Robert F. Durant

“Wicked Problems,” Public Policy, and Administrative Theory Lessons From the GM Food Regulatory Arena

As societies worldwide struggle to address what policy analysts call “wicked problems” such as world hunger, malnutrition, and ecological sustainability, analysts from a variety of perspectives have questioned the administrative state’s abilities to deal with them. Ascendant since the early 1990s as a prescription for remedying these shortcomings is a market, technocratic, and non-deliberative theory of administration that some have called “neo-managerialism” and others the “managerialist ideology.” This study uses European attitudes toward promoting the use of genetically modified (GM) foods as a “policy window” for exploring how well or ill-suited the neo-managerialist philosophy informing the U.S. government’s promotional campaign was with the factors driving European opposition to GM foods. Causal modeling of the “calculus of dissent” that led to a the European Union (EU) moratorium on GM foods suggests that deliberative (rather than neo-managerialist) theories of administration are better suited for the “collective puzzlement of society” that wicked problems require.

Public Opinion, Risk Perceptions, and Genetically Modified Food Regulatory Policy

The underlying assumption of multinational corporations and US government campaigns to inform citizens worldwide of the advantages of genetically modified (GM) foods has been straightforward: if citizens better understand GM science and benefits, they will become less wary of GM foods. To test the assumptions of proponents regarding science-based information campaigns, we use heteroskedastic probit analysis to analyze responses to the 1999 Eurobarometer survey. The results suggest that pro-GM food campaigns, directed at enhancing citizens’ understanding of the underlying science and biotechnology of GM food benefits, may not be as effective as GM proponents expect, and may even be counterproductive. The analysis also reveals, however, that support for GM foods is likely to be linked to citizens’ trust in government. Thus, campaigns stressing the regulatory capacity and willingness to protect public health, safety, and the environment, rather than merely leavening citizens’ understanding of the genetic science and biotechnology informing GM foods, may be more effective.

Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policy: Lessons from the U.S. Foreign Policy Arena

This essay extends John Kingdons work on predecision policy processes in US domestic policy to the foreign policy domain. While Kingdons insights have significantly improved our understanding of predecision processes, further development is necessary for extension across both domestic and foreign policy domains. Kingdons incremental evolutionary metaphor for alternative specification has to be revamped to include both gradualist and nonincremental policy types. Scholars must also make more explicit, elaborate, and thorough use of Cohen, March and Olsens ‘garbage can’ model of decision making. To these ends, we offer a typology of policy alternatives that incorporates alternative metaphors premised on recent developments in evolutionary theory. The essay concludes by suggesting a research agenda amenable to pursuit in both national and cross-national contexts.

Toward a New Governance Paradigm for Environmental and Natural Resources Management in the 21st Century

Dissatisfaction with conventional regulatory approaches has led to an emerging new governance paradigm (NGP) in environmental and natural resources (ENR) management. This NGP is premised on a need to reconceptualize ENR management regimes, reconnect with stakeholders, and redefine what constitutes administrative rationality in the public and private sectors. The ultimate fate of the NGP is in doubt, however. This essay argues that the NGP is best appreciated as an effort to graft managerial flexibility onto an otherwise inflexible regulatory regime—an effort that has left a halfway, halting, and patchworked regulatory regime in its wake. Applying John Gaus’s notion of the ecology of public administration as an analytical framework, the essay addresses three questions: (a) What were the sociopolitical, technological, and economic factors propelling and delimiting theNGPover the last quarter of the 20th century; (b) how likely are they to endure; and (c) with what consequences for ENR managers, regulators, and regulatees in the 21st century?

The Oxford handbook of American bureaucracy

PART I INTRODUCTION PART II RECONCEPTUALIZING THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN BUREAUCRACY? PART III RETHINKING RATIONALITY IN AMERICAN BUREAUCRACY? PART IV REDRAWING THE BOUNDARIES OF AMERICAN BUREAUCRACY? PART V RECALIBRATING POLITICS, RESPONSIVENESS, AND ACCOUNTABILITY IN AMERICAN BUREAUCRACY? PART VI REVITALIZING THE CONSTITUTIONAL, RESOURCE CAPACITY, AND ETHICAL FOUNDATIONS OF AMERICAN BUREAUCRACY?

American Exceptionalism, Human Resource Management, and the Contract State

With the nature, scope, and pace of public sector contracting accelerating significantly during the Bush administration, and with the Obama administration promising to curb the contracting excesses of its predecessors, it is useful to take stock and ponder the consequences of this movement to date for human resource management. This article puts public sector contracting and its effects in a larger historical, political, and democratic context by (a) reviewing the American propensity for market-based solutions (including contracting) to government problems, a disposition rooted in American exceptionalist values; (b) chronicling how that predisposition has manifested itself in four successive and now overlapping expansions of contracting (from products, to services, to core governmental functions, to human resource management functions); and (c) showing how these developments have had significant consequences not only for the future of the public service but also for the values associated with democratic constitutionalism in the United States.

Agenda Setting, the “Third Wave,” and the Administrative State

On the eve of a new millennium, the United States appears bent on diffusing the administrative state’s (Waldo) authority to address social problems throughout the public, market, and civic spheres. Ascendant presently in informing this “neoadministrative” state is a “downsizing, defunding, and devolution” (D3) agenda premised on behavioral, instrumental, and normative assumptions that are not so much wrong as seriously incomplete. This article argues that appropriately matching the metes and bounds of the neoadministrative state with the challenges posed by Third Wave transformations will elude the United States unless an alternative agenda is offered. This agenda must go beyond one-size-fits-all prescriptions, be better informed by empirically based research, and be culturally resonant with the values Lipset identifies as the “American Creed.” To this end, the rudiments of—and important questions posed by—a “reconnecting, reconceptualizing, and reengaging” (R3) agenda are offered, which may yet reframe debates over the neoadministrative state in the 21st century.

Merit, Management, and Neutral Competence: Lessons from the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board, FY 1988–FY 1997

Despite the centrality of merit principles to governance in the United States over the past century, scant empirical research examines linkages between institutions, and outcomes in the implementation of merit system protections. We argue that the fate of merit principles depends, at a minimum, on two influences that may compete with neutral competence. The first is partisan responsiveness by counter bureaucracies charged with holding agencies accountable to merit principles. The second influence is the sacrifice of merit in the interest of managerial rerogatives at the agency level. This exploratory study assesses both of these influences within the federal government. Our data consist of personal interviews, analyses of U.S. Merit System Protection Board (MSPB) processes, case loads, and decisions between fiscal years 1988 and 1997, and a brief case study of the Justice Department. We find that the MSPB is largely the neutral and competent agency that Congress intended to create when it enacted the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. Less positively, our analysis also reveals that federal agencies vary in how well their personnel actions fare with the MSPB. This finding is especially germane to reinventing-government reforms that decentralize personnel management to agencies or to line operators within agencies.

The Political Economy of Results-Oriented Management in the "Neoadministrative State": Lessons from the MCDHHS Experience

To comply with the precepts of today’s neoadministrative state, public managers are routinely pressed by elected officials to become results-oriented, customer-focused, and partnership-seeking service deliverers. The magnitude of the cultural change involved has frequently proved daunting at all levels of government in the United States. Although much remains unclear about the prudence and prospects of such cultural-reform efforts, researchers are gradually discerning the political economy of the efforts and challenges they pose to effectiveness and to public accountability. In the process, they are finding how critical the approaches taken in the early stages of cultural reform are to their ultimate success or failure. To advance practice and research on this topic, this article chronicles and analyzes the first 3 years of a critical case study of results-driven, customer-focused, and partnership-oriented cultural change in the Department of Health and Human Services in Montgomery County, Maryland. Identified are nine critical choices made during those years that sorely complicated progress, the flaws in underlying causal theories that spawned these problems, and the challenges to, and opportunities for advancing, accountability that reformers can expect and that researchers can profitably pursue.

Seizing the moment: outcomes assessment, curriculum reform, and mpa education

This article reviews a recent exercise in developing an outcomes-based capstone course for the MPA program at the University of Baltimore. Chronicled is the way a reversible logic approach to designing that course led ineluctably into a full-scale, outcomes-based, strategic planning exercise for the program as a whole. In the process, the department was able to craft a performance-based curriculum that attacked an “entitlement ethic” among students, that made the faculty more accountable for its actions in the classroom, that streamlined course offerings and content in mission-related ways, and that introduced a “continuous process improvement” ethic driven by constant feedback from the capstone course.