The Black Hole of Public Administration

INTRODUCTION FROM ‘BIG G’ GOVERNMENT TO ‘SMALL G’ GOVERNANCE

INTRODUCTION From’BigG‘Governmentto’smallg‘governance None of the absolute advantages of institutions like businesses or schools or governments have disappeared. Instead, what has happened is that most of the relative advantages of those institutions have disappeared—relative, that is, to the direct effort of the people they represent. —Clay Shirky This book is the result of years of ruminations by a practitioner and an academic on the pathologies of public governance in Canada. These reflections, inspired mainly by real crises in various sectors, but also fuelled by social imaginings in reaction to them, have led both of us to commit a variety of diagnoses, commentaries and suggestions to paper over the last ten years. Not all of them have been well received or necessarily regarded as wise at the time. As a result, many of these modest general propositions we have put forward have been merrily swept under the carpet by friend and foe. But some of these propositions have survived ordeal and contestation, and have become a set of organizing ideas that have informed our conversations and scribbling more or less explicitly. These organizing ideas have found their way into various solo or joint papers. Many were outbursts at particularly annoying acts of provocation; others were stimulated by consultancy work 1 The Black Hole of Public Administration 2 for a variety of clients; still others emerged from extensive freewheeling conversations at Bistro 115 or Lapointe’s over many lunches. These pieces have coalesced into a broad approach to the governing problems of Canada (as a socio-technical system) that runs counter to the prevailing view. The prevailing view is one best echoed by Iain Gow’s model of Canadian public administration: a neat and tidy Westminster model (hierarchical, accountable, transparent, oversight-heavy) in which elected officials are purported to be in charge, and the state plays a transcendent role in defining the public interest on the basis of shared values. Gow suggests that this model has been operating in Canada as an echo of a vibrant tradition of moderation and pragmatism, with a strong tolerance for ambiguity (Gow 2004). Our view is that this is fiction. In fact, the Canadian public administration is painfully trying to meet the new challenges of coping with a turbulent, more complex and diverse environment by slowly and with great difficulty transforming itself into a less state-centric, more decentralized, more participative governance apparatus. The slow progress on this road has left the Canadian federal public administration in a state of strain and stress that has been made all the more acute because of the cognitive dissonance of both practitioners and academics intent on clinging to a Panglossian view that everything is as good as it can be in the best of all worlds (Paquet 2009a). As a result, there is an implicit collusion of most of those concerned to occlude the challenges generated by the sweeping changes in the environment: signs of distress of Canadian public administration are ignored, governance failures are denied, and required repairs are declared unnecessary. 3 Introduction A tectonic change At least since the Great Depression of the 1930s, conventional wisdom in Canada has claimed that Canada needs to be firmly governed from the state centre to ensure the requisite degree of guidance, coherence and redistribution to meet the imperatives of development, stability and equality. ‘From the centre’ in this context means ‘top-down’, with ‘Big G’ government firmly in control, with the federal voice being the strongest one in the government choir, and with much more coercion or competition than collaboration among the different levels of government. We believe that this view is antiquated. Increasingly over recent decades, improving Canada’s stewardship in the face of accelerated change and increasingly wicked problems has entailed the need to mobilize the collective intelligence of the whole country through the fostering of more participation and of a scintilla of open-source culture, the encouragement of dissent and participation, the instituting of multiple deliberative private, public and social forums, and what Michael Schrage famously dubbed ‘serious play’ (much exploratory work with new tools and perspectives, rapid prototyping as a vehicle for innovation in all sorts of domains, much experimentation and social learning as the new imperative). All the while, government has continued to play an important role in the broad process of societal governance. But in Canada, as in other advanced democracies, it...