Abstract
As 2020 draws to a close, with this final issue of Volume 86, we reflect on the vicissitudes wrought upon global humanity by the contagion of COVID-19. Peoples and societies around the world have sought protection and reassurance from their governments, and it is the public servants who have been called upon to deliver this shield. There have been transnational approaches via institutions such as the World Health Organisation, a branch of the United Nations. However, the primary policy formulation and service delivery have come from national public administrations, with a range of approaches and an assortment of accomplishments. IRAS has compiled a Special Issue exploring the global public administration response, and testing the differences in that response, with an online issue due in late 2020/early 2021. The issue addresses the contrasting structures and functions of public administration, as well as the reasons why some state approaches are of a command-and-control type while others have been less so, but it is interesting to note the shift to a more statist approach in all but a few countries.
As we gaze towards the New Year and anticipate some relief from the health, social and economic dislocation wrought by the pandemic, the lessons drawn will be as varied as the response. Some things are clear, though: from public services, recovery across all social and economic sectors will require teams with mixed skill sets of data collection and management, project management, service delivery, and close working relationships with politicians and the wider governance structures of civil society. Some countries possess this capacity, others do not and there are some who once possessed structures to train and inculcate skills into higher civil services that, through decades of public sector transformations, may have squandered the means to rapidly foresee and plan for endogenous and exogenous emergencies. Although this issue is not a special issue, it does have some linking themes that address these concerns. For example, corrupt public administrations are rarely able to successfully deliver the kind of aid and then reconstruction that will be needed for several years. The links between economic drivers and administration are going to be important, and the ability to measure and flexibly adopt techniques that build on trust and transparency in order to develop coalitions of interest is discussed among the articles that follow.
It may be argued, however, that although technological innovations allow governments to address various wicked issues with new weapons in their armoury: The study of human history teaches us that much of life is analogous to a palimpsest. The original aims and older versions of political and administrative systems remain, but are constantly overlain by new ideas and novel approaches (see for example, Cunliffe, 2017). Old ideologies wither to be replaced by contemporary creeds, our understanding of them either aided or distorted by the methodologies deployed in science and social science; there are few eternal verities, but much that is recycled. The technological revolutions of recent generations produce immense amounts of data and new knowledge and this in turn drives social and political change. It has been this way in human society for millennia; it is the human condition. (Massey, 2020: 1) The society in which the Imperial civil service operated was a mixture of governmental absolutism and freedom from restraint. In principle, the government and hence society, was built upon a system of absolute rule, with an emperor at its head and a civil service as the chief instrument of that rule. It was to be a global pattern, the civil service was formed as an instrument of the ruler, its purpose to collect taxes and enforce the will of the king or emperor. It was a pattern only effectively challenged from the time of the English civil war in the seventeenth century and the establishment of the American Republic with its insistence, based on English Liberal Theory, on the limits to government and the need for accountability. (Massey, 2020: 1)
Kasdan’s article is particularly apposite given the contemporary context of public administration. He argues that: Behavioural Public Administration (BPA) meets at the intersection of the two disconnects to address what people expect and what they receive by extending a third dimension with the provision of what people ought to get. Policy has been located somewhere on the plane comprised of ideals, disappointments, and compromises with only the traditional rationale of economic utility maximization thinking.
As befits its title as the International Review, the issue has a wide focus. The article by Beck, Buckley and O’Reilly ‘gives a cross-sectional account of how established health care systems have responded to the novel challenge of drug shortages (DS)’ in Europe and the US. It argues there is a path dependency in terms of response patterns, and although acceptance of the article pre-dated the pandemic, it is obvious that some of the lethargic approaches to pharmaceutical response are anticipated by the authors. Similarly, Hur and Hawley address the problems of high turnover among public sector employees in the US. Although their article is specifically about the US, it has a much wider resonance as the 14–15% turnover rates they record are replicated in other countries, leading to a loss of experience and collective institutional memory. While the Swedish city case study by Brorström and Norbäck again points to the importance of the relationship between career officials and politicians at all levels of governance, the management of this administrative–political link is recognised in much of the public administration literature as being key to effective policy delivery. It is also key to managing and designing out corruption, and the article by Bashir and Hassan argues the need for ethical leadership in order combat corruption. Based on their case study of non-profit organisations and government institutions in Pakistan, they argue that ‘To prevent incidences of corruption, managers must coach subordinates about ethical issues, communicate clearly about ethical standards, and point out unethical as well as ethical behaviour of subordinates.’ The article is a study of within-country variations of corruption and, as such, an innovative look at the institutional drivers of anti-corruption.
Remaining with the important theme of anti-corruption, Park and Kim detail research on the use of e-government as a tool to design out corrupt practice. However, as they point out, ‘there is a lack of empirical evidence on the impacts of e-government on corruption’. As such, the article empirically examines whether e-government reduces corruption across countries and uses a cross-country longitudinal survey. They argue that their results indicate ‘that e-government as a whole significantly reduces corruption’. This is an especially interesting observation as the article by Mahmood, Weerakkody and Chen notes that information and communications technology is core to delivering transformation in government and citizen trust in government, a fundamental part of defeating corruption. Their study of Bahrain concludes that to ‘change the core functions of government, [it] must move beyond simple digitization and web enabling of processes … by improving transparency and performance’, while Cuadrado-Ballesteros, Citro and Bisogno’s study of 33 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries concluded that ‘corruption is reduced as governments advance in public-sector accounting reforms, adopting International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS), or implementing accrual-basis systems’.
The article by Lameck and Hulst takes us to Tanzania to survey the public servants regulating and aiding agricultural extension. In clear links to the preceding articles, they conclude that one of the lessons from their research is that: public managers should be aware of the fact that the professional norms of street-level workers to a large extent determine how they use their discretion. The training of street-level bureaucrats should therefore not only focus on their professional abilities, but should also include the transfer of key values of the public service.