted to be businesslike and to behave entrepreneurially.
The pressures, which we readily embrace, are towards reducing the
proportion of public funding in order to move from dependence on
government and to increase the freedom to play in the marketplace—
and to do so ever more effectively. Yet the popular expectation
remains that a university is in some sense, still a public service, and the
property of the community.
The competitive marketplace is real. We vigorously compete for
overseas students and for participants in unregulated—largely
postgraduate and post-experience—programmes; but, in contrast, the
market for home undergraduates is rigorously managed and controlled
by government. The attempt to create a market in this sector (through
tuition fees) was compromised by the ceiling for fees being set at £3,000—
a figure which is unlikely to be lifted for five years or more. Where there
is a marketplace, it is driven by global influences, imperatives and
expectations, as well as national and local ones.
Government intervention through regulation of the marketplace
(student quotas for recruitment purposes, per capita funding and the
like), instructions mediated via the funding councils, special funding
streams and so on is real. Outsiders looking at the higher education
system and the environment in which it operates constantly marvel at
the sector’s patience and perseverance in dealing with such
intervention. There is nothing strange here to colleagues in other
parts of the public sector, but the environment is much more alien to
the private sector and certainly apparently counter-cultural in a world
which emphasises the entrepreneurial and the competitive.
Herding Cats
What does all this add up to for leadership and management? Before
answering that question, there are other facets of the university
environment which need to be understood. Lucy Kellaway, in a recent
article in the Financial Times, wrote of senior management roles in
universities as being the worst kind of management job. She hung her
piece on the recent departure of Larry Summers as President of
Harvard (his resignation followed a no-confidence vote in the Faculty
of Art and a series of long-running internal disputes, together with
issues about his personal leadership style); and the travails of Oxford
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WHAT IS PUBLIC MANAGEMENT FOR?
University’s Vice-Chancellor John Hood. Harvard and Oxford, for her,
were but reflections—albeit stark ones—of a more general problem. Her
argument was that good academics are ‘employees from hell’.
The analogies of ‘herding cats’ or ‘keeping frogs in wheelbarrows’ to
illustrate the business of academic management are well known. The
Kellaway argument is that the core characteristics of the academic
community are ill-suited to be the components of modern, flexible
organizations. She exaggerates to make a point—but it is worth noting
her observations.
She argued that academics are very clever people with criticism as a
way of life; many have spectacularly low levels of emotional intelligence;
they are not good team-players, with their colleagues (often) their rivals;
there is no line of authority—with open and public disagreement
accepted as a way of life; and, moreover, the status quo gives them secure
jobs and pensions.
Kellaway goes on to argue that the problems are compounded by
the fact that most of those appointed to senior managerial and
leadership positions in universities are people who have risen
through the quality and success of their own research and who mirror
the foregoing characteristics. Her view is that the situation is pretty
desperate and that there is little to be done. While many of her
reflections are perceptive, I think her negative conclusions are wrong.
There is no doubt that universities are operating in a rapidly
changing world, that there are many inherent weaknesses in the way
they operate and that the challenges confronting them are
formidable. However, the changes which are needed are doable.
A New, Hybrid Model
The heart of this will be the evolution of a hybrid model of leadership
and management. Leadership and management, whether in the
private, the public or the third sectors, needs to be shaped to meet the
conditions and purposes of its environment. Since I have argued that
the modern—certainly large, research-intensive—university is neither
wholly public nor private nor third sector, then it follows that it will
require a hybrid approach.
There is a need to re-think managerial career structures,
leadership and management development and, even, the basic
fundamentals of organization structure (itself derived from models
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developed in the early 20th century). Without such re-thinking,
universities will become less and less able to respond to what is going
on around them and increasingly irrelevant to national life. It is
inconceivable, though, that a competitive UK plc could maintain its
place without the underpinning support of its leading universities.
The imperative to change is massive.
Public Management
Here is where modern public management has its contribution to
make. As we set out to construct a new, hybrid model we need to turn
to public management not because there is any desire to recreate oldstyle public administration, old-fashioned bureaucratic behaviours or
anything like that, but because modern public management has to
grapple with many issues which beset universities and so has its
experience and practice to contribute.
Public managers have to deal with the conflict and overlapping of
objectives, with high levels of uncertainty and ambiguity—they are
used to situations where influence rather than control is in the nature
of the job and where strategic leadership is at a premium. There is
also much useful contemporary experience about the development of
collaborative activity, working across organizational boundaries and
the joining up of silo-bound perspectives. Private sector managers will
doubtless protest that this is some of their terrain too. Yes, but not in
such intensity or sophistication as the public.
The hybrid will need similarly to draw on the relevant experience
and competence of the private and third sectors, as well as
recognizing that much is common in the tasks of management and
leadership regardless of context.
If universities like mine are going to continue to develop the
different elements of their core mission, and yet compete effectively in
the global marketplace, they are going to require a nimbleness of foot
and leanness of organization, together with a set of management
competencies and a clarity of leadership far removed from the
collegial, process-dominated organizations of yesterday. Being clear
about those competencies, building career structures and ensuring
the development of those who will lead and manage is an urgent
challenge. Public sector managers and management have a major
contribution to make to this. ■
22
WHAT IS PUBLIC MANAGEMENT FOR?
Why Public Managers Need
to Talk to the Voluntary
and Community Sector
Erica De’Ath
Public Services and the Mixed Economy
The government is committed to the delivery of high-quality public
services to meet the needs of local people and communities, and
provide greater satisfaction and better outcomes. Public management
is about strategic planning and partnerships; ensuring public money is
spent economically, efficiently and effectively; balancing the risk of
different funding models; and managing competing interests, needs
and priorities. When a voluntary or community organization (VCO)
delivers a public service, it is managed through a contract. This does
not make the organization a part of the public sector. For example, it is
not the responsibility of the VCO to balance competing interests.
Indeed, it may well be the role of the VCO to advocate for a particular
interest. If necessary, the public sector funder will specify how
competing interests should be met and will remain accountable for
that.
The government is also committed to a mixed economy and to
extending the role of the voluntary and community sector in the
delivery of public services. NCVO’s 2006 Voluntary Sector Almanac
gives the combined income of UK general charities (excluding,
among others, housing associations and independent schools) as
£26.3 billion. Thirty eight per cent of this is derived from statutory
sources, with an operating expenditure of £24.9 billion, total assets of
£66.8 billion, and a paid workforce of at least 608,000. While there are
14 organizations with an annual income of over £100 million, the vast
majority (87%) have incomes of less than £100,000. Providers within
the voluntary sector thus vary enormously from large national and
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PUBLIC MANAGEMENT AND POLICY ASSOCIATION REPORT
international charities to very small community organizations. HM
Treasury’s 2002 Cross Cutting Review of the role of the voluntary and
community sector in public service delivery identified ways in which
the sector can add value, and also some of the barriers they face in
securing contracts, and set up an investment fund of £125 million,
Futurebuilders, to develop the capacity of the voluntary and
community sector to deliver public services in England. This explicit
support for the voluntary and community sector reflects the prime
minister’s principles of public service reform, particularly devolution
and delegation to the front line, increased flexibility, and expanding
choice for the customer underpinned by contestability.
The Cross Cutting Review also said that ‘value for money’ is of
pivotal importance for funding the voluntary and community sector
but that strict rules (often imposed by departmental funding bodies)
can and often do cause problems in achieving effective outcomes. In
its 2003 Guidance to Funders, the Treasury recommends that
proportionality, well-managed risk-taking and attention to outcomes
should be the key issues for funding bodies.
Public Services and the Voluntary Sector
Central and local government want public management to deliver
good and effective services at appropriate cost. In many cases such
service delivery funded through statutory sources and delivered by the
voluntary and community sector fulfils long-term responsibilities and
priorities of government. Services such as care for the elderly, for the
disabled, child care both daily and residential, health and hospice care,
family support, regeneration, youth offender programmes are longterm commitments. It therefore makes little sense to fund such
programmes on one-year contracts, which is still the case for many
long-standing programmes and organizations. Indeed, Sir Peter
Gershon in his 2004 Review of Public Sector Efficiency recommended
that:
…government improves its funding relationship with the voluntary and
community sector: improving stability by moving to longer-term, multi-year
funding arrangements where possible; considering carefully the appropriate
assignment of risk between the statutory body and the voluntary and community
organization when contracting for service provision; making further progress
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WHAT IS PUBLIC MANAGEMENT FOR?
towards full acceptance of the principle of full cost recovery, ensuring publiclyfunded services are not subsidised by charitable donations or volunteers; and,
streamlining and rationalizing monitoring, regulatory and reporting
requirement.
So, it is accepted that voluntary and community organizations
already play a significant role in public service delivery and that they
have the potential to take on an even greater role. Futurebuilders,
now Futurebuilders England (FBE), set up by government to improve
service delivery through long-term investment in the voluntary and
community sector in England, makes investments in community
cohesion, crime, education and learning, health and social care, and
support for children and young people. It has already agreed 90
investments, totalling £35 million, which range from grants of
£15,000 to multi-million pound investments, including one of £5.2
million to develop a new national centre for autism education.
Research commissioned by FBE from Policy into Practice (2005)
highlighted that voluntary and community organizations are often
best placed to deliver public services because they provide a niche or
highly specialized service, target excluded sectors of the community
and innovate new and better ways of delivering services.
Policy, Procurement and Partnership
Public management is not only about delivery, it is also about setting
policy objectives. The 2005 Labour Party manifesto clearly stated:
We will continue to deliver efficiency savings and improvements to local services
through joint procurement, shared services, streamlining administrative
structures while promoting decision-making at the level that will make a
difference. We will continue to strengthen the community leadership role of local
authorities working in partnership with public, voluntary and private bodies.
However, the lack of early and effective consultation with the
voluntary organizations in the development of policy, programmes
and strategies has often resulted in poorly packaged or unattractive
procurements for the voluntary and community sector. The Good
Practice on Procurement of Services from the Voluntary and Community
Sector, produced in 2004 by the Office of Government Commerce and
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PUBLIC MANAGEMENT AND POLICY ASSOCIATION REPORT
the Home Office, states a great deal can be done to increase voluntary
and community sector engagement and competitiveness. It suggests
the challenge is to think about how you can harness innovation and
best practice from the voluntary and community sector at different
stages: when policy is first being formulated, when programmes and
strategies are being shaped, during the tendering phase, and post
contract.
Public managers therefore should be engaging with the voluntary
and community sector to play to our strengths, innovation, flexibility
and responsiveness; to respect our independence; and recognize that
campaigning and advocacy contributes to effective public service
design and delivery.
The Rhetoric and the Reality
Public service delivery is no longer just a choice between state and
private provision. The NAO’s report on the Home Office and VCOs
makes depressing reading (NAO, 2005). Despite the Home Office PSA
target to achieve a 5% increase in the volume of public services
delivered by the voluntary sector, the recommendations from HM
Treasury and the Gershon Efficiency Review, most VCOs have seen
little improvement in the monitoring or procurement arrangements.
The declared high commitment has seen little practical change since
the 2002 Treasury Review and public managers seem unaware of the
new guidelines published by the Treasury. Not all VCOs wish to
deliver public services, but public managers should be working
proactively with those who do. ■
Reference
National Audit Office (2005), Home Office: Working with the Third Sector,
HC 75 Session 2005–2006 (London).
26
WHAT IS PUBLIC MANAGEMENT FOR?
Keeping UK Plc
Competitive
Mike Blackburn
Before answering the question ‘what is public management for’, we
need to have a view about why there is public management. We can be
clear that industry is about creating shareholder value. It operates on
the basis of free market principles and survives by delivering what
consumers need at a price they can afford. But sometimes free market
principles do not deliver the social return required by societies to
reflect the social values of citizens and communities, and this is where
private and social priorities diverge. For example public intervention
becomes necessary when government policy requires equity and
universal access to services such as health and education.
Public management is about building the social capital to deliver
the returns demanded by citizens at a national and local level. At a
national level, it is influenced by the country’s international
competitiveness. At a local level it is about outcomes, such as the wellbeing of adults and young people, safety, economic regeneration,
infrastructure and skills. Governing the response to changes in social
values is a major aspect of public management through the
democratic process, as is leading and managing stakeholders in a
political environment.
Public management is, at its broadest level, about this governance,
including political responsiveness and accountability. It is about
raising finance for building social capital, the provision or
commissioning of public services and regulation. The scope of public
management, however, continues to develop in response to changing
social values and expectations. There is a tacit recognition that the
way of building social capital is not responsive enough to the changing
needs, expectations and values of a diverse society. Public
management is intrinsically about creating public value, balancing
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private and social returns, taxpayer’s interests and service user
interests. However, as Mark Moore, of Harvard University, said in
his 1995 book on Creating Public Value:
It is not enough to say that public managers create results that are valued;
they must be able to show that the results obtained are worth the cost of
private consumption and unrestrained liberty forgone in producing the
desirable results.
What’s Different?
There are more similarities between management in the private
sector and the public sector than differences. The similarities are:
managing people and assets, planning against long-term
influences, motivating and attracting employees, innovation, the
management of change, corporate governance and scrutiny,
delivering quality services to consumers, delivering value for
money, setting the tone and values of the organization and
leadership towards a defined vision.
However, there are significant differences. The private sector is
subject to competitive forces, consumer choice and delivering
return on capital and must adapt accordingly. The board is
accountable to shareholders and non-executive directors. In
contrast, the public sector is driven by national targets, inspection
and intervention, but must also manage differently motivated
stakeholders in a political environment. The main difference
between the two is that market forces encourages quicker reaction
to changes in consumer needs through innovation. Pressures for
change on business models and business processes from disruptive
technologies impact quickly on organizational structures and
working practices, forcing rapid execution of strategies. Processes
like democratic oversight do not respond quickly enough to
changes in communities’ values and needs and some commentators
say this has led to a lack of engagement by citizens.
There are also cultural differences such as the generally
accepted fact that the public sector attracts managers and frontline staff who want to make a difference in society and within
communities. This motivational asset, coupled with the right
leadership, and empathetic skills is the key factor in building social
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WHAT IS PUBLIC MANAGEMENT FOR?
capital.
Public management, however, may not be best for directly
managing services as better outcomes may be delivered through
market mechanisms such as choice. Delivering public value by
balancing taxpayer and social interests is achieved by
understanding what public managers should manage and what
should be managed through market forces.
Common Challenges
The central objective of government is to build a stronger, more
enterprising economy and a fairer, more equitable society, thus
extending economic opportunity and supporting those in need to
ensure that rising national prosperity is shared by all. Global
competition is becoming fiercer, particularly from China and
India. The keys to a successful economy in the UK are skills,
innovation and being an attractive locality for inward investment.
Creating the right environment where people want to live and
work, and businesses want to invest, is a public management
responsibility. Markets are converging and shifting as fast as
technology. Staying competitive as a nation takes more energy,
awareness, foresight and creativity than in the past. This is a
shared challenge for leadership across the private, public and
voluntary sectors.
So What Should it Do?
Public management is about delivering public value. Public
management’s unique capabilities are its understanding of leading
and managing resources along with stakeholders, in a political
environment, towards equitable outcomes. It is generally
recognized that a properly organized democracy can increase
capacity to address fundamental social problems. Public
management needs to focus on these key areas of competence to
harness the community’s economic potential. A productive
economy and a productive public sector are complementary and
mutually reinforcing. Lessons can be learned from Sir Peter
Gershon’s efficiency agenda where resources are released from
back-office functions and services, which can be provided by
competitive markets, and transferred into front-line services.
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PUBLIC MANAGEMENT AND POLICY ASSOCIATION REPORT
Future opportunities for efficiency gains can come from sharing
services and for citizens and businesses doing more for themselves
with resources redirected to public management’s core capabilities. ■
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WHAT IS PUBLIC MANAGEMENT FOR?
New Public Service
Management: From DAD to
EDD
Ed Straw
Decide–Announce–Defend
High street remodelling, a planning decision, hospital closure and a
flood defence scheme are typical examples where the responsible
organization looks at options, may do some consultation, reaches a
decision, announces it publicly and holds its breath. Often, the
stakeholders of various shapes react, and the management go into
defence mode. Sometimes, the decision is forced through, sometimes
dropped and sometimes the battle wages for years. Defending is a high
cost and time-consuming process.
Why do we keep on doing it? Habit, ego, and skills. In many
organizations, the incentives are for the status quo; DAD has been the
norm; and in the absence of significant stimuli to change, the norm
prevails. Our egos say we know best, be it the chief engineer choosing
between traffic lights and a mini-roundabout or the policy analyst
proposing new regulations. The available skills trap us by what they can
do: pylons are the deep expertise of electricity transmission companies
and they know little of the alternative—underground cabling. So we get
pylons far more than the economics would dictate.
Engage–Deliberate–Decide
EDD is the emerging alternative. The problem is not taken away from
the public for analysis and decision by managements and politicians, but
left with them. After all, it is they who will live with the trade-offs between
service and tax, they who will live with the solution, and they who will
make it work by being committed to it. The final decision may remain
with the responsible body, but now informed and shaped.
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PUBLIC MANAGEMENT AND POLICY ASSOCIATION REPORT
The 2004 Tomlinson report on the replacement of ‘A’ levels was a
classic where being right cut no ice with teachers and much of the public.
Dropped like a hot brick by the politicians before the last general
election, DAD chalks up another failure and a vital educational reform is
left for another five or ten years.
And don’t blame the public or the John Humphrey’s school of dumb
journalism. We all react the same way to proposals put to us and
decisions taken for us, affecting our lives, presented suddenly.
The chairman of the Pensions Commission, Adair Turner, has been
more subtle with pension reforms, offering several options and
painstakingly working through the facts and figures at a digestible pace.
National representative samples of the population have spent a day
deliberating his findings. I hope he succeeds.
EDD takes a fundamental shift in attitude by public sector
management. The public is not stupid. The public comes in many forms.
Different interests and needs underpin the stated position. But, once
properly engaged and informed, the public will identify responsible,
workable solutions, which reflect the whole system they experience in a
way the remote policy-maker or manager has neither the time now the
knowledge to replicate.
Once stakeholder groups become aware of the needs and interests of
others, they become more balanced in their preferred solutions
recognizing that a decision will require consensus and trade-offs.
Extinction
Do we face any bigger challenge than climate change? Thus far, most
politicians have run a mile sheltering behind the notion that any change
affecting (economic) quality of life is unacceptable. On the current
trajectory we are heading the same way as the dinosaurs. How on earth
did those humans living on such a wonderful planet become extinct?
Which new species will pose that question? Were their collective brains
too small? Or was it their method of dealing with complex problems that
failed them? Had their institutions become so sclerotic they were unable
to adapt from within? Had no-one the power or courage to replace the
failing institutions with new?
The Evolving Public Service
The brief history of public services is one of first providing much needed
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WHAT IS PUBLIC MANAGEMENT FOR?
services to communities and individuals, with ambition, drive and
passion. Second, enormous growth. Third, stability and
institutionalization. Fourth, the switch from service to doing things to the
public. The with and for disappeared. The barriers went up. Only the
prescribed institution was allowed to deliver. Communities were actively
discouraged or prevented from doing things for themselves. Not
surprising that social capital took a dive.
All the while, the theory was that communities and individuals
exercised power through representative democracy and thus controlled
their services. By and large, this does not happen. Of course there are
exceptions—but councillors with the time and patience are far from
representative, and the unelected hold at least 80% of the power. Many
services have ‘maze accountability’, where any real connection between a
community and its service gets lost—health and the police for example.
Nationally, we run a two-party state, the elected government
intermediated with public services by a civil service which regards itself as
independent as the judiciary. With a semi-totalitarian news media
running riot in the name of a free press. So much for the theory. It is a
rational decision not to vote.
Hence the move from representative democracy to decision-specific
democracy.
Facilitated Democracy
The mature conifer forest behind a small north Wales village was due to
be felled. Individuals in the community feared a steady flow of heavy
logging trucks and organized to stop the Forestry Commission. The
village was having done to it tourism, a nature reserve and public art too.
Battle lines were drawn until an enlightened manager in the Countryside
Council for Wales thought ‘there must be a better way’ and called in a
professional facilitator to run an engagement process. A facilitated public
meeting (unlike most public meetings ever experienced) started the
process alongside many one-to-one sessions to convince individuals that
the several public sector organizations involved were committed to
working with the community. The village had no centre and the sense of
community was limited.
The partnership of concerned individuals, four public sector bodies
and local businesses formed from the public meeting set about a vision
for the whole community with the forestry extraction as part. ‘Task and
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finish’ groups examined transport and signage, a new community and
local history/conservation interpretation centre, and walks among others.
A local leader emerged who embraced engagement. An exchange with a
similar village in Ireland helped bond the group and share the vision.
Five years on, the community centre, café and snooker hall are up
and running, providing a place to meet and to share with visitors the
local history. The renowned waterfall has car parking relocated to
encourage visitors to walk through the village. The community feels
empowered and energized to solve its problems and create its future.
Social capital has risen. All of this has stemmed from two or three
creative, lateral thinking, rule-bending public service managers.
In a different way, a different public service manager is engaging with
a community to transform a justice system. Judges are rarely perceived as
managers, but at their best they are and they need to be. The North
Liverpool Community Justice Centre deals with quality-of-life crime—
everything other than serious offences—focusing on the offender not the
offence with the aims of reducing reoffending and diverting individuals
from a career in crime and/or living on benefits, to the mainstream. The
centre largely replaced the traditional magistrates court. In setting it up
among much local hostility, the judge engaged the community to
understand their objections and needs. The single judge gets to know the
offenders, deals with them with respect, and says plainly he does not want
them to have a criminal record. He encourages them down the problemsolving route, itself an engagement process, into restorative justice,
community reparation, drugs rehabilitation, and so on. He is strong on
compliance with the sentence, and reviews this monthly with each
offender.
It is too early for any significant evidence on the impact on
reoffending, but community hostility has become community
appreciation, other cities with equivalent circumstances want one, and
evidence from other countries suggests the centre will perform far better
than the traditional system.
An Answer
EDD is an attitude needed at the heart of public service management. It
is not some nice to have optional extra, handy to wheel out when the
public throws a wobbly. I also believe it is a right to be written into our
constitution. ■
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WHAT IS PUBLIC MANAGEMENT FOR?
‘Et Tu Brutus’: Public
Management in Times of
Crisis
Denis Smith
The question posed to the various authors in this PMPA Report ‘what
is public management for’—is reminiscent of the old, somewhat
humorous, question ‘what did the Romans do for us’? As the world’s
first superpower, the Roman empire put into place many of the core
elements of public management that we still value today. The Romans
introduced many aspects of security, control and communication that
remain as key elements of the modern public state. The Roman
empire was also engaged in a search for order within a complex and
chaotic environment. In support of their empire, Rome also provided
those critical infrastructures that were necessary for the control and
the management of ‘supply chains’, as well as for allowing a civilized
society to develop and prosper. It also facilitated the processes of
communication and education in support of these overarching
processes.
These elements can also be seen as forming important attributes of
public management’s role around the broad (and often vexed) issue
of ‘crisis management’. In order to be effective, crisis management
should attempt to ensure that the task demands generated by a crisis
are dealt with, ideally before the demands of the ‘event’ escalate to a
point where they exceed the capabilities of the various organizations
to manage them. For public management, the requirement is often
one of acting as a rescuer to another organization’s crises or even to
provide ‘management of last resort’ in extreme cases. Two examples
serve to illustrate the nature of the issues.
Despite their relatively advanced form of public management, the
Romans failed to deal with the task demands of the eruption of
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Vesuvius in AD 79. The issues of scale, the speed of onset associated
with the event, and the lack of understanding and knowledge on the
part of those seeking to ‘manage’ the task demands that were
generated, all conspired to prevent any effective mitigation and
recovery from the disaster. In this case, there was no effective early
warning and the efforts made by ‘public management’ were in terms
of dealing with the aftermath of the disaster—in other words, with
rescue and recovery. In modern-day Naples, public management is
faced with the potential evacuation of large areas of the area
surrounding Vesuvius—a task aided by the most elaborate volcanic
early warning system in the world, but one that is still likely to be
hampered by issues of scale, speed of onset and problems around
public understanding of risk.
In 2006, public management in New Orleans had a much more
important and fundamental role to play in disaster mitigation than
was possible in Roman Pompeii. Now public management is expected
to take a much more preventative role through emergency planning,
the development of defences and the creation of early warning
systems. However, despite the efforts made by elements of public
management prior to Hurricane Katrina, a number of fundamental
failures around the issues of scale, speed of onset and knowledge,
conspired to allow a bad event become much worse. In this case,
public management could be seen to have provided too little, too late
to help the victims of the disaster.
In both cases, there was little effective foresight brought to bear on
the problem. For the Romans, this was a function of a lack of
knowledge. For the US, this could have been seen as a belief in the
power of technocracy and an over-confidence in its contingency
plans. Whatever the reason, the outcome was the same—people died
because there were either no plans in place to deal with the event or
the plans were inadequate.
This raises some interesting questions concerning the role of
public management in dealing with crisis events. The aim here is to
explore what the public sector should do around issues of crisis and to
consider what often happens in practice.
Management of Last Resort?
In times of crisis, there is an expectation that the public management will
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provide resource, expertise and support for the victims of the damaging
event and will do so in an effective manner. Indeed, one might go so far
as to argue that public management also has a precautionary (or, more
accurately, regulatory) role to play in the process.
There is no doubt in most people’s minds that public management
is the ‘management of last resort’ as far as major crises and disasters
are concerned. It is public management that responds to the demands
of a major accident or disaster, deals with the clean-up requirements
of such events and seeks to protect the safety and welfare of its
‘people’. It should provide help and support for those who need it,
irrespective of social position and wealth. However, in cases of
resource constraint, there is a serious risk that this will not be the case
and public management must ensure that it is effective in providing a
service, rather than being efficient in terms of the delivery of that
service. It was this problem that seemed to wrong foot the US
government when dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Public management is, under such conditions, the last hope for many
within our communities and it should be geared up to deal with that
challenge. This is not simply a matter of resource, it is also an issue of
organizational culture, systems of communication and co-operation,
and ensuring that foresight is applied to dealing with such problems.
Many facets of public management are composed of ‘contingency
bureaucracies’ that exist to deal with other people’s crises—the
emergency services (including primary and acute health care),
emergency planning and environmental health departments, and the
range of security-military services, all have a ‘crisis response’ mode as
a core element of their activities. At least that is the theory.
Invariably, public management ‘in practice’ suffers from the
limitations that seem to befall other forms of managerial activity in the
private sector. It is often inherently short-termist in its outlook and
planning and it fails to consider much beyond the election horizon or,
in some cases, ministerial reshuffles. It has to deal with the lack of
effective resources to ‘get the job done’ and often muddles through
despite the constraints that are imposed upon it. Unlike the
perception that exists of private sector organizations—especially
large, multinational organizations—public management cannot
simply throw resources at a problem. This, combined with the
problems of a highly politicized environment, create a set of task
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PUBLIC MANAGEMENT AND POLICY ASSOCIATION REPORT
demands on public managers that are almost unique.
Witness the public uproar regarding the federal government’s
response to Katrina in the USA. President Bush came in for severe
criticism from local residents and politicians alike about the apparent
failures of the federal system to get aid to the people who needed it
most. And this from a government that has set out its stall around the
agenda of a strong and united America in the face of adversity. So
what is public management for in such conditions of ‘crisis’? One
might argue that public management has helped to create the
conditions for the crisis in the first place. The US, or more specifically
President Bush, has long considered that global warming is not the
cause for extreme weather conditions. His lack of support for the
Kyoto agreement and the subsequent proclamations on greenhouse
gas emissions would lead one to assume that either the evidential basis
for considering the link was weak, or that there were other
motivational factors at work! It is within such a political environment
that public management has to function, and this adds a further layer
of complexity to what is already a complex task environment for those
trying to deal with crises.
What Should Public Management Do?
Perhaps at this point it is worth asking what should public management
be for? Now this is a very different question. In the case of dealing with
disasters and crises, then public management should seek to
undertake a number of key activities.
The first is to provide a regulatory environment in which effective
planning and resourcing can (and should) be undertaken for extreme
events. During the Cold War, there was a clear infrastructure for local
authority emergency planning that would have provided a basis for
most forms of extreme events that the public sector would face—after
all, it is difficult to think of many forms of ‘crisis’ that are worse than
‘mutually assured destruction’! Sadly, the peace dividend was paid on
the back of the dismantling—or, at least, the severe degradation—of
this infrastructure. Public management should require organizations
to plan for major catastrophic events and to work with them to
provide ‘mutually assured support’ in the case of such events. In
reality, private sector organizations will also be the victims of any
disaster and they should not simply assume that the ‘nanny state’ (of
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WHAT IS PUBLIC MANAGEMENT FOR?
which they can be so critical) should miraculously come to their aid
without a degree of pre-planning and co-operation.
Secondly, public management needs to focus more attention on
strategies to deal with the complex issue of the inter-agency aspects of
crisis prevention and response, and the manner in which information
and knowledge networks can be managed. Such a process requires
considerably more than a ministerial statement that inter-agency
collaboration is important. It requires funding, the provision of an
effective set of structural mechanisms and the provision of effective
forms of communication.
Thirdly, the public sector needs to ensure that it maximizes the
information flows that take place within and between its various
elements. Much of the information that is required to provide early
warnings of potential crises is often held within the ‘system’ but is
usually highly codified and in a form that is often inaccessible to a
wider audience. This will also require a shift in the assumptions that
are often made around the nature of risk. These elements will
combine to allow the public sector to develop better forms of early
warning—or weak signal—detection. Such a capability will be
important if public management is to be anything other than reactive
around crisis issues.
Finally, public management needs to take account of the processes
through which crises are created, rather than focusing on the nature
of strategies for responding to the demands that such events generate.
This will necessitate elements of the sector moving away from their
historical role as ‘contingency bureaucracies’—that is, organizations
that exist to deal with the problems generated by other
organizations—to consider the roles that the various elements of the
state play in creating the conditions for crisis. While there is much
political rhetoric around the notion of ‘joined-up government’, it is
often lacking in practice. In times of crisis, the public expects that the
state will work to prevent crises from occurring and help to alleviate
the impact of those damaging events that do occur. Public confidence
is damaged when it appears, as with New Orleans, that elements of
the public sector also act to make matters worse. Public management
should not be seen as betraying those members of society who need it
most in their time of greatest need. Such a ‘Brutus syndrome’ would
be far too much of a betrayal. ■
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PUBLIC MANAGEMENT AND POLICY ASSOCIATION REPORT
Public Money & Management
Public Money & Management is owned and managed by CIPFA, and is
the official journal of the Public Management and Policy Association.
The journal is published on behalf of CIPFA by Blackwell Publishing.
The Editor is Andrew Gray; the Deputy Editor is Professor
Jane Broadbent; and the Managing Editor is Michaela Lavender.
Public Money & Management has a multidisciplinary and international
audience. It publishes articles which contribute new knowledge as a
basis for policy or management improvements, or which reflect on
evidence from public service management and finance in order to
suggest topics for research. Readers include officials in all types of
public service organizations; academics; consultants and advisers
working with the public services; politicians; journalists; and
students on both academic and professional courses.
The journal frequently includes articles grouped around a theme.
Future themes will look at Terrorism and public management;
Financial exclusion; Regeneration; and Governing through
outcomes—the experience of outcome-based budgeting in the UK
and internationally.
In response to a steady rise in sales and submissions, Public Money &
Management increased its frequency in 2004 from quarterly to five
issues per year. The number of pages in the volume was also
increased: from 256 pp. a year to 320 pp. Public Money &
Management is growing again in 2007 (Vol. 27) adding a further
40 pp. a year. Issues in 2007 will be published in February, April,
June, September, and November.
Articles for consideration by the editors should be sent by email to
[email protected]. Or mail to Michaela Lavender, CIPFA, 3
Robert Street, London WC2N 6RL.
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