Proposing mega-policies to solve social and economic problems no longer carries much appeal for Canadian policy makers. This reluctance is a product of perceived failures of many large-scale programmes, the heightened political conflict promised by such interventions and, of course, continuing pressure to reduce government spending. Nevertheless, complex problems persist. Reliance on incremental responses is likely to prove insufficient to redress such problems and there will continue to be a need for policy responses of considerable scope. However, the nagging problem is that governments, despite possessing considerable analytic expertise, often struggle to deliver comprehensive strategies in a timely fashion. This suggests that we pay closer attention to the role of government bureaucracy in policy innovation, and recognize that the difficulty in producing comprehensive responses to problems may be due less to policy and political errors and more to organizational factors.Consider the three cases that inform this study. The first involves the disjointed efforts of the federal Department of Energy, Mines and Resources (EMR) to achieve energy security following two oil crises ). 5 By the term successful, we are not referring to the content of the final design. Significant changes in policy direction are bound to be accompanied by clashes over what constitutes the appropriate policy stance. Nevertheless, we think our analysis is salient for two kinds of critics of such interventions. Critics who claim comprehensive policies were not bold enough should consider whether there was sufficient capacity to design a more ambitious programme. Critics who believe the policy went too far should look for future circumstances when such capacity has been created, and think about how to neutralize such capacity from inside and outside the government.Abstract. Governments often operate under considerable pressure to respond effectively to the emergence of increasingly complex policy dilemmas. This article first explains some key difficulties in bringing forth comprehensive policy interventions. Despite the ubiquity of social and political constraints to policy innovation, many failures can be attributed to public bureaucracies that are not designed to deal with complex problems, and which all too quickly exceed their policy-making capacities. This study then analyzes why comprehensive policy-making does sometimes occur, and links its occurrence to bureaucratic design factors, arguing that extending organizational capacity for innovation involves more than generous budgets and expertise. The article draws upon, and develops further, Mintzberg's ideas on administrative adhocracy to show how administrative units can be organized to enable bureaucracies to transcend professional compartmentalization and routine; and how structures can be designed for comprehensive policy innovation. The study focuses on Canadian federal bureaucracy, and it is supported by three case studies of recent policy experiments: energy, environment and AIDS....
The connection between administrative structure and policy strategy for public agencies is neither well understood, nor widely appreciated in political science. Much more emphasis is placed on the structure of linkages between bureaucracies and other political institutions. In this article, 1 advance an argument explaining the importance of strategy in policymaking for public agencies, and demonstrate how the concept needs to be refined in order for it to have meaning for public sector organizations. Strategy is analyzed in terms of two categories of uncertainty: generalized and contingent. Because of the ubiquitousness of generalized uncertainty in public policymaking, developing a capacity for anticipating uncertainty problems is critical in strategy formation. Whether that capacity exists is a function of administrative structure. 1 further present an argument for why structure deserves consideration as a political and technical matter, and not simply as a consequence of political preferences.For most of the past decade and a half, public sector planning has been in disfavor. Much of the hostility toward planning has been directed at the American federal bureaucracy. Recently, however, a more favorable climate seems to have emerged regarding the prospects of large-scale bureaucratic planning. But even as new policy ventures -such as massive reform of the American health care insurance and delivery system -are contemplated, the ghosts of past failures serve as reminders that success entails more than advancing innovative policy ideas; it necessarily includes the bureaucratic structures and processes involved in the administration of new policy.
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