The public administrator as collaborative citizen: three conceptions.

Smith, Neale

INTRODUCTION

Western welfare bureaucracies historically had little concern for or explicit place for the public in administrative decision making (Vigoda, 2002; Kathi and Cooper, 2005). The traditional bureaucracy, as Weber conceived it and as it was in its essentials implemented in the growth of public service structures, required a hierarchical and specialized division of labour, operation according to standardized rules in which all 'cases' were treated equally, the preeminence of expertise and 'men of reason' as decision makers, and the separation of politics from administration. Yet enabling members of the public to engage directly with decision makers in determining key public policy choices (i.e., 'public participation' or 'citizen engagement') has become, over the last number of decades, a subject of much academic and practical interest in Anglo-American countries. In short, we have seen many arguments for the importance of democratizing public administration. The role of the public administration practitioner is fundamentally implicated in the creation of this new democratic linkage.

The success of public participation involves a change in the conception and organization of public sector agencies. Several theorists have attempted to locate these imperatives within a coherent philosophical stance. These I have grouped here into three main streams: one which draws upon critical theory, articulated for instance by Jurgen Habermas; one that has its roots in American pragmatism, and whose sources include Dewey and James; and one that traces its ancestry to the virtue-based ethical thought of Aristotle, filtered through modern writers like Arendt or Barber. My goal in this paper is to interrogate some of these positions in greater detail, to determine if they truly do end up, as they at first seem to, with comparable prescriptions for how to open up and democratize governance and public administration. I will consider what the particular logic of each tradition would suggest in practical terms for the public administrator--how, in sum, would it affect the way in which civil servants approach their interactions with the public? Is there any practical guidance here for practice?

In the remainder of this paper, I first describe the roots of these three alternative philosophies and their implications for understanding what role(s) the public administrator can and should take in terms of promoting and supporting public engagement in the policy process. Subsequently, I argue that greater attention to the implications of these positions could be combined with the existing extensive work on methods and techniques for engaging the public in deliberative discussions, and/or within network arrangements.

Models of Collaborative Citizenship

I use the term collaborative citizenship here to refer to a situation in which public administrators interact with the public not as experts with privileged insight and right answers, but as people charged with encouraging collective processes of deliberation and discussion that identify priority issues, possible courses of action, and the best way to implement these to build upon the strengths existing already among communities and with individuals. This end point has been reached by each of the three traditions which I consider here: critical theory, pragmatism, and virtue-based theories. The three streams are not mutually exclusive, as theorists can and do draw selectively upon aspects of these different philosophies in their work. Each of these philosophies as well contains subtleties and nuances, even different strains. Inevitably some of this rich detail, worthy of further investigation in its own right, is lost in my effort to provide here a concise but overarching statement of the major claims associated with each tradition. This is not in other words a comprehensive overview.

Nor is this an exhaustive assessment of all different philosophies of public engagement. I acknowledge that there are other established approaches not investigated here, based on orientations such as feminism or traditional indigenous cultures and knowledge(s). Other writers, such as those in the broad liberal tradition (e.g., Mill, Tocqueville or Rawls) or even Karl Marx, might also be mined for potential contributions to democratic public administration. Leo Panitch, for instance, claims that both Mill and Marx shared the belief that

the real test of democratic institutions had to be their developmental dynamic. Democracy was seen not just in terms of registering people's opinions, but in terms of promoting participation in public life, through which people would grow, enrich their faculties, develop their capacities to realize themselves as members of society (Panitch, 1993, p. 6).

Finally, I must note that my assessment of the different streams is based primarily upon how the authors in the participatory state tradition have interpreted their philosophical sources, and less upon a direct reading of the sources themselves. This may have significance since the authors in several cases readily admit that they are taking their sources beyond the point where they are normally considered to go.

On critical theory, for instance:

The notion of legitimating administrative discretion on communicative grounds raises a variety of important questions.... The weakness in Habermas's reasoning is not his failure to answer such questions but rather his failure to even pose them. Habermas does not appear to recognize the potential for transforming public administration into communicative praxis from within its own structures.... In a certain sense, adopting the operation of administrative discretion to the criteria of communicative rationality is taking Habermas's project to the last place he would have thought susceptible to the logic of communicative action (Sossin, 1993, p. 378).

Or this, on a virtue-based approach to public administration:

At first, then, Arendt's sharp division between private and public seems to hold out no hope for any sort of democratic administration.... [Yet] recent reinterpretations suggest openings through which we might move toward such a use of Arendt's ideas.. It is not the case that administration is, per se, anti-political, in the Arendtian sense; rather, the problem is to conceive of institutional forms and processes that make it possible for the democratically political to appear in an administrative context (Stivers, 1999, pp. 3, 5).

To the extent that these extensions of the standard understanding of each theory might be deemed inaccurate readings of the philosophers in question, my work will reproduce those inaccuracies. Nonetheless, I think it important to begin with the understandings of those who would apply their efforts to erecting a new foundation upon which public administration theory might be practiced. It is their claims, if any claims, most likely to influence the future development of the profession.

Critical Theory

Critical theory is most commonly associated with the Frankfurt School--German philosophers beginning in the 1920s who raised concerns about how public and private bureaucracy, mass production, and consumerism were together creating an oppressive and authoritarian society in which the individual was reduced to little more than a cog in a machine. Critical theory is today most associated with the writings of Jurgen Habermas. It has been recently applied by Miller & Fox (2007) and Terrence Kelly (2004) to advocate the collaborative citizen image of public administrators. Writers in professional fields like evaluation, urban planning, and health promotion too have found critical theory a valuable basis on which to defend a more participatory form of professional practice (VanderPlaat, 1997; Forester, 1989; McCullum et al, 2004).

The larger project of critical theory, as it has evolved in Habermas' work and that of other critical theorists, has been to salvage the Enlightenment belief in human rationality and progress from the depredations of postmodernism; in other words, to maintain a place for normative thought in the face of the near-relativism fostered by much recent political and social theorizing (Ashley, 1990). The specific problem to be rectified is the predominance of rational or technocratic thought--how to achieve given ends--at the expense of public debate around the proper ends to be pursued. Critical theorists would aim to foster a situation in which open speech and communication is possible and in which collective decisions would set the goals which more technical decisions would be aimed at achieving. There is an oppositional streak to critical theory, in that it aims to foster dialogue that might dispel the false consciousness, or inaccurate understanding of one's own interests, that is fostered by a social system controlled by the needs of capital for a return on investment. As Harper and Stein argue in the context of urban planning, "a crucial part of the planner's role, then, is 'conscious-raising,' that is, helping the people they are planning with to recognize their own unconscious distortions and to arrive at goals that reflect their true interests" (Harper and Stein, 1995, p. 56).

Critical theory has been of interest to many public administration writers, and has developed many variants. Those most closely linked to its Habermasian origins which Abel & Sementelli (2002) call traditional critical theory--are strongly interested in radical social change, and often skeptical of the extent to which it is possible to transform public administration and modern bureaucratic institutions. In the version promoted by writers such as Zanetti (1997) and Richard Box (1998; 2002; 2005), administrators informed by a critical theory conception of their role are able to "engage in daily politics ... mindful of the limitations imposed on universalist emancipatory visions" (Box, 2002, p. 33). Regardless, the goals of public administrators under a critical theory model include resistance to any further commodification of public life.

Pragmatism

Pragmatism is felt by many to be the distinctively American form of political theory, the only major school whose leading proponents--Peirce, Dewey, William James--wrote and worked in the United States. Its development is closely linked to Progressive-era politics, a time when Americans attempted to grapple with the dramatic changes wrought by industrialization and the expansion of US political, economic and military power on a global scale. Preserving and perpetuating the traditional democratic and republican values upon which the United States, at least rhetorically, were united was one of its chief preoccupations. Pragmatism is continued in contemporary theory through the work of Richard Rorty, and has been notably adapted to public administration by the pseudonymous O.C. McSwite (1997).

While critical theory is often seen as opposed to postmodernism, pragmatism has been promoted as a theory that is conducive to the key insights of postmodernism--it is based on the argument that there are no universal truths, but only situationally realized temporary solutions to troublesome issues (Bogason, 1999). These are generated by public dialogue. Certain pragmatic writers, like Mary Parker Follett, had an affinity for localized, or neighborhood based, models of public decision-making: "The neighborhood group gives the best opportunity for the training and for the practice of citizenship" (Mary Parker Follett, The new state: group organization the solution of popular government [1918] as cited in Guy, 1999; as applied to urban planning, see Chapter 18 in Guttenberg, 1993). "Going to the civic groups, the churches, the schools, and so forth to hear what people think ... leverages citizens' common forms of participation" (Morse, 2006, p. 15). This strain of thought lost out in the Progressive era to the advocates of scientific management and centralized planning (Cooper, Bryer, & Meek, 2006).

Pragmatists believe in continuous experimentation, taking small steps, assessing the results, making corrections, and moving forward again. We can contrast this with the more thorough-going challenges to the existing order which arise from much critical theory work. Finally, the pragmatic model is built upon relationships that emerge from dialogue, bestowing a personal aspect upon discussions that under critical theory seem to remain more abstract. There is an aspect of pragmatism that deals with the self-realization of participants; collective action "becomes a kind of school in which people find themselves as they are and 'teach' others who they are, and others do the same for them" (McSwite, 1997, p. 134).

Moreso perhaps than in the critical theory model, pragmatism would position the public servant as a neutral guardian of process. His or her commitment should be to the health of institutions that allow democratic dialogue, not to any pre-conceived view of what the content of public discussion, or its conclusions, ought to be. Pragmatism's willingness to embrace and dissect the impact of continuous incremental changes to policy or programming would seem to fit well with today's emphasis in the public sector upon outcome measurement and evaluation.

Virtue-based theories

What I call here the virtue-based theories, derived most commonly from Aristotelian ethics, argue that central importance should be given to individual character, rather than the content of actions or the nature of procedures. Contemporary writers who might fall into this tradition include Arendt and Barber, Maclntyre and Sandel. This strain of thought has been brought into public administration theory notably by Camilla Stivers and Cheryl King. According to Stivers,

"the practice of active citizenship is not only an instrument to the achievement of larger aims but also has value in its own right. Because it draws on and develops the highest human capacities, active citizenship constitutes the good, or virtuous life. The purpose of the state is to establish the conditions for its exercise, under which its members can both live (achieve limited ends) and live well (achieve the ultimate end--virtue)" (Stivers, 1990, p. 87).

We see here, then, a rationale for collaborative citizenship that is primarily related to personal development, including that of the administrator herself or himself. Unlike critical theory, whose concern is that the dominance of instrumentally rational thinking will allow some to oppress others, an Aristotelian perspective would place moral obligation upon people being involved in decision-making in order to realize their own personal development. "Engagement is argued to produce not only better policy, but more active, 'better' citizens" (Laforest and Phillips, 2007, p. 67). Public administrators are likely in this vision to enter an educational role, helping citizens become informed and able participants. Racine (1995), for instance, describes how "state power may be applied to help citizens develop their own problem-solving competencies" (p. 452). There are activist connotations to this--whatever degree of participation exists will probably be deemed insufficient, and ways always sought to engage more people at a higher level of debate.

King brings forward arguments that relationships are also central to an Arendtian conception of public space. She envisions the interaction between administrators and citizens as on-going and based primarily upon learning about one another's perspectives and learning to accommodate (King, 2000). This can provide new sources of legitimacy to administrative work: "mature civil servants with experience and broad knowledge and nothing more, who come to know the people in a community as persons, may be able to accomplish what coercion, potential or real, never can" (Racine, 1995, p. 454). King (2000) argues that the culture of public organizations must become one in which numbers are valued less and stories more; for many public servants, that would be a very different kind of practice than that which they have been trained for or experienced.

Integrating Theory into Practice

What then are some of the central claims that we can take from this assessment of philosophical approaches? Above all, the message of participatory state theories is that practice and structures need to change, that as Albo (1993) asserts, "within the state structure itself, it is possible to extend radically direct forms of citizen participation" (p. 30). The differences between the approaches are more in the nuances and the subtleties. By and large, they do lead to the same place and the same prescriptions for reconstructing public service and government-citizen relations. Often times, however, the practical consequences of this are left vague. The pragmatic philosophy, for instance, of 'keeping all the options open,' may not be of much concrete guidance. Hoch (2006) argues that unless other writers were to push his philosophy further, "Rorty has little to say that public administrators or planners can put to practical use" (p. 390). I try then to speculate in the following paragraphs upon what it might mean, in the dayto-day performance of an administrator's job, to put these different philosophical conceptions into operation.

First off, they are all based upon dialogue or discussion--administrators and citizens are called upon to talk and decide collectively on the best course of action to address public issues. Surveys and public hearings, the traditional tools for gathering public input, are widely seen by these approaches, and other commentators, as inadequate to the task of citizen engagement (King, Feltey, O'Neill, 1998). These three lines of approach all are procedurally focused, in that emphasis is on the process of discussion--for instance, creating the 'ideal speech situation' or 'associational public space'--as opposed to prescribing what it is that should be talked about. Critical theory, in particular, recognizes that there are barriers to the creation of such opportunities for dialogue. It is less clear that theories arising from a pragmatic or a virtue-based model would necessarily reach that same conclusion. Seyla Benhabib (1992) states directly that Arendtian models of public space, when compared to the discursive model articulated in critical theory, are "severely limited in their usefulness for analyzing and evaluating political discourse and legitimation in advanced capitalist [societies]" (pp. 8990), due largely to the failure of the former to account explicitly for the role played by differential degrees of power among participants in public decision making situations. Critical theory oriented practitioners, then, may give more attention to challenging vested interests and helping people to understand how they have been victims of 'false consciousness.' Not infrequently, public administrators who attempt to put this into practice may find their own jobs in some jeopardy as a result.

A number of different techniques for deliberate engagement have been proposed, such as the consensus conference, citizens' jury, or deliberative poll (there are of course a range of other processes as well, not described here). However, these prescriptions have seldom been linked to an explicit theory of the role of the public administrator vis-a-vis the citizen as discussed here. Consensus conferences originated in the US: "The consensus conference method was used first in the US health sector in the 1970s. In this case, a panel of health professionals got expert information and discussed some health-related issues" (Zurita, 2006, p. 19). Subsequently, "Denmark altered the format to involve lay citizens rather than experts and expanded the purview beyond medicine to broad questions of technology" (Guston, 1999, p. 453; see also Jensen, 2005; Porsberg Nielsen, Lassen, & Sandoe, 2007). The method, involving presentations by experts and stakeholders to a panel of judges, has been used in other countries and policy sectors also (Guston, 1999; Goven, 2003; Einseidel, Jelsoe, & Breck, 2001). Citizen juries have been used in health, environmental, and other fields. They approximate a traditional jury trial, but with a public policy issue rather than an accused individual 'in the dock'. Juries are comprised by random selection of members of the public. (Smith & Wales, 2000; Kenyon, Niven & Hanley, 2003) Deliberative polls are also based upon a random sample of the public. These participants receive background information which they can consider over a certain period of time and discuss with others before being asked to give opinions or make recommendations. They have been most widely employed in the work of James Fishkin (Luskin, Fishkin, Jowell, 2002; Fishkin & Luskin, 2005).

Despite their recent proliferation, there has been relatively little formal evaluation of deliberative models, and process features have been more commonly assessed than outcomes (i.e., what difference did it make?). That said, there are some notable evaluation studies (Weeks, 2000). Again, however, these evaluation studies have been conducted largely absent of a specific theoretical lens such as pragmatism or critical theory. We may expect that a coherent philosophical grounding may affect the implementation of principles in practice. It would influence the administrators' choice of how to establish their role in relation to citizens (and political officials), and the ends which a deliberative process might aim to achieve. The latter is an important issue, as studies of public engagement generally have found that the purpose for which a particular consultation is undertaken is often never specified: "Much of the literature on public participation tends to concentrate on the how, who, where and when of public involvement, that is to say the operationalization and refinement of the process, rather than the why of public participation, more particularly the underlying rationales and consequences of the adoption of such an approach" (Campbell & Marshall, 2000, p. 323). The conceptual grounding discussed here would give practitioners clear guidance as to why they would opt to engage with the public: for emancipation, to solve immediate practical problems, or to help citizens to develop skills in self-government and identify and pursue their own visions of the 'good life'. These purposes furthermore would shape how administrators go about attracting and recruiting citizen members to their joint deliberative forums.

There is an emphasis in all three models--though it seems particularly strong in pragmatic and virtue-based types--upon relationships, among coworkers as well as between the public and administrators. Many of the theorists in these latter two traditions believe strongly that genuine understanding of other viewpoints can be achieved and genuine discussion can proceed only from a foundation of relationships: "At bottom, it is authentic human relationship that creates the world. If we have relationship, we do not need reason'" (McSwite, 1997, p. 261; italics in original). "Associational public spaces emerge when people come together, building relationships in which there is room for different views and different ways of expressing" (King and Kenson, 1999, p. 8). This contrasts with critical theory's emphasis on creating ideal speech conditions under which rational and reasonable debate and dialogue occur (Laforest and Phillips, 2007). It is feared that personal feelings and emotions may sully the decision process (Scott, 2000). Abel & Sementelli argue that Habermas' original critical theory suffers from "an over reliance on reason as a sufficient emancipatory force" (2002, p. 264). Empirical evidence of the difference between bureaucratic-rational and public ways of knowing comes from research into deliberative forums in UK local government (Barnes, Newman & Sullivan, 2004; Barnes, 2005). Turnover among administrators is a definite factor affecting the quality and success of engagement efforts, with clear practical implications for the ability of public agencies to build and sustain relationships with their public (Baum, Sanderson & Jolley, 1997; Putland, Baum & Macdougall, 1997). The nature of citizen-administrator relationships affects whether or not the public servant can act as a neutral facilitator of dialogue and debate.

Some authors have argued that governance networks can serve as these "spaces for deliberation and negotiation" (Bogason & Musso, 2006). Networks as a means of service delivery, of program evaluation, and of policy making or priority setting, are seen by proponents as more suited to the complex circumstances of postmodernity than traditional hierarchical command-and-control bureaucratic structures. This responds to current pressures for public engagement. There has been much interesting work going on in regard to practical strategies for network development, but again this work has not been combined with explicit consideration of conceptual arguments about the role of administrators as collaborative citizens. All of the models which I have discussed here are collaborative, in that they emphasize empowered citizens and administrators working together on public issues. In this sense, they preserve a significant and active role for the state within networked governance arrangements. They recognize that state power must be shared with citizens, not destroyed through the transfer of decision-making to private interests. They argue that the state must maintain some degree of involvement in working with people to address collectively their common concerns; otherwise, government does nothing more than download responsibility to community without ensuring that community has the resources and tools needed to implement effective action.

However, the models may differ for instance on how they think networks ought to be composed: whether they emphasize individual members of the public or whether they think public views can be mediated through organized groups. Associations, of course, were seen in the Tocquevillian tradition as a cornerstone of democratic practice; Archon Fung (2003) makes the case for their role as agents of democratic deliberation quite forcefully. In general though, deliberative democratic theory has been characterized as harboring "an antipathy towards interest-based politics" (Parkinson, 2004, p. 382). Critical theorists might see them as another layer of interposition between the citizen and the state: "group participation ... transfers the prerogatives of generating alternatives to some collectivity, subjecting individuals to another loci of domination" (Abel & Sementelli, 2002, p. 261). They would almost certain reject private for-profit service providers as appropriate participants in governance. Virtue-based theorists, with concern for individual capacity development, might similarly be distrustful of interest group mediation, through network governance or otherwise, of the expression of public views into public policy making and administration. This follows since private sector organizations are seldom themselves structured to allow the meaningful expression of public voices. On the other hand, as Miller & Fox (2007) argue, not all citizens realistically will be interested in participating on all issues. To Brugue & Gallego (2003), this means that efforts to democratize public administration should turn their attention "from universality to the network" (p. 430). Pragmatists would likely recognize that interest groups or associations are in practice an effective way of amplifying individual voices on shared concerns, though they would likely also look for ways to engage citizens directly, perhaps through the adoption of new technologies.

There are many examples of how practitioners have attempted to make their relationship with citizens more participatory, through deliberative processes--such as citizens' juries, consensus conferences, or deliberative polls--or through new models of network governance. There is also much commentary on these experiments from public administration theorists. However, while there is often in this literature a good description of practical strategies for a more democratized administration, there is rarely any explicit mention of a theoretical or philosophical basis informing the choice of direction. Practitioners, undoubtedly, either do not have a well-developed theoretical stance--whether one of the three models outlined above, or some other conception of how and why to practice more inclusively and democratically--or do not put such into writing. As I hope I've shown, the broad consensus underlying the different approaches means that the direction in which practice must evolve is largely mapped out. Nonetheless, there are at the margins enough differences between the various theoretical camps that an explicit articulation of which road one is walking would probably help both practitioner and citizen in shaping new state structures and policies that accomplish the desired change.

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NEALE SMITH

University of British Columbia