• What’s New and What’s Ahead  in Comparative and International Administration
• Theoretical Underpinnings of Privatization

by Karl Irving

Lawrence Jones, professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, pronounced his disinterest in debating the relatively arbitrary distinctions between "new" and "old" public management or administration, which offers little use to the practitioner. What is important is what is happening within the context of particular governance systems. Even where "New Public Management" principles serve as a supposed classic model, like New Zealand, there has been no real evaluation of the full extent of changes as implemented or their impact, including unintended consequences.

Jennifer Coston, professor at Rutgers University and outgoing SICA chair, introduced the trends of a partnership approach in development management in several important arenas. Examples include economic partnerships between private and public actors, new information linkages made possible by expanding technologies, collaboration in conflict resolution in environmental disputes, and the challenging coordination of an array of actors in response to complex humanitarian emergencies. There is a strong need to continue comparative research to make partnerships as effective as possible, balancing agendas, tool kits, values, and processes.

Jeanne-Marie Col, advisor on public administration at the United Nations, described difficulties of administrative reform in transitional states. There are no built-in methods of scanning for continuous improvement, especially in states evolving—or devolving—from central planning. Societies emerging from civil violence lack basic means of infrastructure in economic and political-administrative systems, and tend to be preoccupied with the need to rebuild basic instruments of governance including legal frameworks and networks. Many attempts at change fail because they target only one level of what is in reality a complex system of governance.

Eric Welch, presently an analyst in the Government of Japan, argued that changes in information technology, global institutions, and trends in efficiency reform are having substantial impact upon national bureaucracies. With new data availability, one can test variables such as structure, size and autonomy in comparing how bureaucracies deal with the new requirements. There is a need to examine contextual differences across types to produce useful conclusions.

Richard Stillman, professor at the University of Colorado, provided commentary on the panel presentations from his non-SICA perspective. He cautioned that Americans have a unique way of thinking about public administration, and other values enter into the picture in introducing governance reform, such as order and stability—not just partnership and public involvement. There is a need to reflect on the consequences of reforms upon national cultures.

As I see it, value tradeoffs are inherent to democratic administration to begin with, as debate over NPM reform demonstrates. While the partnership approach may belie impartiality, it can also be used to effectively assess contextual value tradeoffs. In states emerging from conflict, lean resources and a historical intertwining of values and administration exacerbate the real and symbolic effects of new tradeoffs. Studies that combine greater depth and broader comparison can help understand value choices and their consequences—for comparative scholars/assistance practitioners as well as foreign governments and, indeed, those with a solely domestic focus.
 
 

by Claude Roy

Traditional accountability mechanisms, such as bureaucratic, political, professional, legal, and market accountability, may not be effective in the context of PPPs. For example, many typical PPP organizations are small, fluid organizations, which lack the "single formal governance structure" (p. 11) required to enforce top-down bureaucratic control. Political accountability is often exercised through the participation of elected officials in the governance of PPPs. However, this raises the possibility that they become co-opted. Professional accountability may be a more effective instrument when confronted with the ambiguity arising from the non routine nature of the tasks at hand. Nonetheless, the complexity of the problems tackled often requires professionals from different disciplines to join in collaborative efforts and may lead to clashes between competing professional norms. Legal accountability is often impractical because it is difficult to codify into a contract the details of the partner's behavior a priori, when "the complexities of the issues typically addressed through PPPs" (p. 17) require flexibility, responsiveness, and adaptation. In addition, often enforced through litigation, legal accountability is more likely to fuel adversarial rather than cooperative interactions. Finally, market accountability is also "not an option" (p. 19) because its is often difficult to determine who the customer of the targeted actions is, because utility or equity is often a more appropriate evaluative base than efficiency, and because there is no market, let alone competition, for the type of services provided by many PPPs.

Alternative forms of accountability that are more adapted to the circumstances of the PPPs are community, partner, and moral accountability. Community accountability is centered on the effectiveness of the organizations at responding "to the needs and desires of their target population and develop appropriate two-way communication mechanisms between themselves and the community groups they are supposed to serve" (p. 21). Partner accountability entail that "participants in PPPs recognize that they are interdependent with and accountable to each other, in addition to being collectively accountable to the community" (p. 25). Partner accountability thus serves as a mutual mechanism, internal to the network, to tackle the ongoing need to resolve ambiguities through negotiations and trust building. Finally, moral accountability helps individuals to resolve the confusion experienced by participants about their roles, their allegiances, and their priorities.

The second paper, by Richard Here, was titled Probing the "Deep Structure" of publicprivate Partnership: The Patent as Comparative Reference. The author examined the strategic aspects of large scale PPPs through the metaphor of the patent. The metaphor approach is appropriate because of the functional similitude's between patents and PPPs. Both promote private sector product development for the public welfare, both are complex and intricate, and both take on a key strategic meaning for the enterprise.

The author identified four bases on which the examination of patents is useful to understand PPPs. First, PPP agreements extend ownership (or proprietary) rights to, and create assets for, private firms. Such assets can take the form of control over the work force, secured access to a customer base, etc. In addition, this asset creation is bred through a mutual accord between government and private firms. Second, ownership and proprietary issues impact on the strategic behavior of PPPs as they are key to the cash flows over the life of the project. This becomes critical as private concerns, in need of long term financing, thrive to "securitize" (i.e., anticipate revenue shortfall and other contingencies of subsequent years) the project arising form the partnership. Third, private partners may regard the concept of the partnership, its documentation, and custom developed software as intellectual property and retain proprietary rights over them. Fourth and last, private concerns may view the practice of allowing the public bureaucracy to submit a competitive bid for any given project [e.g., compulsory competitive tendering] as an unfair encroachment upon their project investments. This is similar to a partnership controversy claim relating to a patent infringement.

The author concluded that there is a shift in the administrative role of public managers, from procurement management to collaborative deal-making. From smart buyers and guardians of competitive neutrality, the public players are moving on to become astute negotiators and gatekeepers of the access to public service. No longer reactive guardians against abuse, they become proactive mentors who participate in the definition of the terms of the partnership and guide vendor's involvement in government. Thus, the emergent issue becomes how to foster the development of a context of ethical relationships between vendors and public managers.

The third speaker was Steven Cohen who presented a paper co-authored with William Eimicke and titled A Conceptual Framework for Devolving Responsibility and Functions from Government to the Private Sector. Their intention was to stimulate the public decision maker with a set of questions designed to focus on the material issues when confronted with a privatization alternative. The pertinent questions relate to the goals of the program to be privatized, the tasks of the program, and the current capacity of government to perform the tasks. There is no unique response and the optimal solution is defined from the pertinent facts of the case.

First, the whole issue has inescapable ideological and political dimensions. Appropriateness becomes the driving force. For example, the actions of Oliver North were the equivalent of a partial privatization of the U.S. foreign policy. Similarly, some functions are best handled by public employees, despite the availability of private substitutes. For instance, many persons would prefer to be arrested by a sworn police officer than a "rent-a-cop". Second, a successful privatization entails accountability and ability to monitor the outcome/impact. When this is difficult, it is better to maintain delivery through public means. In addition, not-for-profit organizations often lack the ability to report. Furthermore, the onus of providing good services always reverts to the public official, even if the delivery is contracted-out. For instance, street people who die in the cold because they were denied access to a shelter will haunt the politicians, regardless of who manages the shelter. Third, the term privatization is ambiguous. Hence, precision is required on several dimensions: What is the extent of the privatization? What are the funding implications? What are the ethics considerations? The authors concluded that the privatization phenomenon originated in the U.S., but has gathered much more momentum in other countries (e.g., United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand).

The session proceeded with a few clarification questions addressed by the speakers. Due to time pressures, there was unfortunately little opportunity for an integrative discussion nor to further explore the international and comparative ramifications of the papers.