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Stairways to Heaven: A Reply to Alford

2008; Wiley; Volume: 67; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1467-8500.2008.00594.x

1467-8500

R. A. W. Rhodes, John Wanna,

Local Government Finance and Decentralization

‘There's a laddie who's sure all that glitters is gold and he's buying a stairway to heaven’ (with apologies to Led Zeppelin). We welcome the opportunity to engage with John Alford's defence of the public value approach and its application to Australia. We do not repeat our initial arguments at any length. We prefer readers to look at the full version (Rhodes and Wanna 2007). We focus on key disagreements and identify ways forward.1 That said, it is hard to reply to a critique that barely engages with the major thesis of our article. Our core point is simple. Public value was envisaged for American government, not Westminster parliamentary government, so it should be transplanted with great care. We argue the hierarchy of a strong executive with disciplined political parties and neutral public officials is markedly different from the divided executive, weak party system, and elected or partisan public officials of the United States (US). Cabinet ministers are visible and interventionist. They are not just one among many competing actors. They are the pre-eminent actor. So, to urge officials to build coalitions inside and outside government to legitimise ‘their’ initiatives on public value may well be understandable in the pluralist, fragmented American government but it is dangerous in Australian parliamentary government. Alford's reply is to say that the argument about authority is merely ‘debateable’. All it means is that ‘Westminster public managers encounter authorising environments in which politicians hold greater sway’, so ‘they need to reposition the point of trade-off between value and political imperatives’. There is still ‘a space in which public managers play a political role’. We take Alford's three points in turn. First, the point of our article was to raise the issue of whether the differences in the political systems of America and Australia matter when transplanting Moore's theory of public value. To say the differences are ‘debateable’ is just to avoid our major theme. Our article invited the proponents of public value to join the debate and tell us why the differences do not matter. We have said what the differences are and why they matter. It is not enough to assert ‘the difference is relative rather than absolute, and does not affect the underlying logic of the model’ or to re-describe ‘executive dominance’ as ‘holding greater sway’. Second, we argue that prime ministers, ministers and the majority political party dominate the authorising environment of public servants in a way rarely found in the US. If the phrase ‘reposition the trade-off’ means tread warily while acceding to the call for political responsiveness from ministers, then, in effect, Alford accepts our argument. We suspect he believes the differences are of little import. It would have been helpful if he had said why. One point is clear; ministers continue to be invisible in his account of Australian government. We insist they are the fulcrum of decision-making with interest groups, the media and the courts lesser players. Third, we agree there is space for public managers to play a political role. Our ladder of public value was a first step in delimiting that space. However, we continue to stress the risks and suggest managers weigh carefully the balance between discretion and responsiveness before venturing too far into coalition building in support of their policy initiatives. If managers decide to be entrepreneurial they risk subverting or undermining their core business or areas or responsibility. Moore's example of looking after street kids in a library is presumably fine, but one might ask why is a library with its vast resources of knowledge being converted into a soup kitchen. The second major theme in our article is the primacy of politics and, again, Alford ignores an inconvenient argument. Thus, Alford criticises us for ignoring Moore's strategic triangle. As Alford states, the ‘essential point’ of the strategic triangle is that ‘a manager needs to secure the support of the authorising environment for a given purpose’ (italics in original). We do not ignore this model because we strongly dispute its essential point. We agree with Aaron Wildavsky, writing back in 1968 about the then fashionable management reforms of Program-Planning-Budgeting System (PPBS), when he vigorously defended the primacy of politics: … political rationality is the fundamental kind of reason because it deals with the preservation and improvement of decision structures, and decision structures are the source of all decisions … There can be no conflict between political rationality and … technical, legal, social, or economic rationality, because the solution of political problems makes possible an attack on any other problems, while a serious political deficiency can prevent or undo all other problem solving (Wildavsky 1968:393). In the strategic triangle, managers are the hub and ‘they need to temper the policy purposes they put forward with political acceptability and administrative feasibility’. We think that role is the primary task of the prime minister and the ministers, while non-elected public managers advise. Indeed, again, prime ministers and ministers get nary a mention in his critique. It is not enough to say occasionally that they are important actors. They are the dominant actors in the public managers authorising environment and their political rationality takes precedence, especially over managers and management. Alford's defence of Moore is an example of the inability of business schools and the discipline of management to accept the primacy of politics. We would have fewer qualms about Moore's approach if he had written the book from the vantage point of ministers as policy advocates and described how they could build coalitions, float ideas, and legitimise policy proposals. But Moore centres his message on unelected public officials and tells them to go out and engineer proposals and win some external political authorisation for these proposals. Ministers cannot be defined out of the engine room of power in this way. Parliamentary government does not (and we are prepared to argue, should not) work in this way. Our third theme is that Moore omits the dark side of public value. We laughed aloud when we read Alford's suggestion that Moore does lean toward the dark side and that we have ‘an old-fashioned notion of the state's coercive function’. Alford's notion of the ‘dark side’ refers to helping citizens understand and comply with essentially benign laws and regulations (for example, paying their due taxes, rehabilitation of juveniles, rationing of services, vaccinations). States do nasty things to people within their borders and sometimes without. There is no mention of spying on citizens, arresting suspected terror suspects without evidence, persecution of whistle blowers, and trampling on human rights. And heaven forbid we should be old-fashioned and mention rendition, torture by proxy, sleep deprivation under interrogation or even the detention of Australian citizens in Guantanamo. In case he has not noticed, command, control and punishment are alive and well in most governments throughout the world including the Australian government. Our simple point is that Moore's prescriptions can work well when there is some pre-existing measure of social acceptance and low levels of risk and conflict. Aaron Wildsavsky's (1979:402) epigrammatic story about speaking truth to power captures our point: The King said: ‘Venerable Nagasena, will you converse with me?’Nagasena: ‘If your Majesty will speak with me as wise men converse I will; but if your Majesty speaks with me as kings converse, I will not.’‘How then converse the wise, venerable Nagasena?’‘The wise do not get angry when they are driven into a corner, kings do.’ We were almost as amused at some of the positions ascribed to us. We never saw ourselves as traditionalists supporting the Wilsonian politics-administration divide. If we must wear a hat, we suggest realpolitik; that is we have a marked preference for reforms based on hard, practical considerations rather than on moral or idealistic concerns (Hirsch, Kett and Trefil 2002). So, we do not agree we are ‘legitimising the trend over the last 15-20 years in which public managers have been increasingly cowed by the undue dominance of their political masters’. Instead, we are pointing out that the dominant players in the authorising environment are the prime minister, the ministers, and the majority party. Anyone surveying the past 15-20 years would be foolish to deny there has been, in our preferred language, a search for greater political responsiveness. This call for political responsiveness is legitimate. Alford simply misses the point when he pejoratively talks of officials being cowed, suffering undue dominance, sitting humbly on the sidelines. We cannot and should not go back to an era when a group of unelected ‘Seven Dwarfs’ ruled the Australian public service for decades. They were able to monopolise the provision of advice and often dictate to ministers in an environment where there was little intellectual or institutional challenge to their positions. The most dominant, Sir Roland Wilson, was secretary of the Treasury for 15 years and regularly participated at cabinet as if he were a senior minister. Later ministers resented this bureaucratic stranglehold and it is not surprising they wanted greater responsiveness and to consider more policy options. They also turned to an army of ministerial advisers to assist their cause. There is an argument that these political actors, not public servants, could play a legitimate public value role. It is hard to accept the demands of ministers were unreasonable. In a democratic state, the dominance of the political masters is due, not undue. For Alford, the pendulum now ‘is swinging too far in the other direction’ so the mission of the public value approach is to reverse the trend toward greater political responsiveness. Of course he is entitled to advocate any mission he believes in but, let's be clear, he is inviting public officials to adopt a normative position contrary to the expressed wishes of the governments of the past 20 years. So, our observation that public managers are being sold some dangerous concepts under neutral-sounding managerial language seems reasonable. We do think entrepreneurial officials are taking on a ‘hazardous pastime’ in the service of a normative position that flies in the face of the elected government's preferences. Of course scholars in the groves of academe can argue for what ought to be, but public officials in service need to be a tad more cautious. As Shergold (2008) observes: Public servants who come to believe, intellectually or ethically, that they have a view of the national interest superior to that of the elected government need to leave and enjoy the freedom of pursuing policy goals from the outside. We agree wholeheartedly with Alford on the need to take the argument forward. We sought to do so with our ladder of public value and positive comments about public value and service delivery. We also think it would be productive to explore Gains and Stoker's (2008) argument that in Westminster systems public value will be easier to adopt in local settings and for localised decision-making. We recognise that the public value approach struck a responsive chord in the hearts of several Australian officials. We know that many ANZSOG course members accept the new doctrine and enjoy the teaching untroubled by alternative theoretical approaches. However, we do not agree that the best way forward is simply ‘engaging with his (Moore's) contribution, and seeking to take it further’. That is far too limiting. We consider an exclusive focus on public value far too one-sided and note in passing that the vast majority of ANZSOG teaching cases seem designed to lead managers to that approach and only that approach. Alford is an advocate. At times it seems that our crime is we dare to criticise Moore. So, to be loud and clear, we do not denigrate Moore. We wrote our article on public value because Moore's book is seminal. He engaged critically with traditional public administration. Now, we engage critically with him. We do not put his work on a pedestal. We see our task, and the task of anyone training current and future public managers, as exploring the limits not only of public value but also of the other approaches to improving public policy-making and management. If we are ‘setting the record straight’, then let it be noted there are more stairways to the heaven of better policy-making and better management than envisaged by public value.