Editorial: ‘The seamless web of circumstance’

As we begin 2021, the international family of public policy and administration scholars and practitioners seeks to comprehend the turbulent events of the preceding year. These include the shockwave Covid-19 delivered to the social, economic and political systems of the world; the outburst of social justice protests; the continuing angst regarding climate change; and deepening political and social polarization. Oozing alongside this litany of convulsions is a list of noxious problems: a rise in relative poverty and unemployment, increasing inequality and forced migration, among them. Although each has separate causes, they remain linked together in a ‘seamless web of circumstance’ (Plowden, 1967) that delivers some of the greatest collective challenges to national public administrations for over a generation. It is from the practitioners and professional experts that policy-makers seek solutions. But they must also ensure successful delivery. While searching for antidotes to these misfortunes, they should keep in mind the final paragraph of Mandela’s (1994, p. 617) autobiography:

I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb.

The sequence of disasters that 2020 bestowed upon the globe coincided with a rise in mistrust of experts, distrust of politicians and mainstream news and a continuing rise of populist political movements of the left and right. There are many steep hills to climb.

The statist responses to these challenges, although supported by many, nonetheless were often in conflict with the individualist perspective of market-oriented old-style NPM supporting politicians and citizens. These contradictions are not new, very little in the human condition is, it is simply the technological and scientific solutions that change. As Burke reflected in 1790: ‘Government is not made in virtue of natural rights, which may and do exist in total independence of it … [But] by [people] having a right to everything they want everything. Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants’ (p. 151). The greatest of these wants is security and healthcare, with political leaders responding to the pandemic by mobilizing the resources of the state as though for a war. The ramifications for politics and for those societies that define themselves as a democracy will be seen for many years. 2020, therefore, caused further reflection on the role of government and in particular the role of public servants in terms of preparedness and expertise. In that sense this issue is a natural continuation of Public Money & Management’s (PMM’s) theme issue on Developing civil servants (Vol. 40, No. 8, November 2020), with its contributions from academics, former ministers and former senior civil servants.

In his editorial introducing Developing civil servants, Michael Bichard explained that the theme was being published because: ‘Those of us for whom civil service reform has long been an obsession were struggling to keep the flame burning but most others seemed to have concluded that there were other more pressing issues’. As he also noted, however, reform of the public service in the UK and other jurisdictions is now back on the agenda. Alongside the core values he identified (integrity, honesty, impartiality, and objectivity) there are concerns regarding the ‘proper’ relationship between generalists and specialists, core competencies, the diversity of teams and delivery capacity, the role of advisers to ministers and the role of ministers themselves. This current issue of PMM revisits these questions, but via papers and articles on official responses to Covid-19, attempts to address corruption and specific instances of reform. One of the many benefits of globalization is the opportunity to learn from good practice elsewhere. In the UK, the capacity to train and develop public servants and encourage them to remain in government employ has been impacted by the fragmentation of recruitment and training. One symptom being the abolition of the Civil Service College (later the National School for Government) in its former configuration. This has been accompanied with high staff turnover. Other jurisdictions have sought to take a more formalized approach to developing civil servants. For example Singapore established their Civil Service College (CSC) in 2001 and, despite some parochial criticism, France retains the Ecole Nationale d’Administration for the training of high-level skills.

In Singapore, the CSC is part of the Prime Minister’s Office and all officials receive up to 100 hours’ work-related and personal development training a year. The private sector, especially the tech giants, are also displaying good practice. Google uses a mix of data to analyse their staff training needs, while Amazon identified the company would face a skills gaps in data science, security engineering and business analysis, and therefore invested substantially in an initiative called ‘Upskilling 2025’. The giant manufacturer, General Electric, has long set an example, establishing a management training campus at Crotonville in 1956, that anticipates the company’s (and broader society’s) needs for leadership, neuroscience, engineering and advanced technology. These are just some instances of advanced and continuous development that have lessons for the wider development of public servants.

International lessons from dealing with Covid-19

We begin this issue of PMM with a range of discussions that explore the impact of Covid-19 and government’s response to it. The lessons from this experience will be varied and will be studied for several years, possibly decades, and will have an impact on public service development (and politics) for more than a generation. Elections in a time of Covid-19 account for a significant set of contributions in this issue. In a new developments article, James argues that elections in many countries have been affected by Covid-19, presenting a challenge to the usual administration of politics and democracy (James, 2021). Because of the risk of infection, electoral officials had to plan and manage elections in emergency situations and encountered a range of difficulties. In some cases, important elections have been postponed—initially for up to a year. The debate article by Johnston & Fenwick continues with this exploration of the impact of the pandemic on local politics, asking, ‘would the response to the Covid-19 crisis have been speedier and more effective if decisions and resources were truly devolved?’ (Johnston & Fenwick, 2021). While noting that, ‘there remain unresolved issues about the relationship between sub-national and local government’. Such questions are being asked globally and the debate article by Musiał-Karg and Kapsa (2021) links into the electoral issues raised by James and explores them from a Polish perspective. They note that, despite the pandemic, ‘Poland initially decided to go ahead with a presidential election scheduled for 10 May 2020’ and that, ‘the government mandated all-postal voting to ensure social distancing’. Krimmer, Duenas-Cid & Krivonosova’s (2021a) debate article also argues that, ‘during a pandemic, many countries and organizations must decide whether to postpone upcoming elections’. At this point:

If the decision is made to hold the election, three main scenarios come to mind: continue using the existing system but include measures to ensure the health of participants; or look for alternatives among remote voting channels which could ensure social distancing is guaranteed either by postal voting, or internet voting.

Krimmer et al. conclude that:

Creating an internet based remote voting system is clearly an ugly, and infeasible, option in the short term but it does represent a good system for consideration for a long-lasting solution. It is safe for participants and mitigates the effects of low voter turnout, but requires adaptations to electoral law and administration and, especially, developing secure and reliable systems.

In their main paper in this issue, Krimmer et al. (2021b) explore some of the methodologies for implementing e-voting, arguing that ‘New ways of voting in elections are being sought by electoral administrations worldwide who want to reverse declining voter turnouts without increasing electoral budgets’. Although not expressly analysing Covid-19, their paper provides the evidence for the debate piece and ‘presents a novel approach to cost accounting for multi-channel elections based on local elections in Estonia’, especially in a time of political and economic disruption. The acceleration of the adoption of public sector accrual accounting, with COVID-19 as the dynamic, is also the core of the debate article by Cohen, Manes Rossi, Caperchione & Brusca, which, furthermore, points to the pandemic as a punctuation point that will reset managerial practice for the future.

Agostino, Arnaboldi & Diaz Lema’s new development article continues the theme of arguing that, for the purpose of good governance and society, ‘in an unexpected circumstance, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, public service delivery cannot be suspended, but must be delivered online, relying on the available digital technology. Social media, specifically, have been widely used to reach a broader portion of the population’ (Agostino et al., 2021). Their article ‘highlights three main dilemmas in service delivery: user engagement; planning and control; and costs’, which illustrates the ‘social and organizational challenges connected to digital transformation’. While Wang et al. (2021) discuss these issues from the perspective of the administrative accountability system in China which has evolved during public health crises. They argue that by, ‘holding public officials accountable, the system hopes to improve their performance during emergencies’. They warn, however, that ‘Covid-19 exposed an unexpected effect of the system. Instead of incentivizing public officials to take responsibility, it may have discouraged them from making timely, but potentially risky, decisions’. This perspective is alluded to in other jurisdictions by Cepiku et al. (2021), who argue that:

Covid-19 is not only a crisis of intensive care but a social and humanitarian crisis. Until mass vaccination is undertaken, control of contagion will rely on responsible behaviour by citizens. Strategies for fighting Covid-19 in different regions of Italy have shown that an area-specific approach, not just hospital-focused, pays off.

Cepiku et al. propose a form of community co-production which would at least address some of the issues highlighted by Wang et al. Ahrens and Ferry (2021), however, present a debate article exploring the support that good, competent accounting systems can provide to local government during the time of crisis. In many of these Covid-19 related contributions we can see the importance of accountability and transparency, as well as technological reform, to address corruption and inefficiency.

Institutional change

Moving on from concentrating on Covid-19, this issue examines several case studies on institutional change. Overmans (2021), explores change in a period of continuing austerity. He argues that ‘organizational change is often proposed as a solution to austerity. Implementing change when there is no budget, however, is difficult’, and his paper, ‘explains how a major Dutch city implemented radical changes in the wake of the global financial crisis’. The paper by Taylor et al. (2021), uses ‘evidence from English and Scottish fire and rescue services from 2010 to 2016’ to show how ‘divergent performance management regimes can affect public accountability. Performance management regimes enable agencies and the public to hold public sector organizations accountable by facilitating evaluation of their accomplishments’. But that, ‘local as opposed to central, control over performance management can have quite different implications for public accountability’. In many attempt at organizational reform, the outcome’s success will be decided by the performance and attitude of the public servants themselves and Hinna et al. (2021) argue that, ‘previous research has suggested that an individual’s public service motivation (PSM) is positively linked to a preference for public sector employment’. As such, the nature of the reform will have an impact on PSM and that in turn will affect the outcome. This is something that Naveed & Salman’s debate article takes further when returning to Vakkuri & Johanson April 2018 paper in PMM, to ‘note that the public sector has witnessed hybrid arrangements as an unintended consequence of transforming “public hierarchies” into markets’ and that ‘increasingly wicked and complex societal issues are compelling the public sector to collaborate with the private sector, third sector and civil society for public policy-making and implementation. Hence, by design or default, governance networks have emerged as a critical feature of contemporary public administration’. Exworthy and Lafond’s (2021) new development article continues with the hybrid theme by examining ‘income received by National Health Service (NHS) providers from non-NHS sources’. Which in 2015–2016, ‘amounted to 9.1% of their revenue. In the English NHS, there is an increasing reliance on non-NHS income to provide revenue for NHS organizations, due in part to government’s austere financial plans’.

Global issues

The paper by Brown moves away from all these concerns to explore a case study in the Solomon Islands. But it does underline how issues of accountability and transparency, indeed good governance, are global concerns. ‘Using the theory of indigenous alternatives and a benchmark of indigenous financial reporting expectations, his paper ‘examines the challenges to accountable governance of the nine provincial governments of the Solomon Islands for the years 1998 to 2017. Every provincial government consistently received disclaimed or qualified opinions from the state auditor’. Brown ‘explains why the regional development of all provinces of the Solomon Islands could be improved if rudimentary forms of financial reporting were to be addressed’.

This first issue of PMM’s Volume 41 is a full one, with contributions devoted to the challenging problems of our time. Let us hope, however, that 2021 is a little less challenging than the year that is now behind us.