The Black Hole of Public Administration

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Tableofcontents Preface Public Administration in Distress ix Introduction From ‘Big G’ government to 1 ‘small g’ Governance Part I The Dynamics of the Broader Context Chapter 1 The Clerk as Révélateur 20 Chapter 2 Toward an Autopoietic Federalism 65 Part II Pathologies of Governance Illustrated Chapter 3 Forty-Four Forums on Some 110 Twenty-Four Wicked Problems Chapter 4 Quantophrenia 200 Chapter 5 Disloyalty 218 Chapter 6 The Neurotic State 253 Chapter 7 Fiscal Imbalance as Governance Failure 277 Part III Repairs in Many Dimensions Chapter 8 Alternative Service Delivery: 307 The Thin Edge of the Wedge Chapter 9 P3 and “The Porcupine Problem” 331 Chapter 10 The Myth of the Public Service 353 as a Lump of Labour Chapter 11 Design Challenges for the Strategic 382 State: Bricolage and Sabotage Chapter 12 Ombuds as Producers of Governance 418 Conclusion Governance and Beyond 442 Postface The Sabotage of Harms 452 Acknowledgements 465 Bibliography 468 Index 500 v List of tables Table 1.1 The drift from G to g Table 1.2 Three interdependent threads Table 1.3a Canadian clerks throughout history, Period I (1867–1940) Table 1.3b Canadian clerks throughout history, Period II (1940–1975) Table 1.3c Canadian clerks throughout history, Period III (1975–1994) Table 1.3d Canadian clerks throughout history, Period VI (1994-2010) Table 1.4 The clerk as révélateur of the evolution of governance Table 6.1 Summary of the neurotic styles Table 8.1 Characteristic traits of Jacobs’ syndromes Table 8.2 Relationships within accounting systems Table 10.1 Human capital in Canadian public service Table 11.1 The Accenture model List of figures Figure 1.1 Les Metcalfe’s catastrophe theory framework Figure 2.1 Learning cycles and potential blockages Figure 2.2 Four scenarios of Canadian federalism Figure 7.1 The Laffer curve Figure 9.1 P3 risk versus private spectrum Figure 9.2 The P3 process as four modules Figure 9.3 The Yankelovitch-Rosell social learning process Figure 12.1 The adapted Boulding triangle vi vii The effort to be more ‘scientific’ than the underlying subject matter permits carries a real cost in blinding us to the real complexities of public administration as it is practiced in different societies. —Francis Fukuyama If you fall in a black hole, what will happen? You will be able to see images of far away objects distorted in strange ways, since the black hole gravity bends light. However, no one can see you since light can’t escape the hole. What will happen to you is that you will be moving fast towards the center and depending on the size of the hole, you will eventually hit the center (the singularity) sooner or later. —Kamel M. Refaey ...