Administration & Society

Whether and how organizations adapt to risk in changing contexts is a perennial problem in public administration. We explore this problem in a comparative analysis of four hurricanes that struck the Gulf Coast in 2005 and 2008: Hurricanes Katrina and Gustav in Louisiana and Hurricanes Rita and Ike in Texas. We use a framework of complex adaptive systems to assess what changes facilitate this transition in disaster contexts and what conditions inhibit adaptation. Methods include content and network analysis, including the calculation of E/I index scores. Findings suggest that investment in information technology and training in Louisiana following a perceived poor response to Katrina in 2005 led to adaptive performance in Gustav in 2008 in Louisiana, whereas minimal change following a perceived credible response to Rita in 2005 led to slower adaptation in response to Ike in 2008 in Texas.

The Constitutional School of American Public Administration dictates that the rule of law serves as the intellectual and practical foundation of the field. One way to support the Constitutional School is to examine how the U.S. Supreme Court works to shape the administrative state in its own image. This article provides a thorough examination for how the Court under Chief Justice John Roberts constitutionally protected laws affecting gay marriage, affirmative action, abortion rights, gun ownership, and health care while simultaneously narrowed constitutional protections concerning voting rights, campaign finance laws, and employer mandated contraceptive coverage. These contrasting constitutional viewpoints not only represent a transformative era in the history of the nation’s highest Court but also in how public administrative agencies implement the Court’s decisions.

This article investigates trust in Honduran Municipal Governments and shows that transparency and municipal services quality impact on trust. We posit the Theory of Effective Transparency: relevant information should be reported; transparency should be based on unbiased information; and municipal data should be comparable with other municipal governments. Municipalities where one political party has an overall majority are trusted more, and audited financial statements generate a positive impact on trust. Engagement and participation also affect trust. As a practical implication, municipal governments should increase trust by involving citizens in municipal issues. Finally, quality of democracy is connected with greater trust.

In this article, we offer a critical analysis of governance arrangements looking at the evolution of the Italian local welfare system over a time period of more than 40 years. The broad idea of a shift “from government to governance” is questioned. The nonprofit organizations had a vital role in the foundation of the Italian local welfare system. However, their participation in the governance arenas of today is often illusionary. This has practical consequences, as innovation in the welfare domain needs authentic public–private partnerships, and genuine participation of the nonprofits at all levels of social and political action.

Rittel and Webber connected their notion of “wicked problems” to three fundamental planning dilemmas. Many approaches within public administration theory have explicitly addressed wicked problems yet hardly paid attention to the dilemmas. We revisit the planning dilemmas to find out their potential relevance for current administration theory and practice. We argue that the dilemmas evolve out of the current institutional setup, meaning that wicked problems cannot be resolved by better administrative frameworks or methods. Rather societal matters are to be included in decision-making, for instance, by seeing societal opposition as opportunities to learn to deal with the planning dilemmas.