Governance Infrastructures in 2020

A governance infrastructure is the collection of technologies and systems, people, policies, practices, and relationships that interact to support governing activities. Information technology, especially communication and computational technologies, continues to augment society’s ability to organize, interact, and govern. As we think about the future of governance, this article challenges us to…

Practitioner's Perspective—Managing for 2020 : An Exploration of Role Inter…

This article examines three roles that local governments play: convening community, providing service, and creating and enforcing regulation. The author uses the concept of polarity management to explore how local governments can strike a balance among these roles, and explores how individual employees and organizations can disrupt that balance by favoring individual roles. Particular focus is …

Governing Cities in the Coming Decade : The Democratic and Regional Disconnects

How will cities be governed in 2020? The answer will depend to a significant degree on reducing two “disconnects”: one between municipal government and its citizenry, and the other between municipal government and its region. Elected, managerial, and intellectual leaders need to strengthen their understanding, capacities, and skills regarding public engagement and regional engagement across jur…

The Future of Local Government : Twenty-First-Century Challenges

Local governments in the twenty-first century face challenges regarding service delivery, finance, the workforce, and citizen engagement. While privatization was a major innovation in the last decades of the twentieth century, lack of costs savings and the loss of public values in market provision are prompting reversals in privatization, increases in regulation, and new approaches to governmen…

What if Hurricane Katrina Hit in 2020? The Need for Strategic Management of D…

What would another Hurricane Katrina bring in 2020? Is government at all levels ready for such an event? This essay argues that learning to manage actions supporting disaster response and recovery operations consistently and effectively requires strategic, not reactive, thinking. It adopts a framework based in issues focused thinking, externally focused management, and opportunity-seeking behav…

The Suspect Handmaiden : The Evolution of Politics and Administration in the …

Scholars of an earlier era predicted a more secure role for the administrative state in American political culture. This vision overlooked a historical irony that governs the relationship between politics and administration. For American society, the administrative state is a suspect handmaiden. Citizens have looked to public administration to enable extraordinary growth while simultaneously di…

The Public Service of the Future

This article seeks to identify the status and infrastructure of public service in 2020. It first examines Leonard White’s early effort at predicting a future search for public service, written in 1942, but with an eye toward the 1950s and 1960s. The authors assess the subsequent structural and ideological development of public service to lay a framework for their own projection of the public se…

The Future of Strategic Planning in the Public Sector : Linking Strategic Man…

Edition

Vol 70, Issue Suppl s1, Dec 2010, pages s246–s254

ISBN/ISSN

00333352

Collation

-

Series Title

Public Administration Review

Call Number

-

The Future of Public and Nonprofit Strategic Planning in the United States

Strategic planning is now a ubiquitous practice in U.S. governments and nonprofit organizations. The practice has become widespread for many reasons, but the chief one is the evidence that strategic planning typically “works,” and often works extremely well. Improvements in strategic planning practice are likely to come as it is seen and researched in its full richness as a practice, or set of …

Harris's Mirage : The Positive Service State

In 1942, Joseph Harris anticipated that the United States would develop a highly centralized and rationalized welfare state. The forecast was largely mistaken. The United States did develop an expansive national security apparatus that was relatively centralized and rationalized. By contrast, domestic policies were unevenly developed, and often highly decentralized in design. Harris’s forecast …

Learning from the Past, Committing to the Future : A Practitioner’s View of…

American democracy is at a pivotal moment: electoral dysfunction, low levels of participation, divisive politics, and power imbalances dominate governance and impede our ability to resolve critical issues facing the nation. In this environment, the author argues, our ability to be the representative system of government we claim is in question. Using Harold D. Lasswell’s 1942 essay “The Develop…

Governance, Structure, and Democracy : Luther Gulick and the Future of Public…

Luther Gulick was both an academic and a reformer. In the latter role, he thought seriously about what the future of public administration might look like. This essay examines his work as a lens through which to view the future of public administration in 2020. Gulick suggests that public administration needs a governance orientation to link scholarship with the realities of practice, a recogni…

The Duty to Take Care : President Obama, Public Administration, and the Capac…

President Barack Obama inherited many challenges as he entered the White House. One of the most important obligations he faced was the constitutional duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Meeting that commitment has been rendered more difficult because Obama seems not to have recognized that the people and organizations of the executive branch are facing a crisis in the capa…

Trends in the Study of Public Administration : Empirical and Qualitative Obse…

What are the apparent research and methodological trends in PAR’s content over the past decade? From the perspective of the journal’s 70-year history, with its aim to “mesh” practitioner and academic knowledge creation, topical coverage since 2000 reflects striking continuity, emphasizing many of the “bread and butter” administrative issues such as planning, human resources, budgeting, and publ…

Real Reform or Change for Chumps : Earmark Policy Developments, 2006–2010

In response to widespread perceptions of problems associated with congressional earmarks, reform efforts began in late 2006 and continued through 2010. This essay summarizes those problems, explains the distribution of earmarks within Congress, and documents their rise and relative fall between 1991 and 2010 using government and public interest group databases. The author explains and critiques…

More Similarities or More Differences? Comparing Public and Nonprofit Manager…

Existing research on career motivations tends to focus either on the difference between private and public organizations or on the difference between nonprofit and for-profit firms. Although commonalities exist, the literature suggests that there also are many differences in what motivates public and nonprofit employees. Employing data from the National Administrative Studies Project III, this …

Taking Nonprofit Intermediaries Seriously : A Middle-Range Theory for Impleme…

The federal government often works through nonprofit intermediaries to reach and empower communities in the United States. One increasingly popular policy strategy is to offer grant funding to intermediary organizations in an effort to strengthen communities. Funded intermediaries are tasked with building the capacity of faith-based and community organizations at the local level, but the policy…

Soldiers to Citizens : The Link between Military Service and Volunteering

Research shows that military service is linked with political engagement, such as voting. This connection is strongest for minorities. The authors explore the relationship between military service and volunteering. They conclude that military service helps overcome barriers to volunteering by socializing people with civic responsibility norms, by providing social resources and skills that compe…

Predictors of Administrative and Technological Innovations in Nonprofit Organ…

This study examines the effects of human and structural/process factors on two types of innovation—administrative and technological—in a sample of nonprofit organizations. The results indicate that factors that are favorable to administrative innovations differ from those that are conducive to technological innovation. Three variables are significant predictors of administrative innovation: cen…

Deconstructing School Choice : Problem Schools or Problem Students?

School choice has developed into one of the most contentious policy debates in K–12 education. Proponents argue that choice leads to competition among schools, thereby raising school quality for all students, while opponents claim that school choice often results in racial segregation and worsens inequity. The findings of this study, collected from qualitative interviews with school administrat…