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Hope the high road leads us home again: A review of American administrative capacity: Decline, decay, and resilience

Document Cited in Related
Published date01 December 2022
AuthorCasey LaFrance
Date01 December 2022
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12819
BOOK REVIEW
Hope the high road leads us home again: A review
of American administrative capacity: Decline, decay,
and resilience
For the past few decades, public administration theory has focused on the ways in which 21st Century governance
does (and ought) to work. Often, such approaches compare the contemporary reality of public administration with
the centralized, hierarchical, approach to implementing and evaluating legislative solutions to economic and social
problems. Capacity, once thought to be synonymous with the creation and funding of a federal level agency bent on
procedural efficiency, has come to mean cultivating trust and sharing information between agencies, levels of gov-
ernment, and sectors of the economy in pursuit of dealing with an increasing number of “wicked”problems for
which routine solutions are not appropriate. National governments, according to Giles Pacquet, find themselves in
the position of Gulliver: at times, too large to act on contextually-driven local and regional issues but too small to
deal with international crises such as climate change or the Covid-19 pandemic. In addition to these struggles, public
administrators are also expected to effectively manage the expectations of increasingly polarized political actors and
institutions, courts and citizens involved in a dynamic legal landscape, and, in the case of former President Donald
Trump, outright sabotage. With this backdrop, Ernita Joaquin and Thomas Greitens seek to tell the story of adminis-
trative capacity's past, present, and future.
This book arrives in the wake of current concerns over the ability of the federal government to effectively
administer programs included in the omnibus spending bill, most notably proposed paid family leave programs that
186 other nations have in place. The authors trace such concerns to the genesis of public management theory and
its human resources, Theory X approach to managing employees and processes. In many ways, the authors show,
lack of capacity has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The incremental approach to implementation so common in
federal agencies, when tied to management focused on procedural efficiency, means that the public sector is often
slow to adapt to larger contextual changes in the policy environment. This leads to what the authors describe as an
inability of the federal bureaucracy to make non-routine decisions, predict shocks to the policy environment, and
escape the vicious escalation of commitment cycle. Moreover, the authors argue, little investment has been made to
address these shortcomings and train public managers for the governance challenges of the 21st century. Instead,
we saw a steady shift from the Reagan/Thatcher NPM era to the “reinvention”movement bent on leveraging market
mechanisms and corporate wherewithal to reform government. While there are success stories associated with the
hollow state, federal agencies are often left floundering in these arrangements. Joaquin and Greitens also describe
the increasingly political nature of public administration, curious cabinet appointments, and the lack of autonomy
professional bureaucrats face as another limitation on administrative capacity. The book begins with a no holds bar-
red look at the embarrassingly inadequate federal response to the Covid-19 pandemic, arguing that this event has
done quite a bit to “unmask”the present limits of administrative capacity. After, the authors flesh out the notion of
capacity and spend the next few chapters discussing the history of reforms directed at increasing capacity. After
thorough evaluation, the authors conclude that systemic reform, especially driven by concerned citizens, holds the
key to overcoming the capacity limits we have encountered.
Received: 16 November 2021 Accepted: 23 November 2021
DOI: 10.1111/padm.12819
Public Admin. 2022;100:1185–1186. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/padm © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 1185

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