Editorial: Interesting times

2022 was a series of interesting times. In the UK, the death of Her late Majesty, marking the ending of the embodied link to pre-war Empire, the Second World War and post-war Imperial British decline. But, also, more than a century of administrative reform and innovation begun under Viscount Haldane. The year ended with an unprecedented third prime minister in one year. On the global arena, the UK’s political tremor was replicated with a range of major challenges; the continuation of attempts to deal with the Covid crisis; the Russian invasion of Ukraine; growing energy prices and inflation; the continuing mass movement of migrants caused through a variety of factors, not the least of which were war and climate change. Any one of these is a threat to social order and indeed the states themselves (Massey, 2022).

The international realm of public administration, explored by articles in Public Money & Management (PMM), is immense and intricate in its structures and focus. The global literature is replete with articles and books arising from the disciplines of public administration/management, finance, accountancy, political science, public policy and their overlapping sub-disciplines. These study how policy is developed and then delivered in the form of bureaucratically structured public administrations, usually (but not always) headed by elected or appointed political figures, responding to public demand or societal challenges. So far, so straightforward. PMM focuses on these disciplines and sub-disciplines in terms of practitioner interest and academic research. The journal also recognizes that policy formulation and delivery must include the role of other disciplines, such as science and engineering, medicine, education, the arts and literature, as governments seek to deliver the panoply of services and infrastructure expected of them directly, or via a regulated private sector.

The events since the advent of Covid, however, have again made us challenge public administration to continue to advance policy solutions to the systemic problems that confront societies globally. These vary over time and space, but the academic literature approaches them from various perspectives, referring to them as ‘Grand Challenges’ (Gerton & Mitchell, 2019) or wicked issues that become wicked problems (Massey, 2022; Head & Alford, 2017). Often these are integrated across a range of policies and beyond the scope of any one jurisdiction, such as with climate change, mass migration, inflation or inequalities of wealth and power. Attempts to tackle one aspect often risk making the problem worse elsewhere—for example zero carbon policies, may, if not thought through carefully, exacerbate the poverty in some areas adding to other wicked problems. Something that may appear straightforward often has interrelated links to something that is fiendishly complex (Australian Public Service Commission, 2007).

In recent years there have been several approaches adopted to attempt to restructure public administrations’ ability to deliver sound policies to address these intractable issues. Amongst these the Australian Public Service Commission (2007) and the OECD (Gerson, 2020) have analysed a range of countries and made a series of recommendations for the reform of the senior civil service with improved recruitment and training techniques. Indeed, the OECD report compared good practice across more than 20 countries. Other approaches have included calls to value the role bureaucracy plays in supporting the necessary innovations countries require to be truly able to face the future with confidence, combining technological innovation alongside a willingness to embrace novel techniques beyond our accepted practices; in other words, to construct an entrepreneurial state (Kattel et al., 2022). This is perhaps best achieved by deploying research in the service of the entrepreneurial state, but there are dangers with this. Academia may not be up to the task.

In an earlier work, Drechsler argues that technological innovations risk making some areas of research obsolete, or at least more expensive than innovative artificial intelligence and that in itself jeopardizes true innovation. Computers are not capable of genuine artificial intelligence (yet) but are increasingly used for simple tasks such as weather reports or sports articles. They are, however straying into academia and public sector work. A recent article in the Times Higher Education discussed ‘software that writes your papers for you’ (Pells, 2017). And Drechsler (2019, p. 231) suggests that ‘it is precisely this structure, this shape, this content reducible to a table are typical, (as) what … counts for some of the most successful PA articles today, the ones the archetypical Dutch associate professor would write’. It is, Drechsler scathingly notes, a form of ‘fake research’: ‘scholarship today means that the incentive is to write replicative papers that state the same thing that we know already, for mainstream top journals; even high citation numbers do not count that much, although this is changing as we speak’ (Drechsler, 2019, p. 232). ‘In calling out these restrictive practices, Drechsler is performing a critical, indeed disruptive role. But this fits well with the advice given by the OECD and Australian government in their approach to dealing with wicked and persistent problems’ (Massey, 2022, p. 81).

In this February 2023 issue of PMM, we publish several articles that reflect these issues and approaches. For example, Garcia-Lacalle et al. (2023) explore a Spanish approach to the continuing adoption of private sector practices into the public sector, which has an interesting comparator in the article by Kuhlmann and Heuberger (2023), analysing the digital transformation of public administration. Kuhlmann and Heuberger argue ‘it is a cause for concern and criticism that the actual state of implementation, the impacts, and the hurdles faced at the local level of government have only scarcely been studied in public administration. The results of [our] study reveal several unintended and negative impacts of digital government reforms on public employees and citizens’. Pelizzo and Knox (2023) explore post-Soviet Kazakhstan and its efforts to shake off its corrupt Soviet practices and modernize.

As usual, PMM’s new volume will be bursting with case studies, comparisons and suggestions for better delivery and policy-making, but we ought to heed Drechsler’s warning regarding the need for vigilance and continue to produce new material, avoiding empty emulation of previous work. If public sector academia is not ‘real world’ relevant, then it is nothing.