The challenge with public private partnerships is great, but the rewards are greater, and one overlooked and unmentioned in this article, is the greater rapport occurring with government as private actors perform public work, thus infusing the concept of the public good more deeply into their organizations.
You Say You Want a Revolution
By Paul L. Posner
In a previous column, I discussed the “silent revolution” that is transforming the public sector: increasingly, all levels of government are relying on a wide and diverse range of third parties to develop, design and implement public programs. The federal government is using more indirect tools, such as contracts, grants, loans and tax expenditures, to achieve national goals through states, localities, nonprofits and private companies. State and local leaders are also realizing how reliant they are on other sectors to meet public goals and expectations, whether it is private and nonprofit contractors for child care or private shipping companies for port security.
In this column, I’ll discuss the implications of these trends for public managers.
As a greater range of actors is invited and empowered to share in the process of determining program goals and delivery, results are far less certain than might be obtained through traditional hierarchies. The disconnects between smart policy proposals hatched inside government and the results achieved years later are greater, particularly if we fail to understand this more demanding and complex public management environment.
The greater complexity faced by public administrators is depicted in the following chart developed by the Government Accountability Office.
The traditional world of direct government provision was able to focus on the right dimension of the chart since the management environment of the government agency was principally responsible for the results of government programs. Whether it was the Forest Service or the Veterans Administration, the government agency itself controlled the funding, the rules and the employees responsible for achieving the agency’s goals.
However, in the third-party governance world, the management of agencies is just one of several important factors influencing results. As the chart indicates, achieving goals in third-party environments requires focusing on the selection and design of the tool used to implement the program as well as on the nature of the third-party actors participating in the program. For programs such as Medicaid and homeland security, the kinds of tools deployed, e.g., grants and regulations, and the incentives and capacities of third-party actors, e.g., state and local governments, have a greater bearing on results than the internal workings of federal agencies themselves. Even agencies commonly thought of as relying on traditional hierarchies (i.e., the Internal Revenue Service) have become increasingly dependent on third parties to achieve their goals. The IRS, for instance, recently contracted out the collection of a portion of delinquent tax debt and fundamentally depends on other sectors, such as employers and banks, to accurately report on wages, interest and other items of taxpayer income or deductions.
