The Disconnection of Advocacy and Analysis in Public Administration: A Critique of Robust Governance

A strength of public administration as a discipline is that it is concerned with both the analysis and advocacy. It explores the working of public institutions and wider systems of governance but also proposes reform mechanisms to improve their functioning. But these combined tasks are often conducted as if they were in separate worlds, to the detriment of the advocacy role. This failing, in turn, leads the advocacy arm of public administration regularly down a path of misunderstanding the nature of reform, over‐estimating the prospects for institutional change and not grasping the role of politics in any change. We use the case of the recent promotion of “robust governance” to illustrate our argument.