Results and lessons from Canada's PS2000

Canada has been a world leader in administrative reform, eager to experiment during turbulent times in public administration. Public Service 2000, an attempt to instill the Canadian public service into a people- and results-oriented management culture, has been widely heralded as among the boldest of recent Canadian administrative reforms. Results from implementing PS2000 were expected within a decade of its 1990 launch. Halfway through that timeframe, the results are surprising, complex, contradictory and paradoxical. For example, in the second year of implementation, the longer term solutions of PS2000 conflicted with a financial crisis demanding fast results, and PS2000 principles, throughout implementation, contradicted certain traditional public service values. Reflecting on their experience, individuals who participated in PS2000 confirmed lessons in the extant literature, and suggested lessons specific to Canadian circumstances. PS2000 has been an unavoidable and much-needed effort to reform the Canadian public service, though perhaps inevitably it fell short of expectation. Yet, inside opinion remains mixed, seeking rationalist explanations, and expressing dissatisfaction over the progress of implementation. PS2000 has been absorbed into a much broader plan to reinvent federal government administration and the role of the state in Canadian society. Continuing difference of opinion may well call for a more fundamental change in administrative and managerial doctrine, especially with respect to launching future comprehensive administrative reform projects.     

Transnationality and diaspora advocacy: lessons from disaster

A number of catastrophic disasters in the last decade have raised questions about their transnational impacts and about the role of the diaspora. The 2010 Haiti earthquake, the focus of our study, provided a lens to further our understanding of evolving conceptualizations about transnationalism, transmigrants, and social capital. We hypothesize that sustained ‘intensive transnationalism’ by diaspora and linking forms of social capital between diaspora, other civil society organizations and advocacy groups, and government institutions are critical during post-disaster recovery in affected nation states and in countries to which survivors turn for refuge. We conducted 103 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with a wide range of civil society actors in South Florida, Boston, New York, Atlanta, and Washington DC between June 2010 and June 2015. We found that linking forms of social capital were more important after the earthquake than in previous disasters. Overall, the longevity and variety of Haitian diaspora advocacy work, particularly in immigration, have resulted in broader social networks and alliances, work groups, task forces, interfaith coalitions, and support groups to address complex social and policy issues.     

Opening late-industrializing economies: lessons from Argentina and Australia

Economic liberalization has met substantial resistance in polities as different as Argentina and Australia. For these late industrializing nations the verb protect came to mean much more than just granting favors to industrialists. It also involved reducing the risks previously taken by societies engaged in economic modernization. After histories of vulnerability to external forces, they deliberately fostered collusion between the public and private sectors in an attempt to achieve benefits at the lowest cost for participants from all social classes. Consequently, economic liberalization now demands more than revisions in economic logic and the attitudes of industrialists, as recent attempts to reform economic strategy in both nations indicate. For three generations who were nurtured on these rent seeking notions of political economy, it requires a fundamental transformation of popular attitudes about the creation and distribution of private and public goods.This article is a substantially revised version of a paper I presented at the 46th International Congress of Americanists, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, July 4–8, 1988. I am especially grateful to Carlos Waisman who invited me to write the paper, to an anonymous reader for this journal who suggested many useful revisions, and to the journal's editor, William Ascher, for his leadership.     

Post-conflict reconstruction and citizenship agendas: lessons from Beirut

How does post-conflict reconstruction embody citizenship agendas? By emphasizing the intersections between urban planning, architecture and political community in Hizballah's reconstruction discourse following the 2006 war, this article explores the articulation of such agendas in the historical production of urban space. The first section explores the denial of urban space and membership in the political community to Lebanon's Shi'a in the reconstruction of Beirut following the 1975–1990 civil war. The second section introduces Harat Hreik and the struggle over its reconstruction as resistance, on the part of Hizballah and its cadres, to this exclusion. The party's approach, anchored in an innovative not-for-profit NGO, ‘The Solemn Promise Project’ (Mashru' Wa'ad al-Sadiq), asserted the claims of its constituency to a place in both the city and the nation over considerations of profit. This citizenship agenda, inclusionary in sectarian terms, however, entailed its own set decidedly class-based inclusions and exclusions.     

Managing local development: lessons from Spain

This paper analyzes an operational method that regional government agencies can use to enable locally-based firms to compete effectively in their industries. This method, which emerged in southern Spain after the transition to democracy, embodies many precepts found in the contemporary public management literature. The paper begins the task of cumulating the clinical knowledge needed to translate action plan precepts into specific managerial decisions.     

Abandoned housing: Exploring lessons from baltimore

Abstract

Population loss and economic decline have resulted in thousands of abandoned homes in major U.S. cities. Although abandoned homes are symptomatic of other problems, they also contribute to neighborhood decline and frustrate revitalization. This article provides an overview of the national scope of abandoned housing and profiles Baltimore's strategy for addressing this problem.

Challenges in Baltimore's revitalization planning include the necessity of and financial requirements for a comprehensive approach and the difficulty of reaching consensus. Widespread property “flipping” hampers prevention. Efforts to acquire and demolish units are constrained by difficulties in tracking ownership, felons’ ownership of derelict units, and a shortage of staffing to process takings. Challenges in rehabilitating and marketing row houses include the need for subsidies to make units affordable to the most likely buyers, the omnipresence of lead paint, and the lack of foreign immigration. The article proposes a more strategic approach to the city's revitalization planning.     

Public management reform and lessons from experience in New Zealand

This article is edited from a speech delivered to the University of Victoria, Wellington—IPMN Workshop on the theme lessons from experience in New Zealand. The author articulates a number of lessons that have been learned, and identifies some lessons that should have been learned. Scott writes from the perspective of having been directly and centrally involved in the development and implementation of what has been characterized as “the New Zealand model” of public management for more than twenty years, a record of service that continues to date. The views expressed also benefit from extensive consulting by the author for governments around the world. Among the lessons learned are (a) the need for clarity of roles, responsibilities and accountability in the implementation of management reform, (b) the importance of matching decision capacity to responsibility, (c) the significance of ministerial commitment and clarity on expectations, (d) the advantages gained from structural innovations within the New Zealand cabinet, (e) the need to analyze disasters carefully for what they teach, (f) approaches to embrace and foibles to avoid in implementing performance specification, (g) problems caused by confusion over ownership and improper assessment of organizational capability, (h) the fact that actually doing strategic management in the public sector is hugely complicated, (i) that it is time to put an end to the notion that there is an “extreme model” of public management in application in New Zealand, and (j) that public management, government and governance innovations in New Zealand are no longer novel compared to those advanced in other nations. With respect to lessons not learned satisfactorily, many are simply the dark shadow of positive lessons, i.e., having not understood or implemented the successes achieved in some parts of New Zealand government into others. The author concludes with an admonition to avoid jumping too quickly, in response to post-electoral rhetoric, to the conclusion that past reforms in have to be modified quickly and radically, and that the New Zealand Model has failed.     

Education,identity, and community: lessons from Jewish emancipation

Why do some minority communities take up opportunities for education while others reject them? To shed light on this, we study the impact of Jewish Emancipation in nineteenth century Europe on patterns of education. In Germany, non-religious and Reform Jews dramatically increased their rates of education. In the less developed parts of Eastern Europe, Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox communities imposed unprecedented restrictions on secular education and isolated themselves from society. Explaining this bifurcation requires a model of education that is different from the standard human capital approach. In our model, education not only confers economic benefits but also transmits values that undermine the cultural identity of minority groups. We show that it is individually rational for agents who benefit least from rising returns to education to respond by reducing their investment in education. Group-level sanctions for high levels of education piggyback upon this effect and amplify it.     

Adapting to closed-list proportional representation: lessons from Ukraine

This paper examines the implications of Ukraine’s move from a mixed electoral system to one of proportional representation in the 2006 parliamentary elections. In particular, it seeks to understand how the elimination of district contests affected the two major parties’ strategies in selecting candidates. Two strategies are outlined: prioritizing inclusion and prioritizing cohesion. Under the former, parties co-opt unaffiliated district deputies to improve their electoral fortunes despite potential costs to party discipline. The latter involves parties selecting affiliated deputies on the expectation of greater loyalty if elected. The analysis reveals that while the ruling party, Our Ukraine, employed a cautious version of inclusion, its opponent, the Party of Regions, emphasized cohesion. The findings show that “one size does not fit all” when it comes to how parties react to the introduction of list-only systems. Furthermore, given the greater subsequent success of The Party of Regions in gaining office, the results question the degree to which ruling parties benefit electorally from greater inclusion when responding to the advent of more proportional electoral rules.     

Past and present African citizenships of slave descent: lessons from Benin

This paper takes up the notion of citizenship and ethnicity as forms of belonging in the context of globalisation. The discussion draws on a case study focusing on a Fulfuldephone servile group from Northern Benin called the Gando. Since pre-colonial times, their servile status ascribed by birth has been an argument for placing them at the margins of their society and excluding them from political participation. While still claiming their belonging to the nation-state of Benin and the Fulbe's culture, the Gando have progressively built a new social identity that is showing to be a new ethnic group. In the context of the decentralisation reform implemented in 2002–2003, the Gando have taken the opportunity to access local power; they conquered municipal power in the 2003 and 2008 local elections. In doing so they opened the gates to a full citizenship that in the context of today's Benin means a clientelistic citizenship. Contrary to recent literature focused on the simultaneous emergence of belonging dynamics and violent conflicts in the context of recent globalisation in developing countries, the author argues that belonging dynamics do not necessarily imply violent conflicts and exclusion dynamics.     

National health insurance: Some lessons from the Canadian experience

In the current American debate over national health insurance an examination of the Canadian governmental experience is very instructive. Canada is enough like the United States to make the effects of Canadian health insurance policies rather like a large natural experiment. The Canadian experience—universal government health insurance administered by the ten provinces with some fiscal and policy variations—can be used to predict the impact in the United States of proposed national health insurance plans on the medical care system, and the reaction of mass publics and national policymakers to these effects.The central purpose of the Canadian national health insurance was to reduce and hopefully eliminate financial barriers to medical care. In this it succeeded. But it also produced results which Canadian policymakers never anticipated: essentially unexpected side-effects on cost, quality, organization, and manpower distribution of the particular national health insurance program adopted. It should be cause for concern, the article concludes, that most of the prominent American national health insurance proposals resemble the Canadian program in failing to provide a single level of government with both the means and incentives to curb the inflationary effects of national health insurance. The lesson from Canada is that unless the system has very strong anti-inflationary mechanisms and incentives built into it, national health insurance will feed the fires of medical inflation despite great formal governmental authority to control it.     

Fighting fiscal corruption: lessons from the Tanzania Revenue Authority

Over the last decade, several African countries have undertaken comprehensive reforms of their tax administrations to increase revenue and curb corruption. This article examines recent experiences in the fight against corruption in the Tanzania Revenue Authority (TRA). Two lessons of broader relevance are highlighted. Firstly, even with relatively high wages and good working conditions, corruption may continue to thrive. In a situation where there is high demand for corrupt services, it is unrealistic to provide tax officers with pay rates that can compensate for the amount gained through bribery. Without extensive and effective monitoring, wage increases may produce not only a highly paid, but also a highly corrupt tax administration. Secondly, hiring and firing procedures may lead to more corruption. Corrupt tax officers often operate in networks, which also include external actors. These corruption networks seem to have been strengthened because many of those fired were recruited to the private sector as ‘tax experts’. This partly explains why the positive process experienced in the initial phase of the new revenue authority was later reversed. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Designing policy resilience: lessons from the Affordable Care Act

Policy Sciences - Public policies are the products of political conflict, constituted by mixes of diverse tools and instruments intended to achieve multiple goals that may change over time and not...     

Approaches to strengthening local government: lessons from Sri Lanka

This article sets out to describe recent approaches to strengthening local government within the framework of the World Bank's Municipal Management Programme (1985–95) in Sri Lanka. The article examines a number of innovations adopted within the programme that are of general relevance to the task of strengthening local government throughout the developing world. The article briefly outlines the background to the present system of local government showing that, whilst existing structures and functions remain relatively weak, a number of important innovations have been introduced to assist with the process of strengthening local resource mobilization and improving performance in service delivery, and enhancing certain aspects of accountability, particularly those areas concerned with the allocation and use of public funds. Since a number of these innovations have wide applicability to the process of local government strengthening and reform it is hoped that this article will demonstrate the practical relevance of certain key innovations for practitioners and policy makers elsewhere. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Public Admin. Dev. Vol. 17 : 251–265 (1997). No. of Figures: 0. No. of Tables: 0. No. of Refs: 13.     

Feminising British Politics: Six Lessons from Devolution in Scotland and Wales

Modest levels of female representation at the House of Commons are in sharp contrast to the Nordic‐levels of representation achieved in the Scottish Parliament and the National Assembly for Wales since devolution in 1999. One apparent advantage of devolution is the opportunity that it provides for lesson‐learning across jurisdictions. This article offers six lessons on women's political representation—three positive and three negative—drawn from the experience of devolution in Scotland and Wales. We draw conclusions from these lessons, including the need to keep parties under scrutiny to ensure they deliver on their rhetorical commitments. We also postulate that gender equality might prove too important to be left to political parties and consider whether there is a need to consider stronger measures such as mandatory quotas.