What Will New Governance Mean for the Federal Government?

Across the country, there is wide interest in new ways of doing the public's business. Most of the activity so far, chronicled in books like Osborne and Gaebler's (1992) Reinventing Government and Barzelay and Armajani's Breaking Through Bureaucracy (1992), has been in state and local government. (See also Frederickson, 1992; Roselle, 1992; and Walters, 1992). President Clinton is a member of the movement for new governance, so the new ideas will soon be put to the test in Washington, DC. An Emerging, Unmapped Area As Zhiyong Lan and David Rosenbloom suggest in Administration in Transition? (1992), new governance is more a cluster of ideas and symbols than a rigorous, tested body of thought. New ways of doing the public's business are emerging gradually and unevenly. Furthermore, especially at the national level, most of the advocates for new governance are public policy specialists rather than students of public administration, and they have come to new governance out of frustration about the implementation of policy ideas in their fields. As a consequence, ideas about how to reinvent the federal government are often framed in terms like human service integration, school reform, or Third Wave economic development rather than as cross-cutting ideas about public administration. To provoke a substantive debate between advocates of new governance and traditionalists in public administration, Lan and Rosenbloom present a framework for comparing old and new ideas. They emphasize how agencies operate internally, especially how they deliver services. This emphasis is appropriate because the new governance movement has focused on local and state governments, where services are delivered. As new governance reaches to the federal level, the shape of new governance may change, because in most areas of domestic policy, the federal role is not to deliver services but to provide a legal structure, pay entitlements, and supervise those who deliver services. Reinventing Interdepart-mental, Intergovernmental Rural Policy This comment presents a rough map of the directions that the new governance movement might take at the federal level. It is based on discussions at a roundtable that the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) helped to organize in October 1992.(1) NAPA's partner was the little-known but highly regarded federal Rural Development Initiative (RDI). It encompasses State Rural Development Councils in over 30 states and supporting activities in Washington, DC, and elsewhere. As of last October, RDI had been working for over two years to find new ways to address the problems of areas, and its leaders were intensely interested in the ideas of Osborne and others in the new governance movement. RDI stands out from other efforts to redesign governance in two respects. First, RDI deals with all of the issues facing America and thus cuts across virtually every public program and policy. Second, although launched by the federal government, RDI is a collaborative enterprise, involving states, local governments, tribes, the private sector, and numerous federal agencies. Although the RDI effort was limited in many respects, including weak support from the Bush White House, it is an interesting starting point for mapping how new governance might work at the federal level. New governance may take different forms in different geographic areas and for different issues. Rural areas are highly diverse, including chronically poor communities, prosperous resorts, manufacturing towns, timberlands and farm counties. This diversity is one reason why anyone can benefit from thinking about problems. The rural dimension encourages thinking about diversity rather than about generic answers. And one of the central themes of the movement to redesign governance is empowering people to design answers that fit their load situations. Why Reinvent Governance? …