Implementing Open Innovation in the Public Sector: The Case of Challenge.gov

As part of the Open Government Initiative, the Barack Obama administration has called for new forms of collaboration with stakeholders to increase the innovativeness of public service delivery. Federal managers are employing a new policy instrument called Challenge.gov to implement open innovation concepts invented in the private sector to crowdsource solutions from previously untapped problem solvers and to leverage collective intelligence to tackle complex social and technical public management problems. The authors highlight the work conducted by the Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies at the General Services Administration, the administrator of the Challenge.gov platform. Specifically, this Administrative Profile features the work of Tammi Marcoullier, program manager for Challenge.gov , and Karen Trebon, deputy program manager, and their role as change agents who mediate collaborative practices between policy makers and public agencies as they navigate the political and legal environments of their local agencies. The profile provides insights into the implementation process of crowdsourcing solutions for public management problems, as well as lessons learned for designing open innovation processes in the public sector.     

Do Belgian parties undermine the democratic chain of delegation?

The Belgian party-archy violates the ideal-type chain of parliamentary delegation in many ways, insofar as political parties play a predominant role at each stage. They channel the delegation of power from voters to MPs, from Parliament to the cabinet, from the collective cabinet to individual ministers, and from ministers to their civil servants. Hence, they can be considered the effective principals in the polity, and many actors of the parliamentary chain of delegation, such as MPs, ministers, and civil servants have been reduced to mere party agents. The extreme fragmentation of the Belgian party system in combination with its increasing need for multilevel coordination have further enhanced the position of political parties in the Belgian polity. Yet, at the same time (since the early 1990s), Belgium has also witnessed a gradual decline in the informal system of partitocratic delegation and clientelistic excesses, thereby giving back part of their autonomy to some formal agents, such as the cabinet, top civil servants and some MPs. Still, one can wonder whether these corrections are sufficient to counter the strong outburst of public dissatisfaction with the way parties have run the country in past decades.     

Administrative reform in Belgium: Maintenance or modernisation?

This article aims to analyse, classify and explain similarities and differences in administrative reform in four separate Belgian administrations along four internationally observed trends in administrative reform: organisation, personnel, strategy, and finance. Comparatively, Flanders can be classified as an early moderniser, followed by the federal government, which had been locked longer in a trajectory of maintenance. The French-speaking governments of the Walloon Region and French Community are late modernisers, and compared to both the Flemish and federal government their reform efforts are more fragmented and incremental. The main factors explaining variations in administrative reform in Belgium are differences in institutional continuity, policy entrepreneurship and policy diffusion, all three of which combined to support administrative reform efforts at the Flemish and, slightly less so, at the federal levels, and were markedly absent in the French-speaking governments. Aggregated indicators of differences in political culture do not convincingly explain differences in public sector reform, but the degree of partisan control over the administration, as a meso dimension of politico-administrative culture, impacts on the French-speaking governments' resistance against certain types of organisational and human resources management reforms.     

The Brussels issue in Belgian politics

Belgium is one of the few countries that has been able effectively to accommodate major divisions along linguistic, cultural, ethnic and territorial lines within the fabric of a unitary government. However, one major issue which it has been unable to resolve is the status of its capital city, Brussels, within its devolution reforms. The status of Brussels encapsulates all aspects of the major community divisions in Belgium and has led to numerous unsuccessful legislative proposals, endless parliamentary debates, and the fall of several governments. It was not until 1980 that the Belgian government was able to deal ‘constructively’ with this issue. It did so by removing it from the national political agenda. It is likely that the status of Brussels as a non‐issue is the only resolution possible.     

Civil liberties and the left

Mzwanele Mayekiso, Township Politics: Civic Struggles for a New South Africa. Monthly Review Press: New York. 1996. pp. 288. (foreword by Mel King)

Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England, Edited by Susan D. Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky. (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995)

Modernization and the Production of Power

Kevin A. Yelvington, Producing Power: Ethnicity, Gender, and Class in a Caribbean Workplace (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 286 pp.

Milagros Pena, Theologies and Liberation in Peru: The Role of Ideas in Social Movements (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 222 pp.

Partha Chatterjee (ed), Texts of Power: Emerging Disciplines in Colonial Bengal (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 220 pp.

Carol A. Breckenridge (ed.), Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in South Asia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 261 pp.

Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion: Right‐Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States. (New York: The Guilford Press, 1995. pp. 445. $19.95.)