Fighting for Relevance

t is difficult, given the day-to-day demands of professional life, to find time to reflect on how the institutions we serve should be changing to meet the demands of our evolving American experiment. Yet it is a useful exercise, for both people and their organizations can find greater satisfaction and sense of purpose by understanding the context in which they work.

To say that the context of government work is changing rapidly is to state the obvious. But there is no consensus, no blueprint as to how the federal government could or should adapt. And without a theory to follow, ad hoc arrangements prevail at the expense of better-considered, longer-term approaches to public issues.

What we are facing today is nothing less than "the transformation of governance," as the National Academy of Public Administration put it in a recent paper. NAPA, whose 480 elected fellows collectively have as much expertise about the public sector as can be marshaled in the United States, convened a task force earlier this year to help define the characteristics of the transformation and to create a framework to guide government's response to it.

The problem, as NAPA fellow Donald F. Kettl wrote in the task force report, is that "the pursuit of public purposes depends increasingly on complex partnerships in which the government agency administering a program is only one of the players involved. The capacity of the governance system is often severely strained. Government's role is often unclear. The performance of public programs too often suffers as a result."

Kettl, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, quotes sociologist Daniel Bell's trenchant observation of a dozen years ago: "The nation state is becoming too small for the big problems of life, and too big for the small problems of life. It is too small for the big problems because there are no effective international mechanisms to deal with such things as capital flows, commodity imbalances, the loss of jobs and the several demographic tidal waves that will be developing in the next twenty years. It is too big for the small problems because the flow of power to a national political center means that the center becomes increasingly unresponsive to the variety and diversity of local needs."

Welfare reform, for example, is suited best to local solutions; even though Washington may be paying the bills, states, counties, cities and nonprofit groups have a better grasp of the needs and solutions. Issues of regional security, international trade, and African poverty and health are best considered in globalized systems where the sovereignty of individual nations is subordinated to a greater purpose. Thus, writes Kettl, the federal government "risks finding itself in a squeeze for relevance."

I commend Kettl's thoughtful paper to readers of Government Executive and also to the staffs of the two presidential candidates, George W. Bush and Al Gore. The kinds of big issues of governance that Kettl and his NAPA colleagues are pondering may not be the stuff of campaign sound bites, but they will surely serve as an important subtext to everything the next President may hope to achieve. Kettl's treatise can be found on the NAPA Web site (www.napawash.org) under "What's New."