Crossing Borders

Last Thursday, I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to go over to the U.S. Department of Agriculture for a presentation the team that runs their AgLearn online learning program was giving for a visiting Chinese delegation. It was my second dip into the world of Chinese public administration. Admittedly, neither of those dips have been incredibly deep: when you're in China as a journalist, as I was last year, you don't exactly advertise the fact, and I was visiting an academic public administration program at Tsinghua, rather than a Chinese equivalent of the Office of Personnel Management or the Office of Management and Budget. But in both cases, I was struck by the desire to look to the United States as a model. When I was visiting Tsinghua, the students had a lot of questions about how the federal government does performance management, framed as if the U.S. was the model, rather than a flawed system. And this presentation at USDA was clearly organized by the World Bank because AgLearn is considered the best, or at least most comprehensive, e-learning system in the federal government.

I spend a lot of time interviewing people who think the American federal government is poorly managed, or could be managed better. But most of those people are operating within the framework of that government, or operate with the federal government as their framing device for setting standards. So it's always interesting to me to step outside of that framework and try to understand how the federal sector in the United States looks to people working in different systems. Given the extent to which questions about what other countries are doing shape other public policy questions ranging from health care reform, to the use of international judicial precedents in Supreme Court decision, to urban planning, it's always been a surprise to me how little comparative conversations enter into discussions about public administration. McKinsey, the consulting firm, has done some work (registration required) along these lines, but it hasn't really percolated up to any hearings or conversations with high-level administration officials I've had over the past couple of years.

There are areas in which comparative discussions might not be particularly useful. Civil service corps operate in very different ways in different countries, incentives operate differently in countries with controlled economies, like China's, than they do in the United States. But if the Obama administration is going to ask very broad questions about the right way to measure the performance of federal employees and the right way to pay them, it may make sense to throw open the range of possible reference points and to go beyond comparisons to the private sector in the United States.