Risk Management and Risk Avoidance in Agency Decision Making

Abstract

Despite decades of efforts to enhance the public's role in bureaucratic decision making, citizens still tend to have little influence on the decisions that public managers make. Solutions often focus on the processes or structures of participation, but such changes may be of limited effectiveness if the structure is only part of the problem. Although much research has argued the normative justification for including the public, noting that frameworks that do not encourage genuine participation may diminish rather than enhance public influence, there has been less focus on how participants’ divergent frames of reference may also diminish the influence of public input. This research explores this gap from a risk management perspective, suggesting that public managers tend to view risk as something to be managed, whereas citizens tend to view risk as best avoided.

Organizational sensegiving: Indicators and nonprofit signaling

“…In light of our finding that reporting no fundraising expenses is associated with fairly dramatic increases in donations, a donor for whom symbolic results are important may not look much beyond basic expense ratios. The pressure organizations feel to report low overhead (and low fundraising in particular) is well documented at this point (Eckerd, ) and our results suggest that there may be a tangible benefit to doing so. Despite the contradictory nature of the result, reporting no fundraising expense results in more donations.…”

“…They have to strike a delicate balance between differentiating themselves from their competition as worthy resource recipients (Barman, ) and maintaining legitimacy as a professional nonprofit, complete with the public trust that entails (e.g., Hansmann, ; Sargeant & Lee, ). Isomorphic pressures may explain why, despite the need for differentiation, certain tropes are constant across organizational profiles on watchdog sites (Eckerd, ). The push for evidence‐based metrics could be reflective of mimetic isomorphism, a “standard response to uncertainty” (DiMaggio & Powell, , p. 150) whereby organizations use evidence‐based metrics or professional language because it is what sophisticated donors expect.…”

Toward an Entrepreneurial Public Sector

“…Public employees' risk aversion may also reflect their commitment to accountability and desire to avoid backlash or punishment for failed efforts to alter their agencies' current portfolio of services. Public agency experimentation likely displeases the general public, who possess low tolerance for a trial-and-error approach to public policy implementation (Eckerd, 2014) and the apparent waste of public resources (Townsend, 2013). Ever watchful for failed efforts and fixated on wastefulness, agency leaders, policy makers, and the media continually scrutinize public employees' decision making and frequently jump at the chance to identify and eradicate the source of waste and abuse of public funds (Borins, 2001).…”

Administering Public Participation

“…The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969, one of the first pieces of legislation that promoted participation in broad (and ambiguous) terms, exemplifies this complicated operation. Participation under NEPA was intended, at least in part, to empower citizens in environmental policy (Hanks & Hanks, 1969), but it has essentially become legalized and formalized in such a way that it becomes another facet of administrative decision-making rather than a catalyst of genuine dialogue between citizens and their government (Eckerd, 2014; O’Faircheallaigh, 2010; Shepherd & Bowler, 1997). In many respects, participation has become an administrative issue rather than an issue of democracy (Durant & Ali, 2013), but public participation literature is largely silent on how administrators actually manage public participation.…”