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PART ONE

GOVERNING FOR COLLECTIVE ACTION

In The Study of Public Administration, Dwight Waldo (1955) argued thatpublic administration was integral to collective action across societies. Public administration is indeed a large-scale social activity. One of Waldo’s contemporaries, Vincent Ostrom (1973), was also inclined to view public administration as collective action, sometimes in the absence of govern- mental institutions. This theme of how public administration is conceived continues today as governance and governing are the larger enterprises in which public administration is embedded. Part 1 looks at public admin- istration in the context of the larger developments that shape it today.

Although public administrators and public administration institutions are important elements in meeting needs across societies and solving public problems, the institutions of collective action and the language by which we describe them evolve rapidly. Ideas associated with the two prominent mid-twentieth-century intellects referred to above, Waldo and Ostrom, figure prominently in two contrasting descriptors Donald Kettl uses in chapter 1 for the evolution of public administration since the 1970s. Waldo’s midcentury book, The Administrative State (1948), popu- larized the description of democratic governance for much of the latter twentieth century as an administrative state, where democratic institutions paradoxically share power with special political roles based on expertise and the workings of administrative institutions. Ostrom’s (1971, 1973),

Perry, James L., and Robert K. Christensen. Handbook of Public Administration, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncent-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1895898. Created from ncent-ebooks on 2021-09-23 00:19:53.

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analysis of self-governance in the democratic process and his critique of public administration’s reliance on hierarchy and bureaucracy rather than popular sovereignty led Richard Stillman (1990) to characterize Ostrom’s alternative as stateless administration. Kettl’s argument is that today we have moved, full circle, from the administrative state to stateless administration.

In chapter 1, Kettl identifies four uniformities associated with the transformation from the administrative state to stateless administration: rapid change, evolutionary transformation, erosion of boundaries, and challenges to accountability and public law. He makes a compelling case for the transformation, and his premises are reinforced repeatedly throughout this book, especially in part 1.

Kettl’s point about rapid change is worth repeating here: “Big ideas, about both the dangers of monopoly government and the power of information, spread fast and have driven reforms around the world, to the point that administrative reform has become a universal, even accelerating phenomenon.” Scholars and observers commonly refer to “the” new public management. If truth be told, new public management has changed repeatedly since we first began to refer to it—reify it—in the 1980s. The essence of Kettl’s argument is that what we know today as new public management is likely to be far different from what it was when introduced, and the reality of new public management is changing even as we invoke it as a symbol of change.

The reality of rapid change echoes throughout part 1. In his assess- ment of the changing American intergovernmental system in chapter 2, Laurence O’Toole characterizes it as “dynamically in flux,” pointing to the “array of instruments and cross-governmental linkages.” Barbara Crosby, Melissa Stone, and John Bryson describe in chapter 3 the drivers that have made partnerships across organization and sector boundaries a strategic response to many of society’s most difficult public challenges. Both O’Toole and Crosby and her associates point to the transnational extension of cross-governmental linkages and partnerships that have emerged across the policy landscape. Jonathan Koppell contends in chapter 4 that the increasingly transnational nature of our responses to public problems is driving the creation of novel institutions and systems of administration that are quite different than their domestic counterparts. Koppell brings into view one reason that administrative reform is, in Kettl’s terms, an accelerating phenomenon: new governance forms are increasingly intersecting with traditional forms and change is a by-product.

Environments and the strategies designed to cope with them may change rapidly, but as Kettl notes, transformations in government’s

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Part One 3

tactics are evolutionary. Regardless of how destabilizing change may be for complex systems—and the institutions, organizations, and people defining them—accommodating change is not instantaneous. O’Toole offers a demonstrable reason for why change is evolutionary in the context of the American intergovernmental system, which is that features of the system make it more challenging than ever before to manage. Crosby and associates offer another reason that helps explain evolutionary trans- formation: the stochastic nature of the change process associated with cross-sector partnerships. Crosby and her coauthors note that cross-sector collaborations have produced valuable outcomes for the partners, but oth- ers have foundered. Learning about effective practice takes longer given the stochastic process. Crosby and associates offer advice about coping with the stochastic process: “As a collaboration forms, organizers should attempt to align governance structures and processes with environmental conditions, but recognize that they may need to change as time goes on and environmental shifts and shocks occur.”

Probably the most prominent pattern of change Kettl identifies is ero- sion of boundaries. Since the 1980s, in concert with the rapid growth of the public sector and greater openness to indirect policy tools, scholars and practitioners have observed the blurring of boundaries between public and private. The prominence of erosion of boundaries today is not unex- pected: the blurring of boundaries was an emerging reality acknowledged by contributors to the second edition of this book (see, among others, Milward, 1996; Cigler, 1996).

Although Waldo’s administrative state was a public administration based on boundaries, stateless administration is most certainly a pub- lic administration where boundary erosion and boundary crossing are endemic. The theme is prominent and repeated frequently in the chapters by O’Toole, Crosby and associates, and Koppell. O’Toole notes both the vertical and horizontal extensions of intergovernmental relationships, which are reflective of boundary erosion. Crosby and associates suggest that institutional environments help to drive boundary erosion because of the presence of government mandates requiring collaboration to implement programs. Koppell calls attention to an important irony associated with erosion of boundaries globally. Although we have come to understand that many of the most significant public problems that confront us today are transnational, public administration as a field remains focused on institutions within single, national jurisdictions. Thus, responding to public problems demands less attention to the boundaries that limit prospects for creative, effective solutions.

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The fourth pattern Kettl identifies—challenges to accountability and public law—may be the most daunting facing public administrators because of how it undermines traditional authority relationships. Kettl articulates the accountability logic that sustained the administrative state: “Clear lines of authority tell public administrators what to do, how to do it, and who to do it with.” The institutions and rules that will replace traditional forms of accountability and public law are still being formed. New and evolving accountability regimes are likely to look quite different from the clear lines of authority that once guided public administrators. Koppell offers one glimpse into the future with an example from global governance organizations. He observes that these organizations are constructed with compromised accountability in their superstructures, allowing them to accommodate shifting interests in ways they remain valuable and relevant. This ambiguity may be a trademark of accountability and public law constructed to accommodate rapid change, evolutionary transformation, and erosion of boundaries.

The second edition of this book noted that the old public administra- tion orthodoxy had passed, but a new orthodoxy had not replaced it. This third edition may represent a new orthodoxy coming into clearer focus. Public administration has risen to the challenges that have confronted it in the past. We can hope it will continue to cope with future challenges successfully because the quality of public and private life depends on their resolution. This book is devoted to exploring these challenges and provid- ing public administrators with insights and tools to deal with them.

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CHAPTER ONE

GOVERNING IN AN AGE OF TRANSFORMATION

Donald F. Kettl

As American financial markets were crumbling in fall 2008, I had thechance to catch up with a friend. A very senior career official in a European nation, he had been watching closely—and nervously—the collapse of several investment banks and the drop in the stock market. “Has this affected your country much?” I asked. “Well, so far, not much,” he replied. “We have very good financial regulation and a sound banking system, and I think we will be okay.” When our lunch ended, we shook hands, I wished him luck, and he left for the airport. By the time he got home, everything had changed. The financial crisis had followed him across the Atlantic, and, like many other senior officials around the world, he dove into the formidable challenge of trying to keep his economy afloat in an increasingly stormy sea, with waves driven by challenges far beyond his control.

The financial collapse was not only a wrenching economic event. It was a policy milestone as well. For those who still had any doubts, it made the inescapable point that no longer can any nation unilaterally set its own policy. In the first decade of the new century, financial managers in Baltimore made what they thought was a safe investment in interest rate swaps to even out its investment returns. They charged that some of the world’s largest banks—including Barclays, Bank of America, Citigroup, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, and UBS—had tinkered with interest rates to cheat the city out of its investment income and boost their own profits. No

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6 Handbook of Public Administration

single government organization can any longer fully control any problem that really matters (Kettl, 2009).

Baltimore’s suit against the financial giants powerfully made the point about how truly interwoven the global public administration community has become. Indeed, if the twentieth century was the era of the “adminis- trative state,” as Dwight Waldo put it (1948), the twenty-first century might well be the era of stateless administration. Public administration is increas- ingly dealing with issues that stretch across the traditional boundaries of the governmental program, the public agency, and even the state itself. In Waldo’s administrative state, boundaries defined both the strategies for administrative effectiveness and political accountability. As these bound- aries have eroded, the work of the state has stretched considerably past its boundaries, and that has multiplied the challenges for the fundamental role of bureaucratic power in a democracy: creating programs that work and bureaucracies that do not threaten liberty.

The Changing Environment

Public administration, of course, has forever been in flux. Some issues, like finding the balance between headquarters leadership and field admin- istration, have preoccupied the field for millennia (Fesler, 1949). In his assessment, Leonard D. White (1933) found a growing impetus toward centralization of power in Washington, which he called “one of the major phenomena of our times” (p. 136). In addition, chief executives became politicians more than managers, management became more the province of executive agencies, and recruiting and retaining skilled public man- agers became far more complex and difficult. Nevertheless, at least in the United States, Americans had engaged in little “thinking about the funda- mental reorganization of their institutions of government” (p. 330). White concluded his book by confidently predicting that ongoing readjustments “should spell greater public confidence in government as one agency of social amelioration, and should make more certain the gradual displace- ment of the police state by the service state” (p. 341).

White turned out to be right about the enduring issues of central- ization, political leadership, the rise of the permanent bureaucracy, and the difficulty of managing human capital. He pointed to the challenges to responsiveness and accountability posed by the growth of public bureau- cracy and increasing discretion exercised by public bureaucrats (White, 1942; Perry & Buckwalter, 2010). But after World War II, his prediction about the stability of the administrative state and public confidence in gov- ernment did not hold up. Public confidence in government eroded in the

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Governing in an Age of Transformation 7

United States but in and other industrialized nations. At the same time, fiscal stress grew, especially after the economic crisis of the Great Reces- sion. The combination of declining trust and rising stress proved a deadly cocktail.

Trust in Government

The second half of the twentieth century was a time of declining trust in government, especially in the United States. The trust of Americans that the federal government will do the right thing fell precipitously from the late 1950s through the early 1980s (figure 1.1). Recovery in the 1990s proved short-lived, and trust hit a record low in the first years of the twenty-first century. But falling trust in government is not just an American phenomenon. In the world’s major industrialized democracies,

FIGURE 1.1. TRUST IN AMERICAN GOVERNMENT: PERCENTAGE SAYING THAT THEY TRUST THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT TO DO

WHAT IS RIGHT ALWAYS OR MOST OF THE TIME

1958 1963 1968 1973 1978 1983 1988 1993 1998 2003 2008 2013

Source: Pew Research Center for the People and the Press (2013). Note: The line represents a three-poll average.

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trust in government has been declining since the mid-1960s (Blind, 2007; see also Llewellyn, Brookes, & Mahon, 2013). As figure 1.2 shows, despite the erosion of trust in the US federal government, it ranks about average compared with the world’s industrialized nations: higher than Greece, Portugal, and Hungary and lower than New Zealand, Australia, and the Scandinavian nations (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2013; compare Edelman, 2012).

Understanding this issue of trust and its connection to public admin- istration is challenging. Trust and good governance are not the same thing, mistrust can arise from forces beyond government’s control, good governance does not necessarily increase trust, and it is an open question about how much support modern governments need to govern (Bouckaert & Van de Walle, 2003). Corruption and polarization tend to lower trust, while increased economic prosperity enhances it. Moreover, Hardin (2013) argues that declining public trust in government might be “the inevitable result of the declining role of government in the age of economic globalization.” The loss of trust might “simply be an expres- sion of intolerance of ambiguity.” As problems get more complex and interconnected, “people who do not like ambiguity may trick themselves into seeing political issues as clear by focusing on a single clear issue and neglecting the large array of other issues” (pp. 32, 48).

The decline of trust might simply be the product of a mismatch between the interconnectedness of everything and the desire of many citizens for simpler problems and more straightforward solutions. Reforms to the governmental process seem to do little more than create short-term improvements in the long-term slide (Dalton, 2005), but trust is often the foundation on which success in solving big problems depends (Rothstein, 2005). That is made worse, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) concluded, by increasing polarization and growing distance between citizens and those who govern them.

Evidence on this debate is muddy. There is little support for the idea that good public administration improves public trust in government or the administrative process. Indeed, the public might rightly conclude that public servants should not receive applause for doing what elected officials ask and what taxpayers sacrifice to make possible. But there is support for the idea that poor public administration weakens public trust. Perhaps no other American president saw higher highs or lower lows in public support than George W. Bush, but the point at which his negative approval ratings exceeded his positives and never recovered was after the administration’s initial failure in 2005 to deal with Hurricane Katrina. After the many stumbles in Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, the

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Governing in an Age of Transformation 9

FIGURE 1.2. TRUST IN NATIONAL GOVERNMENT AROUND THE WORLD: PERCENTAGE OF RESPONDENTS REPORTING HIGH

LEVELS OF TRUST, 2010

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90

LUX IND IDN NZL NLD AUS SWE DNK CHE CAN TUR

NOR ZAF RUS BRA GBR AUT CHL FIN

OECD USA ISR

FRA DEU MEX POL BEL ITA IRL

SVN KOR CZE SVK ESP JPN

HUN PRT ISL

GRC EST

Source: Gallup World Poll, in OECD (2013).

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president’s polling numbers began mirroring Bush’s unhappy trend, with the negatives increasing and the gap with his positives growing in the months after the program’s launch. The Japanese government’s struggles to deal with the earthquake, tsunami, and crisis at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant caused public trust to plummet. There seems to be little upside gain through good administration, but there is often a big downside loss.

Distrust in government and in its administrative institutions might well be an inescapable by-product of the globalized, interconnected, and hyper- ambiguous world. Public administrators have little control over the forces that tend to undermine trust in their work. But the rising distrust of gov- ernment in so many countries unquestionably affects the atmosphere in which public administrators work.

Fiscal Stress

Accompanying the decline of public trust is the rise of fiscal stress. Developing countries have long struggled to grow their economies and raise sufficient revenue to meet the aspirations of their citizens. However, with the recent global financial collapse, the world’s advanced economies encountered fiscal stress that for a time exceeded that of developing nations (see figure 1.3). Moreover, evidence mounted that most of the world’s nations faced a long period of high fiscal stress, from a host of interlocking reasons: slow economic growth, weakened confidence in the economy, deep problems in managing generational transition in the workforce, sluggish growth in government revenues, rising public debt, a growing population of older citizens, a rising appetite for a host of other governmental services, and a demand for smaller government.

The economic crisis worsened the fundamental fiscal problem of many nations, including the world’s most developed economies. Debt in many nations, especially in the United States, had already been rising; the crisis drove deficits up and economic growth down and transformed the problem into a crisis. Many nations, again especially the United States, made only slight progress in bringing down the debt in the years after the crisis. But even if the world’s advanced economies stabilized their debts, “merely stabilizing advanced economy debt would be detrimental to medium- and longer-term economic prospects,” the International Monetary Fund concluded (2013, p. vii). Sluggish economic growth coupled with rising expenditures for entitlement and pension programs created a huge overhang on which nations were making scant progress. Moreover, the OECD (2013) found that the economic crisis has worsened trust and the sense of well-being in even the world’s most advanced nations.

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Governing in an Age of Transformation 11

FIGURE 1.3. FISCAL STRESS IN TROUBLED ADVANCED ECONOMIES

0.00

19 95

19 96

19 97

19 98

19 99

20 00

20 01

20 02

20 03

20 04

20 05

20 06

20 07

20 08

20 09

20 10

20 11

0.05

0.10

0.15

0.20

0.25

0.30

0.35

0.40

0.45

0.50

0–1 Scale

Countries in Fiscal Stress Periods (RHS)

Incidence of Fiscal Stress Events (RHS)

Unweighted Fiscal Stress Index

Weighted Fiscal Stress Index

Source: Baldacci et al. (2011, 23).

Transformation

The twin problems of citizen trust and fiscal stress not only created major political problems for most nations around the world. They also heavily weighed on the governance of the world’s advanced economies in ways that reinforced governments’ difficulty of dealing with either. That, in turn, led to a strong focus on government reform.

The Impetus toward Reform

Since White’s conclusion about the relative stability of the American administrative system, reform has been almost constant. The same is true around much of the world, to the point that fundamental reform has become one of the universal constants of modern public administration (Kettl, 2005).

When the United States began its transformation from World War II, one of President Harry S. Truman’s first strategies was to appoint former president Herbert Hoover to chair a commission to examine the organi- zation of the federal government. The commission’s recommendations,

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Truman said, offered “great promise of increasing economy and efficiency” and would “lead to more efficient performance of services by the Govern- ment and lower costs.” The recommendations, he said “will invigorate and promote better management within the Government” (Truman, 1949). The president signed legislation that strengthened the role of the National Security Council inside his executive office, enhanced the role of the cen- tral civil service agency, and created performance budgeting, among other things. The Hoover Commission report led to a second effort, and then an ongoing series of special presidential reform initiatives in the United States (see table 1.1).

The United States was scarcely alone in this reform movement. Indeed, many administrative reforms started earlier and dug deeper in other nations, led by New Zealand’s sweeping transformation in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Schick, 1996; Peters & Pierre, 2001). As Pollitt and Bouckaert (2011) have pointed out, it is “no longer possible for a government to sustain for very long a level of government spending that global markets deem to be imprudent” (p. 35).

At the foundation of the global transformation was the strategy of new public management. Launched in New Zealand and then in other Westminster countries like the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada, new public management grew out of the University of Chicago school of neoclassical economics, which held that market incentives produced better decisions, better results, and cheaper government (Keating, 1998). The model stemmed from arguments that as a monopoly, government suffered from high transaction costs, information problems, and inef- ficiencies. The supporters of the movement believed that introducing market incentives, especially holding public managers responsible for the results they produced, providing sanctions for problems, and giving rewards for good performance, would lead to better results. The strat- egy relied on a collection of interlocking tactics: clear assignment of responsibility for results to individual agencies and agency managers; great flexibility for managers in delivering results; a strong focus on measuring outputs; incentives to drive results, sometimes with a leader’s salary and continued employment dependent on the results produced; a strong supporting information technology system; and a commitment to serving citizens as customers, to bring private sector incentives into public sector operations. In New Zealand, for example, the government sold off its state-owned port and the international airport in Auckland, the Bank of New Zealand, its national airline, its telecommunications and railroad operations, the electric power company, and a state-owned forest. Under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the British government

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Governing in an Age of Transformation 13

TABLE 1.1. AMERICAN REFORM INITIATIVES

First Hoover Commission (Truman: 1947–1949)

Comprehensive review of Executive Branch Structure and Function

Second Hoover Commission (Eisenhower: 1953–1959)

Follow-on to the first Hoover Commission; focused more on policy problems than on organizational structure

Study commissions on executive reorganization (Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson: 1953–1968)

Low-key reforms focusing on quiet but important changes

Planning-Programming- Budgeting System (PPBS; Johnson: 1961–1969)

Introduced in the Pentagon in 1961 and extended to the rest of government in 1965; brought life cycle accounting and program-based planning to the federal budget process

Ash Council (Nixon: 1969–1971)

Proposals for a fundamental restructuring of the executive branch, including creation of four superdepartments to encompass existing departments

Management by Objectives (Nixon: 1973–1974)

Replacement of PPBS with an objective-based budgetary system

Tactical reform efforts (Carter: 1977–1979)

Bottom-up, process-based proposal to reorganize government, which ended mainly in failure; new cabinet departments created independently; zero-base-budgeting introduced; civil service reform act launched

Grace Commission (Reagan: 1982–1984)

Large-scale effort to determine how government could be operated for less money, with a major focus on privatization

National Performance Review (Clinton: 1993–2001)

Effort to “reinvent” government by making it “work better and cost less”

Performance Assessment Rating Tool (PART) and the President’s Management Agenda (Bush: 2001–2009)

Strategy to enhance human capital, financial accountability, competitive sourcing, e-government, and integration of performance information into the annual budget; supported by an annual PART process that assigned “stoplight” scores (red, yellow, green) to agencies on their success in advancing outcome-based performance targets

Management Agenda (Obama: 2009–)

Agency-based efforts to define their performance goals and produce information demonstrating improvement; focus on citizen-centered services; technological initiatives; transparency initiatives through Internet; incorporation of performance improvement ideas from private sector

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privatized scores of government-owned enterprises, including such giants as British Petroleum, British Airways, Rolls-Royce, Jaguar, the collection of airports serving London, and electricity, water, and telecommunications operations.

Two different ideologies lay behind this movement. One (“letting the managers manage”) focused on giving managers more flexibility and assuming that they would devise creative new strategies to produce better results. The other (“making the managers manage”) set clear targets and then held managers strictly accountable for results. The United States has tended to follow the former strategy, the Westminster nations the latter. Scholars have debated what it is, what it should be, whether it will last, and whether it has died (Dunleavy, Margetts, Bastow, & Tinkler, 2006). Moreover, in no country has either model been closely or consistently followed, at least for long. As Lodge and Gill (2011) have pointed out, the implementation of the new public management has been dynamic, “messy,” and inevitably enmeshed in politics, in sharp contrast to the clear and logical precision of new public management theory. Indeed, the government reform movement of the last generation has been a search for “magic concepts” (Pollitt & Hupe, 2011) and “power words” (Hood, 2005) to drive complex institutions through big and fundamental changes.

The Reform Agenda

Among the vast array of reform initiatives that have emerged since the later 1970s, several patterns stand out:

1. Privatization and contracting out. Reformers have been convinced that the private sector works better than the public sector and that anything that the private sector can do, it should do. In many industrialized nations, this led to the sale of big government-owned enterprises. In the United States, where the government did not own airlines or telecommunications companies, the movement accelerated the contracting out of government programs, ranging from government cafeterias to maintenance of military equipment. In fact, in US military operations in the Balkans, Iraq, and Afghanistan, there was at least one contractor for every soldier on the battlefield (Schwartz & Swain, 2011). There have been subtle differences in the approach to contracting out and privatization. Antigovernment rhetoric in the United States has produced a powerful impetus toward contracting out for almost anything. In some nations, including Australia and New Zealand, the term of art has been competitive tendering, a somewhat more neutral approach suggesting that whoever can do the work cheapest and best should get the job. But there has been a broad movement to

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Governing in an Age of Transformation 15

shrink government by relying more on nongovernmental organizations to do work for the public.

2. Customer-driven, citizen-centered government. Closely related to the pri- vatization and contracting-out approaches is a more central role for citi- zens. This strategy fits neatly in the underlying argument that monopolies tend to be inefficient and unresponsive. Sending the production of some goods and services to the competitive market deals with part of the puz- zle. For those that remain in government hands, reformers have urged the government to build citizen-driven forces into government programs. In the United States, Maryland introduced a new website to allow citizens to check on waiting times at Department of Motor Vehicles offices. Tax preparation and filing services have moved online in the United States, and in Canada and the United Kingdom, the government calculates the tax due. British rail passengers can get a refund for their railroad tick- ets. Governments worked to create one-stop shopping, so that informa- tion provided by citizens in one office could be transferred to other agen- cies, and the British government created a website so citizens could check to see if they were receiving all the benefits to which they were entitled (https://www.gov.uk/benefits-adviser). In Austria, 95 percent of all gov- ernment services are available online (OECD, 2010, p. 18).

3. Open government. The customer service movement created a strong impetus toward a more open government. This movement has three parts: greater transparency, in opening government to more public scrutiny; greater accessibility, in making government available “to any- one, anytime, anywhere”; and greater responsiveness, in creating more opportunities for new ideas to reshape government operations (OECD, 2005a; Ubaldi, 2013). In Denmark, for example, the government created “Easy-ID,” which makes it possible for citizens to track all the information the government has on file about them (OECD, 2010). An open gov- ernment, reformers believed, would make it easier for citizens to get the information they needed and to make a better case for better government.

4. Performance management. Starting in the late 1980s with New Zealand’s ongoing reforms, governments around the world have embraced results-oriented budgets, designed to focus public spending on the goals they seek to achieve and measure the results they produce. The movement quickly spread in the 1990s to Canada, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States, with Austria, Germany, and Switzerland not far behind (OECD, 2005b). A 1993 US law required all federal agencies to write strategic plans and measure outcomes, and that effort has expanded over the years since. Australia, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom have developed top-down

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performance and budgeting systems, with the goals framed by the central government. Other governments, such as Finland, rely on bottom-up goals developed by agencies. In the United States, the performance initiatives have moved back and forth between top-down efforts (in the George W. Bush administration) and bottom-up plans (in the Obama adminis- tration). Performance management reforms, designed to help agencies identify and track their progress against goals, have advanced further than performance budgeting, aimed at using performance measures to shape budgetary decisions.

Despite the wide variance in the approaches, most advanced economies moved toward measurement of outputs, using those measures to improve the management of their programs—and, at least in broad terms, to explore linking results to spending. The measures, however, often did not affect decisions. A survey found that elected officials did not use performance measures in more than 40 percent of OECD countries. Legislators used performance measures in just 19 percent of these nations (Curristine, 2005). In the United States, some critics have suggested that performance management strategies are part of a long series of initiatives that involve a big investment of staff time in exchange for little impact (White, 2012). Other students of the process argue that it is more accurate to think of the process as “performance-informed budgeting,” with the analytical tools nudging but not dictating the resource allocation process (Anderson, 2012).

5. Fiscal reforms. Beyond performance management reforms, nations embraced an explicit set of fiscal rules that set tough targets on spend- ing and debt. For example, many nations fixed the level of debt as a percentage of the gross domestic product, created new standards for balancing the budget, set limits on spending, and limited the amount of taxing. Just five nations (Germany, Indonesia, Japan, Luxembourg, and the United States) had such rules in 1990. By 2012, the number had soared to seventy-six. In addition, forty-seven nations were part of super- national currency unions—including members of the European Union, the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union, the West African Economic and Monetary Union, and the Central African Economic and Monetary Community—that established additional rules on debt as a share of the national economy and the need for a balanced budget. Almost all nations adopted some kind of rule designed to limit government spending (Schaechter, Kinda, Budina, & Weber, 2012). As the United States proved over and over, writing rules did not guarantee that a nation would keep them. But at the least, writing the rules created a discussion around new

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norms and shifted the political battles, making it more difficult to stray from emerging international expectations.

6. Human capital. In addition to the other reforms, many countries dealt with fiscal stress by cutting the number of government employees. A 2010 OECD survey showed that three-fourths of the nations responded they were reducing the size of their workforce. Coupling those reductions with human resource management, however, proved difficult and often rare. Cutting the number of employees raised a tough challenge of ensuring that the remaining workforce was diverse, preserved diversity, produced a government with the skills needed, and helped governments manage the transition from retiring baby boomers to new generations of workers. Even more fundamental, many governments risked “seeing staff as costs rather than as assets” (OECD, 2011, 11). Changes to enhance productivity require better people management, a step in the reform effort that few nations have gotten right.

7. Networks. In the face of tough fiscal and operating realities, many governments moved away from broad, sweeping, top-down reforms to pragmatic efforts to improve coordination among operating agencies. This growing reliance on network management drew inspiration from the investigation of the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, where the investigating commission and many analysts pointed to the need to “connect the dots” among different players who shared responsibility for complex actions (9/11 Commission, 2004; Kettl, 2014). Many governments pressed their public administrators to be network managers, focusing squarely on leverage over their partners and synergies with those who shared responsibility for results. This marked an important transformation in the concept of organizational leadership, and it also proved a step away from a relatively narrow hierarchical view of administra- tion (Kickert, 1997; Goldsmith & Eggers, 2004; Pollitt & Bouckaert, 2011; Nickerson & Sanders, 2013; Kettl, 2009). Performance-based information drove many of these partnerships, with the aim of getting information quickly into the hands of managers so they could fine-tune their policy strategies (Behn, 2014). The network approach did not acquire the high-level label that characterized the new public management strategies in many countries, but it did create a relatively coherent and far-reaching effort to improve the performance of government programs in a world of growing complexity. The urgency of the problem becomes clear in a care- ful look at the US Government Accountability Office’s annual “high-risk list” of programs prone to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement. Almost without exception, each of these programs involves complex partnerships that stretch across government agencies and between

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government and its private and nonprofit sector partners. Weaving together these major reform initiatives poses substantial challenges for creating—and assessing—the reform movement as a whole.

Assessing the Reform Movement

Since the late 1970s, government reform has been global, constant, relentless, and sweeping. Many of the ideas have been very big. And many of them have deep roots in the modern state and the debates that have shaped modern democracies (Pollitt, 2008; Kettl, 2002). None have produced permanent answers, and few (if any) work everywhere. Indeed, reform is the constant, but the national context is the great variable in the reform movement. Some have been abandoned (Light, 1997), while others have stumbled in crossing the big divides that often separate national cultures and political systems (World Bank, 2011).

The Westminster countries—most notably New Zealand, Australia, and the United Kingdom—have introduced some of the biggest ideas and most fundamental reforms. Continental European nations have been more cau- tious (Pollitt, 2013). The Scandinavian nations have taken relatively small steps, have very large public sectors, yet retain high levels of trust in their governments and high levels of happiness among their citizens. China has engaged in a surprising level of reform, focusing on both domestic change and global integration (Xue, 2012). Indeed, if there is any truly univer- sal element to public administration around the world, it is the universal, sometimes frenetic pace of reform.

At the core of this reform movement, however, is also a very large problem. The first generation of this movement saw remarkable activity on a host of fronts, focused on addressing what critics saw as the pathologies that monopoly power, based in government, posed for economic efficiency and effectiveness, on the one hand, and democratic responsiveness and accountability, on the other. Most of the reforms aimed at bringing private sector ideas to and simulating private sector incentives within government. The economic crisis in the first decade of the 2000s, however, transformed the basic problem. The problems of efficiency and responsiveness, effectiveness, and accountability remained. But fiscal stress became the far larger problem, and the reforms of the previous generation gave little traction on this fundamental challenge. As it became clear that the economic pressures were more than a short-term, cyclical crisis from which theworld’seconomieswouldquicklybounceback,thedistancebetweenthe management reform movement and the large, inescapable realities grew. Government officials could not abandon the public administration reforms

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that had proven so important for decades, but they also faced more fundamental questions for which the reforms provided few answers. Pollitt and Bouckaert (2011) conclude their classic summary of a generation of management reforms with a conclusion that, they say, is “gloomy,” with ambitious ideas that rarely achieve what their promoters hoped and often with scant examination of the results that the ideas produced.

From the Administrative State to Stateless Administration

The pace of reform, the globalization of world economies, the rise of fiscal stress, and the decline of public trust have combined to force a major change in public administration. If the mid-twentieth century produced Waldo’s administrative state, the turn of the twenty-first century pro- duced stateless administration: sweeping waves and eddies, often beyond the boundaries of existing management strategies and administrative orthodoxy, that pushed the field into new and often challenging new puzzles. This stateless administration only fueled the impetus toward administrative reform.

Finding common administrative threads among the vast array of the world’s nations is a daunting challenge. There is always a gap between bold public pronouncements and management realities, between what policy- makers say and what public managers can do and among the vast array of cultures and politics. Nevertheless, patterns have emerged from the breath- taking pace of change in public administration around the globe since World War II:

1. Rapid change. Big ideas about the dangers of monopoly government and the power of information spread fast and have driven reforms around the world, to the point that administrative reform has become a universal, even accelerating phenomenon.

2. Evolutionary transformation. Revolution in strategy has become evo- lution in government’s tactics through several stages: efforts to improve the function of administrative structures; new processes to bring economic efficiency and better policy analysis into government decisions; a focused effort to spin off from government operations that the private sector could do better or cheaper—or, in some cases, simply that the private sector could take on; reductions in government spending, motivated by fiscal stress and driven by rule-based processes; and network-based reforms to focus government managers on producing better outcomes by harnessing the power of partners, outside their organizations, who share responsibility for results.

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3. Erosion of boundaries. Waldo’s “administrative state” was a pub- lic administration based on boundaries. Max Weber’s classic analysis explained how hierarchy and specialization could structure complex problems through bureaucracy (Weber, Gerth, & Mills, 1946). Even earlier, Woodrow Wilson (1887) had suggested how a powerful bureau- cracy could remain democratically accountable by separating the tools of administration from decisions about their use (1887). As administrative systems evolved in the post–World War II era, however, these boundaries broke down. Especially in the United States, policy execution relied increasingly on a complex collection of grants, contracts, loan programs, and tax preferences that shared a single important feature: they pursued the delivery of public goods and services through mechanisms that crossed boundaries, outside traditional hierarchies. Other countries relied increasingly on these policy tools, although not to the same degree as the United States did (Lane, 2000; Schick, 2011). Schick (2011) argues persuasively that “there is pervasive recognition in strong democracies that to govern is to share authority, ideas and information, often with partners, sometimes with rivals . . . . From the vantage point of government, governance is about leveraging; from the perspective of partners, it may be more about openness and inclusion” (p. 20).

4. Challenge to accountability and public law. The rise of transboundary policy tools, coupled with governments’ struggles to deal with the decline of public trust and the rise of fiscal trust, pose a tough puzzle for account- ability. The traditional theories and approaches to accountability in terms of efficiency and responsiveness have long depended on boundaries. Clear lines of authority tell public administrators what to do, how to do it, and who to do it with. The rise of networked government, driven by accelerated change, erodes these traditions (Freeman, 2003). That complicates gov- ernments’ efforts to rise to the challenges of public trust and fiscal stress, with rapid change making it even more difficult to create new strategies of accountability and new patterns of public law to replace the old traditions that reforms have eroded.

These dimensions frame the central paradox of administration today: as policy systems and structures have become ever more intricate and com- plex, the importance of individual leaders has grown (IBM, 2005). Policy reformers have paid increasing attention to policy design, whether through administrative restructuring (in New Zealand), accountability through per- formance measures (in the United Kingdom), public-private partnerships (in Canada, Australia, and around the rest of the world), and in complex public-private health insurance systems (in the United States).

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Citizens expect government to work as easily as their interactions with the private sector, which allows transactions with the swipe of a card, com- merce on the Internet, considerable choice, and a high level of attention to satisfaction. They expect a government that is more citizen centered, with administrators weaving together different programs to improve their lives where they live. Moreover, citizens do not expect to have to understand how inserting a card into a machine can transfer cash from a bank account to their hands. Neither do they expect that they need to know how govern- ment programs work for the programs to work well for them. Indeed, that poses the sharpest challenge of all.

Summary

As administrative systems have become more complex, public adminis- trators have the responsibility for making them seamless. Citizens do not like the intrusion of government power, but they expect government to be powerful enough to solve public programs. They expect high-quality and effective services, but they do not expect to pay higher taxes. Indeed, one of the most fundamental realities of government today is the emergence of a permanent paradox: the expectation that government will solve a far wider range of problems, including protecting citizens for a far larger range of threats, combined with fiscal stress that strains government’s ability to operate. Some of these challenges require systems-level solutions, including better information technology and improved governance by elected officials. But on an unprecedented scale, these problems require highly trained, nimble public administrators with uncommon skill and an innate sense of the public interest.

That is the core puzzle for stateless administration. If anything seems certain in public administration, it is that the challenges of low public trust and high fiscal stress will continue, governments will innovate even more frequently with an even larger variety of tools, and these forces will pose an even greater challenge to administrative orthodoxy. That frames huge challenges for public administrators around the world in rising to these puzzles—and for public administration scholars pursuing the eter- nal search for efficiency, effectiveness, responsiveness, and accountability in a turbulent world.

It is the challenge I encountered while driving home several years ago. There had been news reports of the risk of rollovers in collisions involv- ing sports utility vehicles, and one of those collisions happened right in front of me. Fortunately for the occupants of the SUV, it was a low-speed

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collision, and no one seemed hurt. However, the SUV rolled over onto its roof, and the passengers were hanging upside by their seatbelts. And there was an extra note of risk: the collision happened precisely at the boundary between two adjoining jurisdictions. I called the 911 emergency service, run by the county, and they promised help was on the way. I then realized that four things could happen, and that three of them were bad. The county’s dispatchers could fail to connect with the local government’s emergency response teams. The local emergency responders could each assume that the other jurisdiction would respond, and no one would arrive to help. Or emergency responders from both jurisdictions would arrive, the passengers would be helped out, but taxpayers would have to pay double for the emergency. Or the county and the local governments could coor- dinate the response, ensure that each jurisdiction sent the help needed (and no more), and would jointly help the passengers safely from their precarious position.

In a very short time, I heard sirens coming to the scene, from oppo- site directions. It soon became clear that the result was the fourth, happy outcome: just the right response, carefully coordinated, with passengers helped and taxpayers protected. From the point of view of those hanging upside down, they did not care what the decals on the side of the vehicles said: they just wanted help. It was a model of effective, efficient, respon- sive, and accountable public service, and it was led by public servants who understood how to bring resources to bear to help citizens. For the age of transformation, the constant challenge is bringing just that approach to scale—and aggressively pursuing the public interest.

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CHAPTER TWO

THE CHANGING CHARACTER OF THE AMERICAN INTERGOVERNMENTAL SYSTEM

Laurence J. O’Toole Jr.

The huge and variegated intergovernmental landscape in the UnitedStates can barely be comprehended in general terms, let alone understood in all its finely grained detail: more than ninety thousand gov- ernments and growing (US Bureau of the Census, 2012), huge variations by region and type of governmental ties, fundamentally true to the basic constitutional design of the founders and yet incredibly complicated. What is more, the “system,” if one can even use that term to encompass the whole, is dynamically in flux.

With regard to the changing character of the system, one need only point to the array of instruments and cross-governmental linkages. More venerable ties on the vertical dimension established by grants and associated regulations (“strings”) remain quite visible, but these have been supplemented by unfunded mandates—federal-to-state and state-to-local—as well as preemptions and newer instruments like waivers (a state’s exemption from a federal statutory or regulatory requirement in the interest of policy flexibility). And to add more depth to the challenge for public managers, the system has increasingly been stretched vertically; the growing importance of the transnational level has been noted in almost all sectors of policy (O’Toole & Hanf, 2002): bi- and multilateral, transnational, functionally specific regimes now proliferate and commit even subnational US (and other) governments to responsibilities negoti- ated internationally. As for the horizontal dimension, governments deal

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with each other and are sometimes linked institutionally through such var- ied forms as regional associations and councils of governments, interstate compacts, memoranda of agreement, contracts, and other mechanisms of collaboration (Agranoff & McGuire, 2003; Bowman, 2004; Feiock & Scholz, 2010; Agranoff, 2012). These can change form over time as well.

Meanwhile, the system has recently been buffeted and influenced by multiple forces, including serious budget reductions, particularly in certain policy fields, and increased politicization, which has generated tensions vertically (witness the numerous states trying to resist roles in the imple- mentation of the Affordable Care Act) and also significantly raised the level of uncertainty and shortened planning horizons in intergovernmental programs (note the great complications facing administrators at all levels of the intergovernmental system in dealing with threatened federal shut- downs, budget impasses, and sequesters). Accompanying the development of a more politicized intergovernmental context has been the concomitant “judicialization” of important parts of intergovernmental policy, especially as intergovernmental tensions have been unable to be resolved by bar- gaining efforts to bridge differences. Examples like immigration policy, education policy, policy on the use (including medical use) of marijuana, policy on the rights of gay couples, and policy on health care illustrate the contemporary high profile of the courts in the intergovernmental system.

Amid such tumultuous change, the need for skilled and judicious inter- governmental management has not lessened. Bridges across jurisdictions need to be built, and people and resources need to be moved toward com- plex policy objectives, even as tensions and conflicts in parts of the system escalate. Today’s intergovernmental managers have their hands full.

As this chapter indicates, there is no shortage of partial theories that can sometimes be tapped to enhance the practice of intergovernmental public administration, but no valid general theory and few theoretical advances are available from recent scholarship. What is more, the nation must now deal with its intergovernmental challenges without an official institution representing the intergovernmental dimensions of public life: the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (ACIR), once a valuable and respected voice on many intergovernmental matters, met its demise long ago now, in 1996.1

This chapter reviews the changing character of the contemporary US intergovernmental system. It sketches what we know that is relevant to effective managerial practice and offers some implications for practice in the contemporary intergovernmental setting, where the changing character of the pattern, with interdependence and complexity at very high levels, has rendered effective management increasingly challenging.

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Knowledge about Effective Practice

Several broad features of the US intergovernmental system are important to take note of for those desirous of operating effectively. Even so, it is dif- ficult for actors at any place in the system to make rational decisions to benefit the individuals or activities for which they hold responsibility. It is also difficult to effect any coherent change in the overall system. The rea- sons have to do with some of the dominant systemic features evident today.

Two key features are the system’s interdependence—one might say hyperinterdependence—and its complexity. Interdependence means that power is shared among branches and layers of government, even within policy sectors. Instead of one level consistently controlling decisions about policy, nearly any change requires mutual accommodation among several levels of government (O’Toole & Christensen, 2013). No one is in control of the system itself, and unanticipated consequences are a fact of life. Some of these consequences are also path dependent: they cannot be reversed or undone. And even small changes in the structure of interde- pendence among the intergovernmental actors can carry important impli- cations for the future. Hyperinterdependence references the fact that public organizations and decision makers are often linked to multiple others and in multiple directions, so it can be difficult to anticipate the consequences likely to flow from a given act. Consequently, it is very difficult to operate strategically in the system; focus necessarily tends to be on short-term issues. Complexity accompanies such interdependence. “Complexity means that the intergovernmental network is large and undifferentiated; no one participant can possibly possess enough information about its com- ponents and dynamics to consistently make rational decisions on its own or to operate in isolation from the rest” (O’Toole & Christensen, 2013, p. 18).

Such properties also produce high levels of uncertainty and risk as public administrators seek to coordinate people and resources to accomplish public objectives in concert with others, whose moves can be anticipated and planned for only partially and imperfectly (Agranoff, 1996). The increasing involvement of the international level, important and in principle helpful in many fields of policy, can complicate the system still further: international processes and negotiations are more opaque to domestic practitioners and involve considerations of far-distant others in national contexts much different from the American one. Multilateral negotiations regarding such subjects as the transboundary movement and disposal of hazardous wastes or the depletion of the ozone layer affect policy and management decisions of many domestic intergovernmental actors who operate far from the negotiating table.

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This complexity and interdependence, with accompanying uncertainty and risk, provide a double-edged sword. On the one hand, such a system leverages additional opportunities for addressing public problems by cre- ating possibilities for an expanded scope of action. On the other hand, the systemic elements render it much more difficult for any given actor or agency or government to achieve objectives.

The typical pattern of decision making across units and actors in the system is one of bargaining under circumstances of partial conflict among the participants. The different actors have different objectives and interests to serve, but often they cannot act unilaterally. They may find it easier to block or veto intergovernmental action than to ensure its execution. They might join together into coalitions, but these are unlikely to be highly sta- ble over extended periods. A result of such patterns is the expectation of regular processes of negotiating and renegotiating, particularly with grant programs (for a classic depiction, see Derthick, 1970).

Of course, this broad sketch is rather abstract, and the proverbial devil is in the intergovernmental details. For while such broad-brush characterizations can be made, different intergovernmental programs and contexts can differ considerably from each other. Indeed, no one theoret- ical approach can cover the variety of intergovernmental circumstances. Rather, different perspectives can be more or less useful in deciphering various parts of the system.

Partial Theoretical Perspectives

There is a paucity of validated theories of intergovernmental relations and intergovernmental management. The vast literature on the US intergov- ernmental system is descriptively rich but theoretically impoverished. This observation should be relatively unsurprising, given the inherent difficul- ties of developing a theory covering such a huge and varied constellation of governments and relationships, but it does make for challenges in deriving practically useful points from theoretical contributions.

The most appropriate theoretical perspective in a given case depends on the particular features of programs, relationships, incentives, and objectives. Therefore, insights from the (candidate) theoretical perspec- tives can be more or less useful in practice, depending on the specifics of the context.

Among the approaches that might seem to offer possibilities is principal-agent theory. Sometimes, especially for understanding the oper- ations of grant-in-aid programs, it might seem feasible to treat grantor governments or agencies (“donors”) as de facto principals, with grantee

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units (“recipients”) as agents of the former (Pressman, 1975). Certainly this rough approximation can make sense of the relative influence of donors and recipients in different types of grant programs: donor units exercise more leverage when making project grants available than for categorical grant arrangements. The former structure places potential recipients into direct competition with each other for a limited supply of resources. Similarly, recipients have inherently more maneuvering room when dealing with block grants than with narrower types. But principal-agent logic goes only so far. Most fundamental, it ignores the special features of a federal system that render national and state governments formal and constitutional coequals. It also blurs the practical reality that principals in such arrangements usually cannot afford to apply strict sanctions to agents. The latter must continue to operate programs if a policy’s purpose is to be furthered. Similarly, it is obvious that any sort of principal-agent approach to understanding intergovernmental relations will fail to capture horizontal ties, collaborative arrangements, and all sorts of networked intergovernmental arrangements in which actors are interdependent but in complex, reciprocal fashion (McGuire, Lee, & Fyall, 2013).

Another theme many researchers have emphasized has been that the explicitly management aspects of intergovernmental relations are central to any understanding of the operations of programs in the US system. Deil Wright (1988) was perhaps the foremost scholar developing and emphasiz- ing this perspective, but it has remained a prominent viewpoint for some time (Conlan & Posner, 2008; O’Toole & Meier, 2011). Furthermore, a number of additional theoretical lines of development are relevant to the management of intergovernmental relations. For instance, theories regard- ing collaborative governance may have the potential to inform intergovern- mental management, particularly the management of horizontal and net- worked intergovernmental programs (O’Leary & Bingham, 2009). Public choice offers another theoretical perspective that clearly has applicability for some aspects of intergovernmental relations. Public choice can some- times offer insights into how and why jurisdictions multiply, why there can be resistance to metropolitan consolidation, and why polycentricity can offer advantages. A polycentric system is one “where citizens are able to organize not just one but multiple governing authorities at differing scales” (Ostrom, 2005, p. 283; see also McGinnis & Ostrom, 2012). But to date, public choice has not provided many robust injunctions for public man- agers interested in more effective practice.

Game theory provides an additional theoretical lens with some applica- bility in settings where managers interact to coproduce intergovernmental

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action. It is not a perfect tool, but it offers some significant advantages. It treats all actors analytically as potentially relevant, obviates the need to think hierarchically, considers and is capable of handling repeated inter- actions, and realistically assumes strategic thinking on the part of decision makers because they take into account what other actors are likely to do as the former make their own choices. This is useful, even if intergovernmen- tal arrangements can overwhelm individual actors’ abilities to make sense of the overall pattern. And finally, game theory provides a way to think sys- tematically about patterns of interdependent choice where no one actor can control collective outcomes. Accordingly, this chapter uses a heuristic version of game theory to sort through some broad tendencies and recom- mendations for effective practice.

Research Findings and Knowledge about Effective Practice

The lack of solid, broadly applicable theory on intergovernmental rela- tions means that there is much less research-based general knowledge available than would be ideal. Indeed, research findings are highly diverse, as are their conclusions. Research tends to be focused on issues or policy sectors (e.g., immigration, programs for health care). The context-specific details matter greatly, but that means there is little in the way of broadly systemic treatments that can be useful for effective practice. The ACIR, formerly responsible for important systemwide analyses (examples include the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, 1977, 1984), filled an important role in this regard. A similar point can be made regarding the state-level versions of the ACIR, but these too have been diminishing in number. Nationwide there has been no emergence of a functionally equivalent institution to take on this role, despite frequent exhortations by observers and analysts to do so (Walters, 2005; Kincaid & Stenberg, 2011).

Still, research findings offer general lessons for effective practice. First, it is important for public administrators to analyze carefully the particu- lar features of their programs, relationships, incentives, and objectives and see which general models of potentially effective practice seem to be most applicable. Second, it is helpful to recognize and take into account the mul- tilevel aspect of much intergovernmental relations. Influence over what ultimately happens tends to come from all involved levels. Accordingly, it can be especially useful for analysts and practitioners alike to engage in what Elmore (1985) called “reversible logic”: mapping both forward, from one’s own situation, institutional setting, and agenda toward others with whom one is interdependent, and backward, from the involved others and

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their situations, settings, and likely agendas and sketching the causal paths back toward oneself. Not doing so is a mistake commonly made in the inter- governmental system, perhaps especially by actors at the federal level.

The implication here is to avoid the hubris of assuming that one’s own preferences can be enacted or enforced by merely pressing forward with one’s own perspective, and instead, to take explicitly and systematically into analytical account the preferences and predicaments of others whose coop- eration and perhaps coordination may be necessary for success. Doing so involves explicitly tracing causal paths in all directions, identifying points of leverage that are potentially usable from one’s own position in the inter- governmental system and also consequential from the perspective of the others. This approach does not mean neglecting one’s own interests, pol- icy commitments, or principles, but rather grounding one’s approach in intergovernmental settings to what may actually be possible given that one can seldom act unilaterally.

This injunction is not the same as a general endorsement of incrementalism—small changes and limited moves to be preferred over larger ones—or “muddling through” (Lindblom, 1959). It may be that significant adaptations are possible, even over relatively short time spans, but these need to be premised on taking into account causal paths that can work.

How this might operate for a practicing intergovernmental manager interested in effective practice can be suggested by considering a few sit- uations, ranging widely in terms of likelihood of conflict or cooperation. A version of ideas derived from game theory can be a potentially useful heuristic here (Stoker, 1991; O’Toole, 1995).

First, consider situations in which interdependent intergovernmental actors have quite similar perspectives on the common problem or program, including that it is worthwhile to work cooperatively toward a mostly shared objective. Even here, spontaneous cooperative effort may not emerge. It is also highly unlikely that different governments or parts of governments will have exactly the same view on the matter and are committed to the common cause with identical assessments of the salience of the matter. Still, the situation may be reasonably structured for cooperative effort. Fed- eral and state agencies participating in some grant programs are examples. To the extent that both or all parties can benefit from cooperative effort, what does game theory suggest about assisting effective practice? Public managers in such settings would do well to make clear their own inter- est in successful cooperative effort, encourage the others to do likewise, and communicate transparently about their own moves. Such signaling can reduce the chances for misunderstandings. Regular interaction can also

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increase the ease of interdependent effort and reduce uncertainty among the participating actors, whether organizational or individual. Productive cooperative intergovernmental effort should be buffered, if possible, from other potentially disruptive features of the system. Intergovernmental suc- cess, in other words, is more likely to the extent that the various actors have an accurate reading of the structure of their own interdependence.

What about situations where things are not so favorably structured? Quite a number of intergovernmental settings are ones in which different parties are neither tightly aligned nor stridently in conflict. An example may be No Child Left Behind, with states and localities as the prime movers in structuring and delivering educational results. Game theory suggests that sometimes different actors can find ways to work out ways of func- tioning interdependently together despite the continuing presence of at least some conflict.

How can such situations be managed toward success, if success means acceptable outcomes from the perspective of all, or nearly all, of the parties involved? Several possibilities present themselves. First, intergovernmental programs and patterns typically have multiple parts. In grant programs, for instance, there are funding mechanisms attached to regulatory elements, often some explicit discretion placed in the hands of recipients, sometimes encouragement toward innovation, or equity, or responsiveness, or other political values. It may be that one feature of one program poses a stick- ing point, but one or another intergovernmental actor might be willing to cooperate on it provided another, or the other, party offers flexibility on an entirely different feature or program that may be particularly salient for the first party. Seeking, identifying, and brokering such trade-offs can be an important skill for intergovernmental managers and can expand the set of feasible outcomes.

Some intergovernmental situations involve, or potentially involve, large commitments on the part of one or more of those involved. Espe- cially if the parties have little history of cooperative effort, they may be reluctant to commit to the entire programmatic initiative—for instance, when local governments in a large metropolitan area are being asked to invest in a large-scale program to protect a watershed. If large com- mitments can be disaggregated into smaller ones, and especially if these can be queued in sequence over a more extended time period, the risks underlying major commitments can be reduced. The intergovernmental actors can phase in their investments of people and resources gradually as they observe and evaluate the evolution of the cooperative effort and the respective contributions and degree of cooperative behavior displayed by the others. Patterns of linked action can be developed gradually, with

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the trust and increasing effectiveness that can come in successful versions of such multiactor efforts. If the anticipated developments do not ensue or the intergovernmental effort turns out to be more complicated or difficult than anticipated, the parties can reassess their commitments, reconfigure their patterns of interdependence, reschedule the joint effort, or decommit without having to take a huge loss. Lowering the size of commitments early on can increase prospects for later success.

Sometimes in such an effort, the overall chances for successful coop- eration can be enhanced by efforts to manage second-order collective action challenges. If the efforts and commitments of each of the inter- governmental parties are not fully transparent and visible to the others involved, all may be reluctant to abide by their parts of the bargain for fear of shirking by others. In this case, it may be worthwhile for the actors to tax themselves—literally, or perhaps in terms of in-kind contributions—to set up a monitoring and perhaps enforcement system to keep track of the various moves taking place among all those involved. This system can cost some additional resources but may also increase the confidence that the parties feel in the collective project or activity, and thus increase their own commitment to the cause.

These steps can be undertaken by or contributed to by public managers in intergovernmental settings and can thus assist in effective practice as long as differences among those involved are not too extreme.

However, sometimes the differences are rather large and cannot eas- ily be bridged. In this case, one obvious consideration is whether such a manager has any options to try to work with one or more alternative par- ties who may be somewhat more congenial toward the expected results of such interdependent action. In project grant arrangements, for instance, the granting government may be able to select from among prospective recipients those that seem to be strongly committed to the objectives of the program and have the capacity to work toward their achievement.

Of course, it is not always feasible to select among potential partners. For example, if a modification in the structure of the intergovernmental program could render it a less challenging context in which to operate, several kinds of structural alternatives might be considered. Aside from programmatic changes that may have to be enacted through legislation,2

managers might consider proposing modifications to the list of stakehold- ers involved—for instance, inviting or encouraging some organizations favoring the joint activity and its intended outcomes to meet with the representatives of the governments involved, serve on an advisory board for the program, or take over responsibility for some aspects of program

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implementation. Managers may also be able to suggest regulatory modifi- cations to reduce onerous requirements or streamline intergovernmental program management, or they might be able to set up monitoring processes to limit others’ ability to defect from cooperation without being seen to do so.

An important possibility for managers is to try to alter the perspective of one or more other actors whose willing participation in the program is considered necessary. Providing timely and valid information about the program—its advantages, its likely impact on other participants and on clients or others—can sometimes be persuasive. Data from other states or localities or other similar programs may be relevant and can alter perspectives. Good old-fashioned lobbying by stakeholder groups may be influential. This general point about persuasion may strike some as naive about intergovernmental disagreements, but game theory can illustrate the significance of the point: certain game-theoretic games that may seem almost unplayable to acceptable outcomes are structurally, and in terms of actors’ preferences, not very different from smoothly cooperative games; small modifications of preferences can produce dramatically different collective results.3

An important possibility is to find ways for intergovernmental man- agers to encourage the development of norms of trust and cooperation among the relevant parties involved in helping to manage an intergov- ernmental program. Doing so is not always possible, of course. Earlier experience may have soured at least some of the key actors on trusting certain others. Or, especially in the early stages of intergovernmental effort toward some programmatic objectives, actors may be near-strangers to each other. In addition, and often importantly, political decisions made by actors beyond those involved in managerial responsibilities (e.g., elected officials) can destabilize an intergovernmental setting and interject unanticipated destabilization that can challenge or collapse relationships built on trust. But it is difficult to overestimate how helpful such norms can be; accordingly, when it is feasible, managers should exert effort toward the development and stabilization of such norms.

Norms of trust and cooperation can alter settings of intergovernmental effort in consequential ways. For one thing, to the extent that such norms are in place and actors in different roles and governments receive informa- tion from others in the system, they can assume that the information (e.g., about preferences, operations, possible consequences) is valid. Knowing that this is so can help render a complicated and interdependent situation more easily navigated and managed toward productive results. For another,

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to the extent that norms of trust and cooperation operate within an inter- governmental setting, each party can afford to be more flexible regarding immediate payoffs. That is, if the medium- or longer-term expectation is for the intergovernmental program to be worth the effort, trust allows such actors to exercise patience and await the valued outcome instead of need- ing results immediately, as would be the case if the actor could not count on others to make good on their commitments beyond the very short term. Trust renders more agreements and more cooperative arrangements pos- sible, even (or especially) among rational actors.

None of the preceding means that intergovernmental management is easy, especially when disagreements across actors are significant. Indeed, in that case, and when uncertainty can be introduced by other parties beyond those involved in managing a program (the “backward induction of uncertainty,” in the language of game theory), it can be exceedingly diffi- cult to develop sustained workable intergovernmental operations. A recent example is the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, famously exco- riated by political actors in some states, who have not only declined to par- ticipate in some of the program’s arrangements, like insurance exchanges, but have actively sought to destabilize and dismantle the developing pat- terns (Haeder & Weimer, 2013).

In fact, one important feature of the changing US intergovernmental landscape has been the introduction of more destabilizing elements than were visible in the past. While it is still the case that some programs operate with substantive experts in different governments at different levels in the system largely managing and heavily influencing day-to-day operations without much intrusion from others, in numerous sectors of policy, significant destabilization, or at least uncertainty, has made routine intergovernmental operations much more challenging. This is so for many reasons: budgetary stringency and budgetary brinksman- ship, increased politicization more broadly, complexity in the system, and uncertainty. Furthermore, a consequence has been to judicialize more decisions with intergovernmental implications, and introducing the judiciary at intermittent points with its concomitant authority to dramatically decide—and alter—intergovernmental understandings adds to the uncertainties, at least prior to definitive determinations. The same is true with the internationalization of numerous policy fields: adding the international level increases the possibility of crafting truly effective policy solutions and implementing them, but at the cost of greater complexity, interdependence, and uncertainty.

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In recent years, these features of the system have become more impor- tant and frequently occurring, and it has become ever more challenging to manage in many parts of the US intergovernmental system.

Judgments about Effective Practice Grounded in Administrative Experience

Recent administrative experience helps ground effective practice. First, given the complications and challenges of the system, it is clear that effective practice could be greatly enhanced by a new ACIR, or at least an institution with sufficient legitimacy that focuses on the intergovernmental system as a whole—and with sufficient analytical capacity to examine some of the systemic details that can matter so much for performance.

Second, public managers in the system need sufficient support to do their job. This requirement includes not only time and financial resources and political support, but also the capacity to manage effectively. Sufficient managerial capacity is an important but underrecognized requirement for effective practice. US governments and agencies should make every effort to support the capacity of management to knit parts of the system together in patterns of effective practice.

Third, operating managers should know well the parts of the system that are near the operational locus of their jurisdiction and center of reg- ular practice. The system as a whole is almost impossibly complex, but dissecting the most proximate portions and examining the possibilities for effective cooperation is clearly feasible. It can be important for practicing managers to develop the ability to discern the prospects for intergovern- mental success on the basis of the features of the proximate networked environment in which they operate.

Managers can, for example, assess whether there are prospects for partnership and cooperation, even close coordination, across intergov- ernmental counterparts. Alternatively, they may be able to discern the likelihood of considerable competition. They can make such assessments by taking note of the proximate programmatic environment and the struc- ture of interdependence, or potential interdependence, congealed by a program or by efforts to develop and manage a program. Also relevant are the policy instruments being used, or potentially being used, to generate the policy-relevant joint action. They can take into account the likelihood of involvement by overtly political actors, since such involvement could alter the situation toward or away from coordinated and mutually support- ive results. The degrees of complexity and interdependence can also be estimated; the relevance of these variables is obviously to determine the extent to which the estimated chances of intergovernmental cooperation can be treated with greater or lesser degrees of confidence.

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Finally, and depending on the assessment of the situation, public man- agers can take one or more courses of action outlined to improve prospects for successful intergovernmental action.

Implications

The implications for intergovernmental public administrative practice are straightforward:

• It is crucial that public managers know their own bailiwick: the structure and set of understandings that characterize their corner of the intergov- ernmental system. These vary considerably across programs and parts of the system, so broad generalizations cannot be expected to be valid. But making sense of the immediate environment and identifying its possible opportunities for cooperation is a prudent approach.

• Some insights from theory can be helpful in practice. In particular, theories based in public choice can help public managers be alert to and work effectively in complex, polycentric parts of the system. Principal-agent theory can sometimes approximate certain aspects of intergovernmental settings for public managers, but such theory is more likely to be misleading in most cases and unlikely to identify effective practical steps for managers. Theory based on the concept of networks, and in particular theories built as game-theoretic logic suggests, are likely to carry the most useful implications for practice. Practicing managers should consider the set of theories reviewed here as potential heuristics: they can point to some nonobvious features of the intergovernmental settings, suggest a range of options to consider, or sometimes alert managers to counterintuitive implications of various actions, but in no sense do they provide a clear set of steps for effective intergovernmental practice.

• In applying game-theoretic notions heuristically, public managers should consider the overlap of interests, perspectives, and incentives among the actors, as well as the possibly repeat nature of at least some of the interactions. The more closely aligned these are across actors and institutions, the more compatible are the perspectives, the more the interactions can be repeated, and the more that norms of trust and cooperation are embedded in the pattern, the more likely that a collaborative approach is possible. Different kinds of managerial moves are more or less apropos in different circumstances.

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• Public managers should take account of any politicized and sometimes judicialized aspects of many intergovernmental issues and programs when making management decisions.

• Public managers should recognize the great complexity and inter- dependence posed in the execution of some large and salient intergovernmental programs. They are best advised to be prepared to adjust and adapt as policy-oriented learning proceeds.

• In cases carrying considerable complexity and interdependence, public managers are advised to stay in touch with counterparts in other similarly positioned jurisdictions (e.g., other states), as well as with counterparts via PIGS (so-called public interest groups: associations of similarly posi- tioned public administrators active in intergovernmental program man- agement), and learn from others’ experiences. Policy-oriented learning is a better strategic perspective than is a narrowly ideological stance.

• A number of these points apply broadly in other national settings as well—for example, the heuristic use of insights from various theoreti- cal traditions, the variation in types of managerial situations possible in other systems, and the importance of complexity and interdependence in many intergovernmental arrays. Indeed, examining the European Union as a particularly interesting and important instance suggests the more general applicability of some of these points (Nicolaidis & Howse, 2001).

Summary

The contemporary intergovernmental system in the United States is notable for its considerable complexity and interdependence. Recent developments have rendered the tasks of intergovernmental management even more challenging than previously. High levels of politicization, a difficult and strained budgetary environment, considerable involvement by the nation’s judiciary, and increased ties between domestic programs and the international level have all ratcheted up the managerial task.

There is no one-size-fits-all theoretical lens or research that can neatly sort out the system and serve as a guide for effective practice. Still, partial theories can be of heuristic use, and game theory in particular offers some help in discerning possible options for improving the chances of inter- governmental cooperation, depending on how the features of managers’ proximate environments are aligned—or not.

While the system as a whole is seriously disadvantaged by the declining institutional support for or interest in systemwide advocacy and analysis,

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considerable evidence is available to suggest that important collaborative intergovernmental ventures are possible and can deliver contributions to the public good. Public managers themselves are hardly omnipotent in this regard but can exert significant influence on such results. So while the system as a whole is more challenging than ever before, managers would do well to attend to how effective practice can be enhanced even as several features of the system render that task ever more demanding.

Notes 1. The disappearance of the ACIR is but one of several signs that institutional support

for the intergovernmental dimension of US public affairs has been unmistakably declining. As John Kincaid and Carl W. Stenberg have observed (2011), “Intergov- ernmental deinstitutionalization occurred across the board in the 1980s and 1990s. The president’s Office of Management and Budget no longer has an explicit inter- governmental shop; the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs (called the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Engagement under President Obama) is more pertinent to politics than to policy; the US House and Senate no longer have subcommittees on intergovernmental relations; and the US Govern- ment Accountability Office no longer has a formal intergovernmental unit. At the same time, partisanship, interest group advocacy, and confrontational politics have eroded support for the kinds of impartial research, objective data collection, bipar- tisan policy development, and collaborative performance produced by the ACIR and its former institutional cousins in Congress and the executive branch” (158). The number of state-level ACIRs has also been declining.

2. Or via judicial determination. For example, in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (2012), the majority determined that the aspect of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that required all states to expand their Med- icaid rolls or face the loss of their entire Medicaid funding was unduly coercive. This one modification of the structure of the program—the default condition for a possible state’s decision not to expand—resulted in numerous states opting not to do so. Had the full law been allowed to stand, it is likely that all states would have expanded their Medicaid programs; see Rosenbaum (2013). For a general overview of health care reform and “fractious federalism,” see Thompson (2013).

3. An example is the close parallel between the so-called stag hunt game, which is highly cooperative, and the prisoners’ dilemma game, which is famous for its problematic structure, in terms of jointly acceptable results. An alteration of one preference’s order in a two-player, one-shot game converts the latter into the former.

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CHAPTER THREE

GOVERNANCE IN AN ERA OF PARTNERSHIPS

Barbara C. Crosby, Melissa M. Stone, and John M. Bryson

Public administration scholars and practitioners increasingly assumethat partnering across organizational and sectoral boundaries is both a necessary and desirable strategy for addressing many of society’s most difficult public challenges (Agranoff & McGuire, 2003; Goldsmith & Eggers, 2004; Agranoff, 2007; O’Leary & Bingham, 2009; Emerson, Nabatchi, & Balogh, 2012). It is difficult to imagine successfully tackling major international problems, such as the AIDS pandemic or terrorism, or domestic issues, such as urban traffic congestion, without some sort of interorganizational and cross-sector collaboration.

Increasing use of collaborations as problem-solving and service delivery mechanisms coincides with attention to “governance” (Osborne, 2010). Indeed, part of the attraction that discussions of governance hold is that it fits a world in which governing no longer is confined to public institutions. The term signals awareness that concern for public well-being and the capacity for public problem solving must extend beyond govern- ment bodies if elected officials and public managers are to meet citizens’ expectations and needs. In other words, those involved in cross-sector collaborations should ensure that the effort creates significant public value, viewed broadly as that which is valued by the public and is good for the public, as assessed against various public value criteria such as public benefit and fairness (Bryson, Crosby, & Bloomberg, 2014). They should do this because when government organizations share power with businesses

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and nonprofits, they may find that public purposes are undermined or cer- tainly not maximized (Andrews & Entwistle, 2010). To the extent that the collaborations engage in societal governance—collective decision making about important issues in some aspect of public life—they may actually undermine democratic process if they are able to operate independent of legislators’ or citizens’ control (Dahl & Soss, 2014).

The influence of the environment in driving and constraining col- laborations and governance is well established. Fifty years ago, Emery and Trist (1965) noted that the increasing complexity of organizations’ environments prompted them to build interorganizational relationships in order to reduce uncertainty and foster stability. More recently, scholars have identified ways in which both institutional and competitive envi- ronments influence collaborations (Sharfman, Gray, & Yan, 1991; Stone, Crosby, & Bryson, 2013). The importance of the external environment to governance, especially at the organizational level, has also been well established (Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978; Ostrower & Stone, 2006). The influ- ence of the external environment on the governance of collaborations, however, is less well understood.

This chapter explores the relationship between important aspects of the external environment and the formation of collaborations as well as their governance structures and processes. Although a considerable literature records the success of recent cross-sector collaborations aimed at tackling complex public problems (Gerencser, Van Lee, Napolitano, & Kelly, 2008; Bryson, Crosby, Stone, Saunoi-Sandgren, & Imboden, 2011; Crosby & Bryson, 2010), collaborations are often beset by difficulties stemming from elements of their external environment (Sharfman, Gray, & Yan, 1991; Huxham & Vangen, 2005; McGuire & Agranoff, 2011; Stone, Crosby, & Bryson, 2013). For example, a study focused on social housing construction in Belgium (Van Gestel, Voets, & Verhoest, 2012) found that poor performance resulted from too much government control of the collaboration. In highlighting the need for more attention to the relationship between collaborations and their environments, this chapter discusses how managers can design governance structures and processes in ways that accommodate multiple demands from the complex environ- ments in which collaborations operate. The chapter proceeds as follows. First, we provide definitions of how we are using the terms collaboration, governance, and the environment because each is subject to considerable ambiguity. Next, we discuss how the external environment affects the activities of collaborations in general and then provide a more focused exploration of how particular aspects of the environment influence the governance structures and processes of collaborations. Throughout, we

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draw on specific examples from our own and others’ research. Finally, we offer implications of these discussions for public managers seeking to design effective governing systems for multiorganizational collaborations.

Clarifying Terms

Three terms are important to this discussion: collaboration, governance, and external environment.

We assert that collaboration occurs in the midrange of a continuum for how organizations work on public problems (Crosby & Bryson, 2005). (See figure 3.1.) At one end are organizations that hardly relate to each other, and at the other are organizations merged into a new entity. In the middle, toward the formal end of network configurations, are collaborations: entities that link or share information, resources, activities, and capabilities to achieve jointly what could not be achieved by organizations separately. In particular, we focus here on cross-sector collaborations: those involving government, business, nonprofits, and community groups. We see collaborations as formal networks joined by

FIGURE 3.1. ORGANIZATIONAL CONTINUUM

Informal Formal

Networks

No connection Communication Collaboration MergerCoordination/ Cooperation Cross-sector

collaborations (PPPs, strategic alliances, relational contracting)

Single sector (joint power, strategic alliances)

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Governance in an Era of Partnerships 41

strong ties, in contrast with informal networks consisting mainly of weak ties (e.g., a group of public managers, elected officials, nonprofit leaders, and for-profit developers who cooperate to pass affordable housing legislation but have no formal working arrangements with each other). Collaborations are given a variety of labels (e.g., consortium, alliance) and may be categorized by their governance structures (lead agency, network administrative agency, participant-governed, or hybrid).

We use collaborations interchangeably with partnerships because of the prevalence of that term in the literature. However, we make an important distinction between collaborations and public-private partnerships (PPPs). Public-privatepartnership has become a catch-all term for referring to govern- ment’s relying on businesses or nonprofits to deliver public services, build infrastructure, or improve government functioning (Goldsmith & Eggers, 2004; Hodge & Greve, 2007; Van Gestal et al., 2012). They have acquired an aura of international “best practice,” which becomes a factor in some coun- tries’ pursuit of such arrangements (Mouraviev, 2012). Nevertheless, in order to distinguish PPPs from collaborations in the sense we are using the term, we see them as a particular type of cross-sector collaboration—those based on formal, contractual relationships between two or more entities (Zhao, 2011). Often they are a means for government to share risks with partners and tie funding to performance.

Governance is a critical issue yet remains ambiguous (Hughes, 2010), in part because it is used at different levels of analysis, including the governance of single organizations, interorganizational networks or col- laborations, and whole societies or communities (Kooiman, 2010). Across these levels are central characteristics of governance that include making collective decisions about the purpose of collective action and other vital issues, designing strategies for achieving purpose, and providing oversight and accountability mechanisms (Cornforth, 2004). The focus of this chapter is on governance by and of interorganizational networks or collaborations.

In line with Daft (2001), we treat the external environment as “all elements that exist outside the boundary of the organization and have the potential to affect all or part of the organization” (p. 53). Because we are focusing on collaborations that cross and often blur organizational boundaries, the environment potentially encompasses greater diversity and complexity of external elements than may be faced by a single organi- zation. A useful analytical approach to such diversity and complexity is to examine two aspects of the environment (Scott & Davis, 2007). The first is the systemic forces that constitute what we call the macroenvironment. For collaborations, this environment may include broad economic, political, or policy trends and resides largely outside the control of the

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partnership and its members. The second aspect of the environment is more proximate, that is, the environment as directly experienced by, in this case, the cross-sector collaboration. This proximate environment may in turn be influenced by the collaboration.

The Environment and Its Effects on Collaborations

Work on interorganizational relationships has directly linked certain environmental conditions to the necessity for single organizations to join with others. Emery and Trist (1965) argued that increased environmental complexity necessitated linkages among organizations to decrease uncer- tainty and increase stability. Yet in order for such networks to form, they require some degree of stability in organizational systems and sufficient resources to develop and operate effectively (Sharfman et al., 1991; Provan & Milward, 1995). Exogenous events can either strengthen or loosen ties among partnership members (Brass, Galaskiewicz, Greve, & Tsai, 2004). For example, changes in government policy or political leadership often destabilize collaborative systems and relationships and may alter resource priorities (Sharfman et al., 1991; Huxham & Vangen, 2005).

This latter point draws attention to the vital role played by a collabora- tion’s institutional environment. While both competitive and institutional environments can stimulate or constrain the formation and development of partnerships (Oliver, 1990; Sharfman et al., 1991; Sharma, 2011; Vangen & Huxham, 2012), the institutional environment is especially important for those focused on public policy or public problem solving because it includes broad systems of relationships across public jurisdictional areas (Scott & Meyer, 1991) that can directly affect collaborative purpose, structure, and outcomes (Dickinson & Glasby, 2010; McGuire & Agranoff, 2011). For example, Sharfman and colleagues (1991) found in their study of a partnership in the garment industry that institutional forces were more intractable than competitive forces: a decrease in public funds and changes in welfare payment policies created strong disincentives for the partnership to continue.

An important aspect of the institutional environment is the presence of government mandates requiring certain institutions and organizations to collaborate to implement programs. Mandates may specify collabora- tion membership, designate decision makers, and establish performance measures or accountability mechanisms. For example, during the 1990s, the Blair government in the United Kingdom mandated a number of joint working initiatives in human services, an approach that has continued

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under successor governments (Huxham & Vangen, 2005; Vangen & Huxham, 2012; Andrews & Entwistle, 2010). Mandates to collaborate may also be less explicit but clearly indicate that collaboration among organizations, groups, and institutions will be needed to implement the policy goals. Such was the case in one US county’s efforts to implement federal welfare reform legislation: a board of county commissioners approved, in general, a community partnership model for welfare reform but did not specify its parameters (Stone et al., 2013).

The external environment is the “major source of technical knowl- edge, work technologies and tools, and trained personnel” for any organization (Scott & Davis, 2007, p. 124). Increasingly sophisticated technologies also can facilitate the formation of cross-sector collabora- tions. They can reduce the transaction costs of facilitation and may be the innovation that draws partners together in order to gain access to needed expertise or to take advantage of potential new solutions. This was the case in two collaborations we have studied extensively: the Urban Partnership Agreements sponsored by the US Department of Transportation (DOT) and the creation of MetroGIS, a regional geographic information system serving the Minneapolis–St. Paul area of Minnesota (Bryson, Crosby, & Stone, 2006).

In the more proximate environment facing collaborations, meaning the immediate environment as experienced by the collaborations and its members, several aspects deserve attention. The first derives from the institutional environment and concerns challenges associated with multiple institutional logics that may emerge from the different sectors. Institutional logics are macrolevel, historical patterns, both symbolic and material, that establish formal and informal rules of the game and provide interpretations of action (Friedland & Alford, 1991; Thornton & Ocasio, 1999). Partners from the business sector are likely to act on the basis of market logic—a predilection for competition and efficiency—while some nonprofit partners may operate from a logic of democracy or the family. Meanwhile, government partners may be operating with the logic of the bureaucratic state and thus focusing on hierarchy, rules, and standard operating procedures. Partners in different parts of the same sector may have very different perspectives; for example, a university and a foundation may both be nonprofits but have very different views about engagement with public problems. A result of multiple logics is that partners from one sector or industry may see as foreign or illegitimate the norms, processes, and structures that make perfect sense to partners from another sector (Bryson, Crosby, & Stone, 2006; Di Domenico, Tracey, & Haugh, 2009; Wadham, 2009).

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Another aspect of the proximate environment is sector failure—the degree to which single-sector efforts to solve a public problem have failed (Bryson & Crosby, 2008). Many societies rely on the differential strengths of the for-profit, government, and nonprofit sectors to help overcome the weaknesses or failures of the other sectors and to contribute to the creation of public value (Salamon, 1995; Bozeman, 2007; Bryson & Crosby, 2008). However, policymakers and managers from different sectors may become more interested in collaborating with each other when they have tried and failed to deal with a significant challenge by working only in their own sectors. For example, US government leaders have experienced failure in their efforts to alleviate affordable housing shortages or traffic con- gestion on their own and have had to forge partnerships with businesses and nonprofits to accomplish the public purposes of ensuring citizens are decently housed and that people and goods can easily reach their destinations.

A third element in the proximate environment is prior relationships or existing networks. It is often through these relationships that partners judge the trustworthiness of other partners and the legitimacy of key stakeholders. Scholars refer to this factor as the degree of structural embeddedness: the more partners have interacted in the past in positive ways, the more that social mechanisms enable coordination and safeguard exchanges (Ring & Van de Ven, 1994; Jones, Hesterly, & Borghatti, 1997). If prior relationships do not exist, partnerships are likely to emerge more incrementally and begin with small, informal deals that do not require much trust (Ring & Van de Ven, 1994; Gulati, 1995). Also important may be partners’ previous experience working with cross-sector collaborations (Lee & Liu, 2013), perhaps because partners have worked through aspects of multiple and even competing logics. The availability of partners with a shared vision, forged in previous experiences with each other, allows them to come together more easily to form an effective collaboration (Chen, 2010). Sometimes relationships can be hard to establish because potential partners with the capacity to collaborate are not available.

Finally, cross-sector collaborations are unlikely to get off the ground and operate effectively without leadership from two types of people: spon- sors and champions (Bryson et al., 2006). We include available leaders as an aspect of the external, albeit proximate, environment because spon- sors and champions are people (typically within organizations that are important to a collaborative effort) who see the need for the collaboration and try to enroll others in forming it. Sponsors (e.g., elected officials, business CEOs, heads of foundations) can provide visibility, legitimacy, staffing, funding, and favorable policy decisions by virtue of their formal

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authority. Champions operate mainly on the basis of informal authority and connections. They are the people who tirelessly attend to organizing the collaboration and foster constant enthusiasm for its work. Either sponsors or champions may serve as initial conveners, a critical linking mechanism role (Waddock, 1986) and an important characteristic of both sponsors and champions is a “collaborative mind-set” (Cikaliuk, 2011).

Sponsors and champions are especially crucial in managing the unity-diversity tension, or paradox, that characterizes every collaboration (Tschirhart, Christensen, & Perry, 2005; Ospina & Saz-Carranza, 2010). By definition, a collaboration is a network of organizations with partially shared and partially separate interests and goals. As a collaboration is being formed and as it proceeds, individual participants can be expected to experience tension between loyalty to their own organizations and commitment to the new entity. Indeed, sponsors and champions who represent a partner organization must personally cope with the tension. Strategies for managing the tension include finding ways to protect and celebrate the diverse “brands” and capacities of member organizations, while shaping a unifying or transcendent identity and establishing equi- table governance mechanisms for the collaboration itself (Tschirhart et al., 2005; Ospina & Saz-Carranza, 2010; Ospina & Foldy, 2010; Saz-Carranza & Ospina, 2010). As they attempt to bring partners together in a particular context, they should consider which partners can bring needed resources (e.g., legitimacy, political connections) that can help the collaboration deal with political and institutional forces in its environment. As they think strategically about the collaboration, sponsors and champions should focus especially on likely sources of funds and expertise that can be used at the collaboration level to build relationships among the partners and begin developing shared understandings of the challenge prompting the collaboration (Keast, Mandell, Brown, & Woolcock, 2004; Ospina & Saz-Carranza, 2010).

Conditions in either macro and proximate environments can provide what John Kingdon (2002) has called a “window of opportunity,” and sponsors and champions play crucial roles in recognizing and shaping these windows. From our own research, in the case of the Urban Partner- ship Agreements, top officials at the DOT became convinced that previous approaches to combating urban traffic congestion were not working and that major progress would occur only if federal funds were directed to combinations of dynamic tolling, transit, technology, and telecommuting. The department’s launch of a competitive funding process that would implement this new approach coincided with an unusual congressional failure to earmark transportation funds; thus, the transportation secretary

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was able to use her discretionary authority to channel $1.1 billion to the program (Bryson, Crosby, Stone, & Saunoi-Sandgren, 2009).

The concept of windows of opportunity also brings political environ- ments into the discussion as important macro or proximate elements of the environment. Because many collaborations seek to solve complex public problems, they are likely to exist in contentious political environ- ments comprising elected public officials, policymakers, public opinion leaders, and other stakeholders who maintain strongly held but conflicting opinions and views on problem definition, solutions, and needed resource allocation. Such was the case in our research in the transportation field over the highly politicized issue of highway tolling and in the social welfare field concerning authority over workforce development programs (Stone et al., 2010).

Table 3.1 summarizes this section. Overall, it is important to understand that several different elements in the macro or proxi- mate environments, either by themselves or through their interactions, can significantly influence collaboration formation, development, and sustainability. The power of these influences can be seen in the ways in which governance structures in particular may rapidly change and may help explain collaborations’ dynamic nature (Provan & Kenis, 2008; Stone et al., 2010).

TABLE 3.1. ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS AS DRIVERS FOR AND CONSTRAINTS ON COLLABORATIONS

Drivers Constraints

Macroenvironment Environmental complexity

System stability Resource sufficiency Policy changes Mandates

Extreme volatility in environment

Resource scarcity Policy changes

Macroenvironment or proximate environment

Windows of opportunity Political environment Technologies

Political environment Unavailable technologies

Proximate environment Sector failure Positive preexisting

relationships among members

Leadership champions and sponsors

Competing institutional logics held by members

Negative or nonexistent relationships among members

Source: Partially adapted from Sharfman et al. (1991).

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Environmental Effects on a Collaboration’s Governance Processes and Structures

In the United States, state statutes set parameters for governance in the case of corporate entities. A board of directors consisting of a minimum number of directors must meet basic legal standards and through its poli- cies and by-laws demonstrate duty of obedience to the corporate purpose, duty of care in providing managerial oversight, and duty of loyalty to avoid conflicts of interest. The board is legally responsible for the acts of the corporation. No such parameters exist for collaborations. Indeed, some argue that a hierarchical concept like governance is problematic (Provan & Kenis, 2008) in the context of most collaborations. Nevertheless, for col- lective decision making and action to occur, collaborations must answer essential questions: Who is “authorized” to make what kinds of decisions, and by what rules are those decisions made (Ostrom, 1990; Thomson & Perry, 2006)?

Interconnection of Governance Processes and Structures

For collaborations, attention to both governance structures and processes is essential because the act of governing includes ongoing processes of interactions among members, as well as the development of particular structures and rules for where and how decisions are made (Stone et al., 2013). Types of governance structures are varied, far more so than in organizations. Provan and Kenis (2008) offer a typology of governance structures in interorganizational networks:

• Participant-governed structures that have no separate governance entity. Members perform all monitoring and coordinating activities through formal and informal interactions.

• Lead organization structures, in which a single, core organization coor- dinates all activities and makes major decisions.

• Network administrative organization, in which a separate organization forms to oversee network affairs.

• Hybrid forms of these types.

In collaborations, governance processes are especially important because it is through processes such as negotiation and bargaining that members (who come to the collaboration with diverse motives and goals) develop trust and commitment (Ring & Van de Ven, 1994; Vangen & Huxham, 2003). These processes are both formal and informal; for

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example, negotiating may entail both formal bargaining and informal sense making (Ring & Van de Ven, 1994). Governance processes also build on future expectations as well as past experiences (Vangen & Huxham, 2003) and are often emergent and nonlinear (Thomson & Perry, 2006). Furthermore, in cyclical fashion, as trust grows, it may substitute for formal structure because trust facilitates the diffusion of values and norms about standards of behavior (Ring & Van de Ven, 1994; Moynihan, 2005).

Governance processes and structures are interrelated and dynamic. Through doing collaborative work, member interactions (i.e., processes) shape and are shaped by structure and rules about how members will work together. When these experiences are positive, moral obligations and commitments increase and trust builds (Larson, 1992; Jones et al., 1997). Conversely if members violate rules and norms, trust will be undermined and hard to rebuild.

Creating processes for decision making and member interactions and structures to enforce decisions give a collaboration the ability to self-monitor (reward and sanction behavior), build commitment among members, and make important collective decisions (Thomson & Perry, 2006). Communications and computer technologies can be helpful in these decision-making processes by keeping partners informed of policies, rules, and norms and monitoring and reporting on implementation of policies.

An important question is, To what extent does the external environ- ment influence governance structure and processes? Expanding on the previous discussion of how the macro and the more proximate environ- ment influence collaborations generally, we draw attention to the following external influences relative to governance structures and processes.

Influence of Policy and Institutional Environments

Government policies are likely to influence collaborative governance in several ways. The policy itself may mandate that a partnership of specified institutions, organizations, and groups be formed to implement policy goals. For example, the Urban Partnership project required applicants to address both highway tolling and public transit needs, necessitating collaboration between agencies representing those transportation modes (Bryson et al., 2009). Because mandates may specify primary partners, other members, performance measures, and accountability mechanisms, they may, in effect, provide key parameters of governance design, such as who the decision makers are and what types of authority they have. Because these characteristics suggest more formal governance structures

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with hierarchical qualities, a lead organization form may be especially appropriate or even required. Furthermore, collaborations that face man- dated demands for performance may be wise to opt for more efficient, less participatory governance structures that make clear how to hold members accountable for results.

It is vital to recognize that these more hierarchical collaborative governance structures, in which one partner has more authority and control than others, may too easily ignore the needs and contributions of other partners (Dienhart & Ludescher, 2010) and undermine real collaboration (Van Gestal et al., 2012). Collaboration leaders who opt for governance using a lead organization or a network administrative organization must still provide ways for all partners to influence decision making and implementation, for example, through relational contracting (Bertelli & Smith, 2010).

Policy environments that are in the midst of significant change pose other challenges to collaborative governance. Such was the case in the mid-1990s during the design and implementation of US welfare reform, followed shortly by the Workforce Investment Act. For example, a county-level collaboration designed a governance structure that inten- tionally lacked formal structure in order to gain the commitment of a wide range of community organizations and public agencies. However, the federal Workforce Investment Act introduced new requirements for quick, measurable results, a mandate that coincided with a push by local policymakers for more government accountability. The existing gover- nance structure no longer matched the needs of the policy environment because it lacked formal authority to demand results from its networks of public and nonprofit service providers (Stone et al., 2010, 2013). Because it can act more quickly, a lead organization is likely to work best in volatile environments, when external demands for performance are also high. On the other hand, our research indicates that collaborating partners who come together in relatively stable, politically supportive environments can enhance member commitment through participatory governance processes and structures (Stone et al., 2013).

Collaborations situated in multiple institutional environments (often the case in cross-sector collaborations with members from business, public agencies, and nonprofit organizations) may face internal dissension over what constitutes “legitimate” governance structures. Partners who have experience with traditional governance structures, such as boards of directors or boards of local officials, may see such structures as more legitimate than a less formal assembly of decision makers. That is, to some members of the collaboration, less formal governance structures lack

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clearly recognizable and desirable elements (Suchman, 1995; DiMaggio, 1988; Human & Provan, 2000).

Preexisting Relationships

The nature of relationships among collaboration members also is likely to influence collaborative governance. If positive, these relationships likely contain residual trust, making it easier to build commitment to the new endeavor. Under these conditions, participatory governance structures not only are likely to be effective but will be seen as internally legitimate to members and further enhance member commitment (Provan & Kenis, 2008). It is important to note that preexisting experiences with particu- lar governing structures or deliberative forums are also relevant. In other words, members who have worked together before may have experienced other governance structures such as steering committees or processes such as inclusive dialogue and deliberation, and these experiences are available to members as they begin a new collaboration. Such was the case in Min- nesota’s Urban Partnership Agreement, in which members initially drew on previous experience with stakeholder workshops to design a highly par- ticipatory governance structure during the early days of the partnership (Stone et al., 2010). However, not all preexisting relationships are posi- tive, and in some cases collaborative partners have never worked together before. In these cases, governance structure may take a back seat to devel- oping initial processes that build internal legitimacy and trust (Huxham & Vangen, 2005).

Sponsors, by virtue of their formal roles and their ability to span boundaries between the collaboration and key external stakeholders, are potentially good candidates for chairing advisory or policy boards that are part of a collaboration’s governance structure. For example, MetroGIS established a governing policy board consisting mainly of elected officials and chaired by a county commissioner (Crosby & Bryson, 2010).

Influence of Tensions

Finally, it is important to note that several tensions are inherent in col- laborative governance systems, and these tensions increase the complexity and dynamic quality often found in governing structures, processes, and rules (Huxham & Vangen, 2005, Provan & Kenis, 2008). One tension is inclusivity versus efficiency. Here, a collaboration may be drawn toward a participatory governance system that helps build a broad base of support and internal legitimacy, but it also is likely to face other pressures, often

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from external demands, for a governance system that is more formal and aimed at efficient decision making. Another tension is the need for col- laborative governance structures and processes to be flexible, to adapt to changes in the external environment, and stable, to signal to important external stakeholders its legitimacy and efficiency. A third source of ten- sion is ambiguous membership, caused by differing perceptions of who is actually a member of the collaboration and what the members represent (themselves, their organization, the partnership, or a particular identity group) and by turnover (Huxham & Vangen, 2005). Highly participatory governance structures and processes are especially affected by this tension because member ambiguity creates difficult contexts in which to develop the kinds of committed and trusting relationships essential to this type of governing system. Finally, tension is likely to result from discrepancies in power (e.g., decision-making authority or control of resources) among members (Huxham & Vangen, 2005).

Implications

Public managers seeking to remedy complex public problems have multi- ple incentives for establishing cross-sector collaborations. Yet cross-sector collaborations are not easy solutions to tough problems, and environ- mental conditions very much affect the chances that these often-complex shared-power arrangements can be formed and governed effectively. Thus, public managers should assess relevant aspects of the macro and proximate environments to determine whether a window of opportunity exists. An assessment could focus on the following questions:

1. Is the issue or problem at hand complex enough that cross-sector col- laboration is required?

2. Have previous single-sector efforts to deal with the issue failed? 3. Will a collaborative initiative have adequate political support? 4. Do policy mandates exist that either facilitate or constrain formation of

a collaboration? 5. Do external resources to support the collaboration—including finan-

cial, technological, information, skills, and competencies—exist? 6. What preexisting relationships among potential partners exist, and are

these relationships largely positive or negative? Can the collaboration overcome negative relationships?

7. Do potential sponsors and champions exist to establish both internal and external legitimacy and provide energy and other resources for the collaboration?

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8. Can the collaboration be flexible enough to cope with significant shifts that may necessitate altering governing structures and processes?

9. What are the prospects for producing public value—outcomes that cit- izens value and that promote societal well-being?

A helpful tool for answering these questions is a policy field analysis, which traces flows of policy authority, funding, and legal and regulatory mechanisms among governmental and nongovernmental organizations and networks and across levels from national to local (Stone & Sandfort, 2009). The analysis could also be extended to the international level as appropriate. Conducting a policy field analysis can deepen the collabo- ration’s ability to understand its external environment and then identify ways in which it can reduce constraints and respond to changes.

If conditions are favorable enough to proceed with a cross-sector collaboration, public managers should determine what kinds of gov- ernance structures and processes will match external demands; that is, governance systems should be aligned with their environments in much the same way as organization structures, and processes should match the demands of their environment environments. Relatively stable environments favor participant-governed collaborations, and less sta- ble environments may make governance by lead organization or network administrative organization more effective. Regardless, governance pro- cesses and structures should provide ways for partners to reconcile their differences, learn from each other, and obtain benefits from the partner- ship while achieving public purposes. Processes for sharing resources and building trust may be especially important (Chen, 2011). While attending to all of these factors, public managers should keep in mind that both externalandinternalconditionsforcollaborationsarelikelytobeespecially dynamic—and indeed, the collaboration itself often is aimed at significantly altering those conditions. As part of coping with environmental shifts or unanticipated shocks, partners likely will have to alter the collaboration’s governance structures and processes if the collaboration is to thrive.

Finally, in line with Dienhart and Ludesher (2010), we argue that governance systems in cross-sector collaborations must be appropriate for particular circumstances and must have the internal capacity and external legitimacy to:

• Monitor the network of inputs, processes, and outputs • Evaluate the efficiency of how the sectors contribute and integrate

resources to promote the project and redirect them as needed • Use members’ capacity and legitimacy to convene, exhort, or redefine

rights and responsibilities

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• Distribute the right to define and judge the value of what is being produced

• Evaluate and alter the governance of the project in terms of justice, fairness, and community well-being

Summary

The use of cross-sector partnerships to accomplish public purposes is a growing global phenomenon. Many of these collaborations, which take var- ious forms, have produced valuable outcomes for the partners and their communities, but many others have foundered. Meanwhile, even success- ful collaborations must deal with the challenges of recruiting and retaining committed partners, gaining adequate financial and political support, and governing the collaboration in ways that help it articulate and achieve its mission.

Public managers who initiate or join cross-sector partnerships enter the realm of governance, where government does not have sole responsibility for or control over collective decision making, program design, and eval- uation of results. In this realm, public managers, as the stewards of public value, should pay particular attention to designing appropriate governance structures and processes for the collaboration.

This chapter has discussed the ways that the external environment drives and constrains the formation and operation of collaborations. Of particular importance in the macroenvironment are the degree of complexity and system stability associated with the issue, the availability of resources, and policy changes, including mandates. In the more proximate environment, a history of sector failure, positive preexisting relationships among partners, and the availability of sponsors and champions facilitate the formation of collaborations. Partners’ competing institutional logics or lack of positive relationships, meanwhile, make partnership more challenging. Political shifts in the macro and proximate environments, as well as available technologies, can facilitate or hinder the collaboration.

Environmental conditions also affect which governance structures and processes will be best suited to a particular partnership. The policy envi- ronment, for example, may establish mandates regarding membership, decision making, and performance, a situation in which a lead organiza- tion form of governance may work best. When mandates are less of a factor, more participatory governance forms have the advantage of allowing part- ners more influence over (and promoting more commitment to) major collaboration decisions.

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Public managers should assess both the macro and proximate envi- ronments to determine whether conditions are favorable for forming a cross-sector collaboration. As collaboration forms, organizers should attempt to align governance structures and processes with environmental conditions, but recognize that they may need to change as time goes on and environmental shifts and shocks occur.

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CHAPTER FOUR

GOVERNING IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT

Jonathan G. S. Koppell

“Many of the most pressing problems confronting humanity requirea global response” (Koppell, 2010a); issues such as climate change, political unrest, fluctuating commodity prices, natural disasters, and financial crises, all transend national boundaries and therefore demand transnational solutions (Schiavone, 2008; Farazmand & Pinkowski, 2006; Weiss & Wilkinson, 2014). To be successful, responses to these problems must cross borders and involve many governments, citizens, and private sector participants. These transnational responses demand novel institu- tions and systems of administration that operate under different terms from those associated with domestic models.

Public administration must therefore evolve to meet these demands and needs of global governance. What existing theories and practices work in the emerging global context, and which are best left behind? What are the gaps in practice and knowledge with respect to the administration of global governance and problem solving? There are no adequately devel- oped answers to these questions yet. With the rise of global governance, we are entering a new era in public administration practice and theory. We are challenged to build new knowledge about institutional arrangements that

This chapter draws heavily from my previous work, particularly World Rule: Accountability, Legitimacy, and the Design of Global Governance (2010a), “Administration without Borders” (2010b), and “Global Rulemaking and Institutional Forms” (2014).

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are unfamiliar and ideas about effective management and administration in transnational space.

Globalization has added layers of complexity with respect to how public interest is defined and manifested. One does not need to travel far down the path of public administration (or political science, or business management, or organization studies) literature to find discussions of the implications of increased interconnection across national borders (Koppell, 2010a, 2010b; O’Leary, Van Slyke, & Kim, 2010; Farazmand & Pinkowski, 2006). The study of “governance” (as opposed to government), “comparative public administration” and “international organization” are streams of focus that are prompted by the rise of globalization. Ali Farazmand and Jack Pinkowski edited a volume on the subject, Handbook of Globalization, Governance, and Public Administration (2006), that has fifty-two essays on the subject. Rosemary O’Leary, David Van Slyke, and Soonhee Kim devote a three-chapter part on globalization in their 2010 edited volume derived from the proceedings of the 2008 Minnowbrook Confer- ence entitled The Future of Public Administration Around the World. The same conference also spawned a special issue (edited by O’Leary and Van Slyke) of Public Administration Review (December 2010), which contains sixty articles on the future of public administration, including five related to globalization. It would be fair to say, however, that notwithstanding these efforts, little of the work related to globalization yet occupies a central place in the field of public administration. And one could argue that while discussions of a global perspective on public administration exist, the empirical study of public administration in the global governance context is extremely limited.

This chapter addresses three questions that have relevance for fram- ing understanding of public administration within a global governance context:

• When and how does governance enter the global context? • What are the design imperatives for the administration of global gov-

ernance, and how do those imperatives differ from what works within domestic contexts?

• Under what conditions does global coordination affect domestic policy and administrative practice?

Organizational Responses to Globalization

The most vexing contemporary public policy problems are rarely confined by national borders. Indeed, almost every day we are provided additional

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evidence that phenomena experienced around the globe are interrelated in the areas of security, finance, climate change, and public health. Changes in fuel regulation on one continent are blamed for the inflation of food prices and even stability-shattering riots on the other side of the globe. Disease leaps across oceans in a matter of hours given the rapid increase in numbers of people traveling between continents. Criminals prey on victims from remote corners of the Earth using wild schemes or devious software. Fluctuating demand for raw materials in China affects commodity prices in global and local markets sowing seeds of political instability in some regions and rendering cost estimates for municipal construction projects painfully inaccurate in others.

A substantial number of international organizations are devoted to addressing these problems. Most familiar are the United Nations and Bret- ton Woods institutions (e.g., the International Monetary Fund and World Bank). A host of regional organizations work with or complement global efforts. And while many of these transnational entities are intergovern- mental, a growing population of nongovernmental bodies plays key roles addressing the global governance challenges. The development of such international governance organizations and their assumption of meaning- ful roles are accelerating. The meetings of the G20 following the 2008 global financial crisis, for example, included a commitment to better coor- dinate financial regulation as a response to the lessons learned from the financial crisis (Financial Stability Board, 2009).

Public administration as a field has been slower than the bureaucra- cies we study to appreciate and adjust to this new reality. This is partly attributable to the drawing of disciplinary lines between political science and public administration. For the most part, international organizations are the purview of the “international relations” subfield of political sci- ence. Many of the seminal scholars looking at international organizations were keenly interested in organizational design and administration, and their work is comfortable alongside public administration research (Weiss & Wilkinson, 2014; Reinalda, 2013; Reinalda, 2009; Jacobson, 1979; Haas, 1964). Alas, most contemporary political science research in this area is not as concerned with administrative issues. Jorn Ege and Michael Bauer (2013) make the point that the field of international relations has remained mostly silent on questions regarding formal organizational structure and the informal behavior of public administrators and organiza- tional policy, a silence that the field of public administration is beginning to address. But for the most part, our field remains focused on institutions within a single jurisdiction—or perhaps comparisons across a small

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number of such entities—leaving transnational public administration relatively neglected.

Interestingly, transnational governance has been with us for longer than many may realize. The Universal Postal Union and the International Telecommunications Union (the telegraph) were created in the 1860s to facilitate smoother cross-border communication (Murphy, 1994). In the years since, many other international organizations have been created to deal with issues requiring global coordination and harmonization. Tradi- tionally these have been intergovernmental organizations with a basis in treaties among states. The World Intellectual Property Organization, for example, has its origins in several nineteenth-century treaties signed to protect copyrights and trademarks across borders. The International Civil Aviation Organization arose to establish safety and communications stan- dards when transoceanic flight became a part of everyday life. Each of these organizations developed a bureaucracy, administrative procedures, and a rule-making process suitable to a unique set of demands. Indeed, each organization, even those that are part of the United Nations “system” of organizations, is truly distinctive (Koppell, 2010b).

In recent decades, the landscape of international organizations has become more diverse as nongovernmental bodies and quasigovernmen- tal bodies play an increasingly prominent role in global governance. Standard-setting bodies such as the International Organization for Stan- dardization or the International Electrotechnical Commission originated as obscure industrial coordination bodies, intended to ensure the interop- erability of devices and mechanical parts (Büthe & Mattli, 2011). But the substantive footprint of these entities has grown over the years to include management processes, environmental impact, and even corporate social responsibility. More specialized bodies such as the International Accounting Standards Board, a nonprofit organization based in London, promulgate standards that are just as crucial in global financial regulation as those produced by the intergovernmental Basel Committee on Capital Standards (Weiss & Wilkinson, 2014; Reinalda, 2009).

From an administrative perspective, these nongovernmental standard-setting bodies represent a significant departure from stan- dard models of governmental rule making. In general, the work of these entities is carried out by members—with the staff playing mostly a supporting role—who participate through technical committees and working groups centered around substantive areas of concern. Naturally, this creates a dynamic entirely different from that associated with a typical Administrative Procedure Act rule-making exercise.1

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Even more intriguing has been a proliferation of nongovernmental standard-setting bodies with a clear social agenda driving their work (Cashore, Auld, & Renckens, 2011). The Forest Stewardship Council and the US Green Building Council are perhaps the best known to American consumers. These organizations attempt to get market power behind their standards, and when they are successful, they can be every bit as com- pelling as the rules set forth by intergovernmental organizations. Public administration has certainly been paying attention to the phenomenon of “voluntary regulation” (Darnall, Potoski, & Prakash, 2010; Cashore et al., 2011; Bierrman, Pattberg, van Asselt, & Zelti, 2009). But we have not integrated this research into a comprehensive study of international governance. And there is power in doing so. Indeed, one key finding of my study of international rule-making organizations was that the adherence dynamics, including rule adoption and enforcement, were not much different for government and nongovernment rule makers in the transnational realm (Koppell, 2010a).

An Emerging Pattern of Global Governance

The distinctive characteristics of global governance are gaining definition. There is a tendency to frame global governance as a supranational force limiting state sovereignty, but empirical analysis suggests this conclusion is simplistic. First, many international organizations are structured around the nation-states brought together through formal treaties and agree- ments. The very structure of an organization that organizes participation by country reinforces the importance of states rather than undermines it, particularly compared with nongovernmental global rule makers. Second, in practical terms, constraints on national autonomy are not distributed evenly. As one would expect, some nations have more influence over the international rule-making bodies than others, reflecting the geopo- litical realities of power asymmetry. Third, to the extent sovereignty is compromised, it is almost never by formal means. That is, rarely does an international organization have the power to formally sanction a member state; rather, it is a market mechanism—a cost of ignoring the rules pro- duced by an international organization—that compels behavior. This is a more subtle impingement on national autonomy and one that is not con- fined to areas in which international organizations produce formal rules.

The other reality of global governance implicit in the discussion thus far is that there is nothing even closely approximating a “world government” (O’Toole & Hanf, 2002). Instead, we observe an interlocking network of global governance organizations (GGO), each part of a con- stellation of firms, national bodies, and interest groups. Understanding

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this dynamic ecosystem of transnational public administration may be more difficult than getting a grasp of the domestic political context in which public administration is conventionally understood. Indeed, global governance organizations are constantly coordinating and competing, simultaneously in many cases, with other global bodies (Dimitrakopoulos & Passes, 2003).

If understanding the nature of transnational rule-making organiza- tions is not enough to entice public administration scholars to look beyond the borders of single nation, the increasing importance of transnational rules in a wide variety of seemingly domestic policy arenas—from food safety to energy regulation to commerce—ought to be. Though the emergence of a world government is not at hand, global rule-making bodies are increasingly part of domestic public administration in ways direct and indirect.

The intertwining of domestic bureaucracies with GGOs is not so advanced as to be obvious, but it is already an important and established fact of life in many policy areas (O’Toole & Hanf, 2002). Bodies such as the International Civil Aviation Organization and, most famous, the World Trade Organization make rules with serious ramifications for domestic governments. In many cases, these rules can conflict with domestic statutes and regulations, requiring adaptation on the part of government agencies and firms. And contrary to the view that domestic governments can be unbending in the face of international norms, this accommodation of international rules occurs regularly (Chayes & Chayes, 1991).

Participation in the deliberations of international bodies is now a com- monplace responsibility of domestic government bureaucrats. Agencies routinely devote staff to international issues and participate in global and regional transnational organizations. For example, in the United States, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (2004) has an international office. More important, its regulations make frequent reference to the Interna- tional Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) regulations and the requirement that US entities comply with IAEA standards and make themselves open to IAEA inspections. This type of recognition of the primacy of international regulations is far from universal, but the practices of many government bureaucracies reflect international mandates from entities such as the World Customs Union and the Convention on the Trade in International and Endangered Species.

The Logic of Global Governance

These observations regarding the history and organization of global gover- nance reveal something quite different from the domestic model starting

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with the reasons that global governance organizations emerge (and per- sist). What we observe is a conditional need governance grounded in a very different premise than the social contract of John Locke or his peers. Unlike Thomas Hobbes’s citizens for whom life was nasty, brutish, and short in the absence of Leviathan, the countries and corporations that create international organizations do not fear for their lives or property. Rather, they recognize that their wealth might be increased, their safety enhanced, or their activities simplified with a set of globally recognized rules. Imagine mailing a letter from one country to another without the harmonization offered by the Universal Postal Union or the chaos intro- duced into air travel in the absence of a set of agreed-on principles of communication and navigation.

Participation in global governance regimes is ultimately about the self-interest of actors being served through a coherent set of rules. But unlike the states that Locke, Hobbes, and other early political philoso- phers sought to explain, contemporary global rule-making bodies lack the coercive authority to impose their rule regardless of their underlying utility. That is, they do not have the ability to manipulate the self-interest of their would-be followers by threatening jail, fine, or, for that matter, beheading. And so participation in global governance represents a choice for actors that is guided by a fundamentally different logic from that with which standard public administration scholarship is concerned. Participation in a transnational regime is driven by the interests of the parties that are to be bound by rule-making organization’s outputs.

Global rules are desirable when the cost associated with their creation and implementation is outweighed by gains afforded by the resulting coordination or harmonization. We see this in a host of areas, including telecommunications, travel, and finance. But there are other arenas (e.g., carbon emission or climate change more generally) where we have not yet seen robust global regimes because key actors have felt their interests are better served by the absence of a global regime than any possible organization that could arise (Biermann et al., 2009).

Therefore, global governance does not happen in situations where the self-interest of all or some actors is best served by a status quo that does not include a global set of rules or standards. Consider the lack of a stan- dard charging cable for electronic devices. Electronics manufacturers have clearly concluded that the benefits of maintaining switching costs for their customers as well as the markets for incompatible accessories outweigh the benefits (to consumers) of standardized hardware. This is obviously not true in the storage arena, where most hardware and software is compatible across brands and, to some extent, platforms.

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Understanding the logic of rule acceptance is a vital issue for scholars and practitioners alike. Global governance organizations matter because the rules they produce are accepted. Many attempts at global governance that do not gain acceptance invite obvious questions: Why are some rule-making bodies accepted but not others? Why are the rules they gen- erate widely used? Again, the normative theory underpinning most public administration scholarship roots power in legitimacy: rules are followed because processes were followed ensuring fairness and impartiality, two core dimensions of democratic legitimacy (Sell, 2014).

In the domestic context, we rarely have an opportunity to see whether rules are followed in the absence of this type of legitimacy. And there is reason to suspect that legitimacy is not the only explanation for obedience. There are myriad examples of rule following in countries that do not meet our normative expectations for legitimacy. Moreover, as individuals, our acceptance of rules (say, obeying the speed limit) is attributable only in part to legitimacy. Fear of sanction is at least as important. Our acceptance of the legitimacy of the ticketing agency and the legislative process that created the speed limit are of secondary concern (at best).

This interest-based consideration in rule acceptance tends to be mini- mized in our understanding of governance. In the domestic context, this is not particularly troublesome because those of us fortunate enough to live in democratic environments see the various explanations for obedience in alignment. Government makes rules in a fair way and we do not want to go to jail or pay a fine; there is no tension.

The global governance context is quite different: global rule-making bodies generally have no formal sanctioning power to compel obedience. Those who do not like the rules can simply walk away. That creates a fun- damentally different dynamic. Consider the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS), a critical entity in global financial regulation respon- sible for creating many rules governing banking. A country disliking the regulations produced in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis could opt not to adopt them. There is no BCBS police equipped with black heli- copters to arrest leaders for this act of deviance or an international body to impose sanctions. That is not to say there would be no consequences. Indeed, that country’s bank would be financially cut off from the rest of world. but that is a different type of consequence. Unlike an individual driver facing a legal sanction, an actor is free to make a calculation regard- ing the rule with no hierarchically imposed discipline.

And therefore interest-based reasons for rule acceptance are effectively disentangled from normative explanations (i.e., legitimacy). In global gov- ernance, the potential for conflict between the two is ever present. Indeed,

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the institutional forms of global rule-making bodies can be best understood by seeing them as design solutions to the underlying tension between nor- mative and interest-based considerations.

Public Administration in the Age of Globalization

Moving a field that is historically defined and rooted in the institutions and interests of nations is not easy. To approach the problems of transnational governance requires not just a realization that the domestic arrangements and assumptions do not automatically translate to an international con- text. It requires an understanding of how domestic contexts can be both alike and different. The scholarly literature focused on comparative pub- lic administration (CPA) has pushed public administration to appreciate this facet of our field. And others have investigated directly the adminis- tration of transnational organizations. Both literatures speak to the design imperatives of global governance.

For the most part, CPA focuses attention on the conceptions and practices of public administration within and between respective national boundaries. It is based on the premise that public administration is contextually bound: understanding the history, culture, and legal systems of a particular country or government is crucial in understanding its system of public administration. (For useful summaries of the history and foci of CPA see Heady, 1998, and Bowornwathana, 2010.)

Founding scholars of CPA, notably Ferrel Heady and Fred Riggs, were political science scholars, which may explain why CPA remained somewhat sidelined in mainstream public administration as it grew distant from political science during the 1970s and 1980s. Heady (1998) makes the point that CPA and the study of the administration of international organizations—agencies he defines as “created by sovereign nation-states as instrumentalities for international and regional cooperation”—were different endeavors and noted the need for bridges between these two distinct subfields as both grapple with the concept of representativeness in bureaucracies, increasing privatization and reliance on market provision of public purposes, and the increase of intermediary entities that affect but do not displace nation-states as the primary political unit (e.g., the European Union).

Although it does not deal explicitly with transnational institutions, the CPA literature is useful for reminding scholars of global governance that no single enthocentric tradition can be applied in a different context effectively without informed adaptation. Wholesale adoption of public administration theory and practice born within one national

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context is likely to fall short when applied in other contexts. Fluency in understanding different approaches to public administration allows the analyst of systems, drawing on components of different contexts, to grasp the designs and intentions of global (transnational) governance organizations (Walker, 2011; Shangraw & Crow, 1998). Empirical studies of global governance make clear that no one particular version of nationally defined public administration fits the demands of this arena. Global public administration, if we are to speak of such a thing, represents a break with and a continuum with a host of different administrative traditions.

This is true in a practical and an academic sense. Importing public administration theory and practices, uniquely adapted to one national context, wholesale to other countries or to transnational governance organizations, increases the probability of organizational ineffectiveness. This invites the investigation of administration of organizations that transcend national borders (Hou, Ni, Poocharoen, Yang, & Zhao, 2011).

International organizations have grown in number, size, and scope over the past two decades, spurred in no small part by the dawn of the information age and other technological changes (Heady, 1998; Castells, 2009). The study of these organizations draws on political science, public administration, international relations, international business management, and organization studies (Weiss & Wilkinson, 2014).

Understanding the design of global governance has vital implications for the future of public administrative practice in bringing to bear the rich expertise flowing from the field, as well as increasing the technical knowl- edge and capacities needed to administer the public’s interest that these organizations must serve.

Learning from the Design of Existing Transnational Organizations

In WorldRule, (Koppell, 2010a), I integrated several approaches commonly used to understand institutional forms in public administration and other fields: (1) the structure of global rule-making organizations, particu- larly their approaches to representation and administration; (2) their rule-making process; (3) their adherence mechanisms or tools by which rule adoption and implementation are encouraged; and (4) the nature of interest group participation. This empirical study of twenty-five global rule-making organizations involved quantitative analysis complemented by intense interviewing and gathering of qualitative data. Capturing the informal is as important as the formal; how things work in practice is not always represented by the numbers, and the differences are often profoundly important.

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Ultimately patterns in the distribution of characteristics revealed which organizational attributes tend to go together, and based on these clustering tendencies, I suggested three types of global governance organizations:

• Classical—the traditional intergovernmental body with a design that emphasizes legitimacy. It jibes with normative expectations imported from the domestic context and puts high value on nation-states. Safeguards are built into this model to protect powerful members of the organization from unwanted outcomes. These safety valves are not available to all organizational members, and while they do not guarantee preferred outcomes, they do generally ensure that unwanted outcomes can be avoided.

• Cartel—essentially the opposite of classical. Cartel organizations (e.g., the Basel Committee) offer very low levels of access and are the most contrary to normative expectations such as transparency and equity in participation. Yet they create some of the most accepted rules in the world. (This observation feeds one of the most provocative conclusions of this study: that normative legitimacy is overrated.)

• Symbiotic—nongovernmental or quasigovernmental organizations that generally reach into markets. They typically put rule-writing responsi- bilities into the hands of the users of the rules, a very different notion of governance from what we import from the domestic sector.

I offer a few bureaucratic structures associated with these models to make the case for the value of this public administration approach to the study of global governance. The design features that appear to be critical are representational structure, voting or decision making, safety valves, and rule type. Other studies of global organizations that look at different functions naturally highlight other administrative design features. Steven Waddell’s (2012) analysis of global action networks, for example, focuses on the design of network participation. Jarle Trondal (2013) makes an important contribution in his work on the relationship between admin- istrative behavior and bureaucratic structure, identifying the logics that mediate between them. Underscoring not only the growing interest in the study of transnational organizations but the significant accumulation of knowledge that has occurred in the past decade, two important edited volumes on international organizations have been published recently (Reinalda, 2013; Weiss & Wilkinson, 2014).

In this case, the analysis of representation identified two general design approaches. More familiar is the model built around a repre- sentative body that chooses a smaller intermediate body with day-to-day

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governing responsibility. This intermediate body is often called a council and is therefore dubbed the conciliar approach. The intermediate body oversees some permanent bureaucracy (often called a secretariat). Alter- natively, some organizations are more bottom up. Constituent groups elect representatives to a board that oversees the secretariat. Governmental organizations typically adopt the conciliar approach consistent with strong normative expectations for governmental entities and the need to respect claims of sovereignty (through national representation).2

Apportionment of voting strength defies expectation. Most interna- tional organizations do not use weighted voting schemes (exceptions are the World Bank and International Monetary Fund) and instead use one member, one vote. One might think that this system puts the United States, Japan, or other stronger countries at risk.3 Here is where the public admin- istration perspective adds value: we know that administrative structures must be understood as systems rather than individual features.

Alternative approaches to representation and apportionment incor- porate distinctive protections against unwanted outcomes in different ways. These might be termed safety valves. The UN Security Council veto represents an obvious safety valve in the United Nations. Among the GGOs examined in World Rule (Koppell, 2010a), however, no organization employs the “security council” approach; the safety valves were more subtle and dependent on the contextual variables and the combinations of structural features. One member, one vote apportionment, for example, is strongly correlated with the conciliar approach to representation. Every organization member participates in the representative body, but this assembly typically meets once a year at most—sometimes once every two or even four years. In conciliar organizations, real decision-making authority is vested in the intermediate body, and almost every organization that employs the model guarantees intermediate body membership. Member- ship is typically guaranteed to the most powerful parties—those who have to be assured that their interests are protected before they will join.4

Layering additional considerations helps explain variation. Open membership organizations are essentially available to any country or organization. United Nations–related organizations are typically open in this sense. A closed membership organization is different; members retain control over admission. The Basel Committee, for instance, approves new members selectively. This in itself is a powerful safety valve; closed membership organizations do not need the “intermediate-body” safety valve because they exercise control at the front door. Such an institu- tional design serves the same end in a different way. All this comes out when you look at the patterns across organizations; closed membership

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organizations do not have distribution requirements in intermediate body membership.

By incorporating multiple facets of variation in global governance, understanding of the institutional forms is deepened. For instance, studies of rule-making agencies do not typically differentiate the types of rules being crafted. In the realm of global rule making, however, variation in the nature of the rule appears quite important in explaining variation in institutional form. All rules accomplish one of two types of coordination: pure coordination or battle-of-the-sexes coordination. Under pure coordi- nation, the substance of the rule is not terribly important; agreement on a standard is critical. The classic example is what side of the street we drive on. But most coordination is what is typically termed battle-of-the-sexes coordination. This name is derived from the anachronistic metaphor typically offered to explain the concept: a husband and wife want to go out together, but the husband wants to go to boxing and the wife prefers ballet. They want to do something together, but they also want different activities. If they are committed to coordinating—that is, if they prefer either activity together to their preferred activity alone—they will cooperate but still try hard to get their preferred outcome (Koppell, 2010a).

Most global rule-making exercises are best described as battle-of-the- sexes type of coordination where the problem is coming to agreement. However, the more technical the subject matter an organization deals with, the more it looks like pure coordination. Very little rule making is actually pure coordination. There are always interests at play. But the less diver- gence of interests there is, the less important this design feature is in the construction of a GGO. The essential point is that this helps explain why institutional forms are linked to context.

This analytical approach may also be taken with respect to rule making, adherence, and interest group participation. In each area, the general theory of institutional design is borne out. So, for example, in the area of rule-making process, observations with respect to the formality of the process speak to the central theoretical claims regarding institutional design in global governance. The formality of the rule-making process refers to the rigidity of the steps taken for the creation and introduction of a new rule. Formal processes do not allow much variation creating a highly predictable, often legalistic approach. In contrast, a more informal rule-making process is exemplified by the International Accounting Stan- dards Board, which offers greater latitude. To illustrate, its requirements state that there “could be a discussion paper but it’s not mandatory.” This is not to suggest that rule makers have carte blanche but they have leeway to make accommodations. Informal rule-making processes are much more

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likely to be employed by closed membership organizations. This makes sense. An informal process can be very hard to predict and control, and so it is acceptable only in a context where trust in other members is very high. In organizations that are formal in approach, there are sometimes informal settings, restricted to a subset of members, where informal practice is accepted.

Implications of Transnational Organization Design for Public Administration and Management

This study of global rule-making bodies makes clear that the differences in the logic of organization design result in different administrative structures and behavior. Given the focus on accountability in this analysis, the key finding was that GGOs appear necessarily constructed with compromised accountability in their very superstructure. This allows them to accommodate shifting interests in such a way that they remain valuable and relevant. Insistence that GGOs display unbending fidelity to traditional legitimacy and accountability expectations imported from the domestic sphere of public administration theory and practice is quixotic and self-defeating.

Interestingly, the differences in the logic, design, and administration of global governance organizations make their influence on domestic gov- ernment and administration all the more significant. Weiss and Wilkinson (2013) observe that while few spheres of public concern are not global- ized, the policy and resource systems needed to address these collective problems remain localized in individual nation-states. This reality repre- sents a critical challenge to public administrators who work within GGOs as well as those who must interface with them on a regular basis in fulfilling their roles and responsibilities within the domestic context.

While globalization adds layers of complexity to public administration practice and challenges the field to examine and redefine itself, it does not require or imply that domestic traditions of public administration are irrelevant (O’Toole & Hanf, 2002) or that we will see public administra- tion converge across the globe with a universal one-size-fits-all orientation (Dimitrakopoulos & Passes, 2003). Surely new skills and perspectives are needed to meet the demands of globalization, but they must augment and inform, not replace, the accumulated wisdom and knowledge already embedded in domestic public administrative practice. Some of these skills or knowledge areas are languages, policy style differences across nations and within the specific international arena, the bodies of law that

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shape both the international domestic contexts, advanced negotiation, coordination, and coalition building (Dimitrakopoulos & Passes, 2003).

Understanding the logic and dynamics of global governance organiza- tions has become a critical competency for effective public administrators, whether they find themselves administering such organizations directly or interfacing with them in their roles as designers and implementers of domestic public policies. Domestic public administrator job descriptions must increasingly include expectations that the job involves interfacing with transnational organizations and requires the ability to work to ensure that domestic agendas are reflected in the policy work of these entities as well as facilitating the incorporation of international agendas and global policy goals into the domestic policy sphere. Schools of public administra- tion increasingly will be challenged to offer curriculums dually focused on domestic and international contexts, preparing students for careers that will most likely involve significant interface and management of global governance institutions and transnational organizations (Forrer, Kee, & Gabriel, 2007; Ryan, 1994).

Summary

Globalization and the rise of institutions to govern our interconnected economies and societies means that the practice of public administration is no longer limited to single nation-states. Research and teaching in our field has not yet fully adapted to this reality, although many scholars have been exploring the contours of international public administration. This chapter provides an overview of relevant work and makes the argument that global public administration is a beast distinct from all domestic species of public administration. Moreover, no universal model of international public administration is likely to emerge. We will continue to confront a confusing and challenging landscape. Even so, domestic administrators will be compelled to integrate global standards and interact with international institutions, meaning that even scholars focused on public administration in the domestic context require some appreciation of the dynamics at the international level.

Governance in a globalized world has emerged (perhaps to a great extent than is appreciated) and revealed a distinctive purpose and logic. Global rule-making bodies emerge and persist when actors see their interests served by a robust international regime. Because there is no coercive authority to compel participation in such regimes, unlike the domestic context where the state has such authority, the burden on public

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administrators in the global realm is to operate institutions that serve the interests of those who would be governed. This logic yields a varied set of institutional forms that public administration scholars are in the early stages of exploring, including government and nongovernmental rule makers who interact across a wide variety of policy domains.

Nevertheless, some steps have been taken in our field to assimilate international public administration. The literature on comparative pub- lic administration is addressed in this chapter not because it has claimed global administration as its terrain but because it underscores the futility of treating global public administration as an extension of the domestic. Which domestic administrative norms would apply? In neither practical nor academic terms does the administrative approach in any single country meet the needs of the global context. Studies of international organizations have yielded some understanding, but we are at the early stages of work that moves from detailed analysis of case studies to generalization across the population of international rule-making organizations. One approach defines types of global rule makers based on their design features and sees the heterogeneity of the population as ordered into three basic solutions to the same challenge: how to satisfy the interests of key constituencies while maintaining acceptable levels of fidelity to normative expectations.

There is no indication of any kind of convergence around a single model of global public administration. Designs seem to fit the particular needs of certain sectors at given moments in time. This, in and of itself, seemingly defies our tradition in which institutions are crafted and remain relatively static. It also makes it more challenging to study, but all the more important for the many constituencies—business, government, civil society—with an interest in understanding the dynamics of global gover- nance. More to the point, given the interconnection between domestic administration and policy and the international realm, we have no choice but to embrace this as a core issue to address in the years ahead.

Notes 1. The Administrative Procedures Act (APA) is an American law that lays out the stipu-

lated steps by which an executive branch agency produces a new rule or regulation. Every year, federal agencies introduce numerous rules consistent with legislation passed by Congress. These rules add specificity to laws and form to the programs agencies are charged with administering. The APA sets out requirements for pub- lication, solicitation of public feedback, and response that must be met for a new rule to be approved and implemented.

2. Again, within these categories there is broad variation. for example, the Inter- national Labor Organization with its very unusual representation scheme. Each country’s delegation to the organization is made up of business, labor, and

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governmental representatives that operate independently. I mention this to remind readers that complexity is reduced in order to make an analysis.

3. Thinking of the United Nations, one might say “That is why they have the Security Council!” But the Security Council is unique. None of the organizations studied have the equivalent of a security council, at least not formally.

4. Interestingly, there is one exception: the International Seabed Authority. It does not guarantee American membership in its council; it so happens that the United States is not a member of this organization, perhaps as a consequence. Tellingly, the Seabed Authority has limited power (for many reasons), but it is significant that the exception is the most marginal organization in the set.

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