The Black Hole of Public Administration

PART II PATHOLOGIES OF GOVERNANCE ILLUSTRATED

PART II PathologiesofGovernanceIllustrated The turbulence of the context, the major transformations in governance, in public governance and in government as such, that are hinted at in the introduction, as well as the extent to which fictions have come to trump reality, have conspired to create strains in the public administration process. Some have even suggested that, in the case of countries like Canada, one might appropriately speak of a latent crisis. There is much denial at the official level of anything untoward, but some perceptive observers have acknowledged a decline of the public domain, as well as anecdotal evidence that would appear to suggest that public administration is in distress. Our ‘windshield’ survey of the Canadian experience has revealed that such strains are not new. They are caused by environmental turbulence, by the misalignment not only between politicians and bureaucrats but also among the private, public and social sectors, as well as the different levels of governments, and by misfits between systems of belief and needed practical strategies. These tensions have been resolved differently and more or less successfully over the last century, but with greater difficulty over the most recent decades. At the core of these heightened tensions is the fact that a new order is emerging that will entail a more modest role for the public sector, and a much different one. We have tried to deconstruct this transition somewhat by identifying some parallel, intermingled processes that would appear to call for a fundamental ‘refoundation’ of the public administration process. 107 108 The Black Hole of Public Administration Part I sets the historical and institutional context, and draws attention to some of the more important aspects of these transition challenges, but before we can begin to reflect on repairs that might help resolve these strains and plug the black hole, it is essential to delve a bit deeper into the pathologies that these strains have generated. We proceed in two steps. First, we report on some ethnographic work done over the last three years, with the collaboration of The Association of Professional Executives of the Public Service of Canada (APEX), inordertoascertainthemindsetandconcernsofseniorexecutives in the Canadian federal public service. These persons are at a level of authority at which they can provide important seismographic data—their daily diet of tensions allows them to experience very acutely and accurately the strains that were discussed earlier in more general terms. The forty-four forums on twenty-four ‘wicked problems’ have revealed many key thorny issues. These sessions may be a somewhatunconventionalbutneverthelessamosteffectivewayto uncover the nexus of problems making the public administration process dysfunctional. We do not claim to have covered the whole territory—indeed, these inquiries are continuing and the exploration remains a work in progress—but we have attempted to review the material collected up to now in a clinical way in order to distill some key dimensions of concern that might help to finesse a more refined diagnosis of what is not working well somewhat. Chapter 3 reports in some detail on the topics discussed, on the concerns that emerged clearly from these discussions, and on the lessons that we have drawn from these psycho-socio-analyses. We have also attempted to draw attention in the conclusion of this synthetic report to the contours of an overall diagnosis of the etiology of the current malaise that we have derived from our synthesis of the results of three years of probing. Chapters 4 and 5 analyze two issues raised by our APEX conversations in greater depth: quantophrenia and disloyalty. 109 Quantophrenia is a crippling epistemology that suggests that, if something cannot be measured, it is of no consequence. This mental reductionism (now a new gospel in public administration) dismisses many important forms of knowledge, and tends to have important negative consequences on public management and public policy resulting from perverse steering effects. Disloyalty entails misalignment between the direction chosen by the principal (the government in power) and the direction chosen by the agents (the senior bureaucrats). It constitutes a breach of trust and a major source of governance failures when public servants usurp the role of responsible government by defining themselves as Platonic guardians who decide the public interest. Second, chapters 6 and 7 present two case studies. The first one documents the silent revolution triggered by the distrustparanoia vicious cycle among citizens, elected officials and bureaucrats. It...