Given its rising importance, the subject of intergovernmental management is itself worth some consideration. It is not something that government executives necessarily know how to do well, except by political instinct or hard-won experience. And while we are starting to build up a base of best practices under the label of project management, there is clearly there is much more to learn about the whole subject.
Carl Stenberg, former chair of the board of directors of the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA), has gone so far as to suggest recently that while intergovernmental management never has been more critical to the America's security and prosperity, our capacity manage across different levels of government has actually eroded.
NAPA is now working to launch an intergovernmental initiative that will include the development of an educational program, publication of a research agenda and a series of intergovernmental issue forums.
In addition, NAPA is developing a book on emerging challenges in the intergovernmental system, brought about by 21st Century economic, technological and demographic trends. "The book is intended to chart pathways for defining an agenda for improving governance in our intergovernmental system, noted current NAPA chair Valerie Lemmie and president Morgan Kinghorn in a recent academy newsletter. "The chapters will provide a contemporary discussion of the current state of practice in intergovernmental system and apply cross-cutting themes to five important areas where intergovernmental management is central to policy outcomes and debates: homeland security, election reform, education, welfare reform and health care."
Harlan Cleveland, former Assistant Secretary of State for International Affairs (1960s) and U.S. Ambassador to NATO (1965-69), was one of the first to recognize that intergovernmental management would become increasingly important in a world driven by new technology. In his 1972 book, The Future Executive: A Guide for Tomorrow's Managers, Cleveland coined the word "governance" as an alternative to public administration, and was arguing that, "What the people want is less government and more governance."
Cleveland predicted, "The organizations that get things done [in the future] will no longer be hierarchical pyramids with most of the real control at the top. They will be systems -- interlaced webs of tension in which control is loose, power diffused, and centers of decision plural. 'Decision-making' will become an increasingly intricate process of multilateral brokerage both inside and outside the organization which thinks it has the responsibility for making, or at least announcing, the decision. Because organizations will be horizontal, the way they are governed is likely to be more collegial, consensual, and consultative. The bigger the problems to be tackled, the more real power is diffused and the larger the number of persons who can exercise it -- if they work at it."
Technology is clearly one of the drivers that is moving us increasingly toward this model. When we seek to employ IT solutions across agencies and jurisdictions, especially in shared service environments, the multi-agency task forces established to implement such projects take on many of the dynamics that Cleveland described. However, looking more broadly, we have also begun to see that more and more of the challenges confronting governments do not necessarily follow the traditional bureaucratic stovepipes.
Nowhere is this more apparent than the homeland security efforts of recent years. "The Homeland Security Department has centralized federal efforts, but the intergovernmental system through which it operates is fragmented," noted Stenberg in a Government Executive article. "For instance, there are 115 signatories to the regional disaster plan for the Seattle area. More than 20 federal grant programs for first responders weave a tangled web of funding streams that delays progress where it matters most."
To recognize that today's problems don't necessarily align to traditional jurisdictions and bureaucracies, one simply has to examine some of the effects of globalization. Internationally, even the nation state is stretched to meet the new challenges, something noted by Jessica T. Mathews while a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (she moved on to become president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace).
Mathews pointed out that capital-driven multinational corporations don't consider national interests when seeking to expand their economic base and this shifts power from nations to the free market. Additionally, there has been the explosive growth in the activity and influence of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), some that have budgets exceed those of small governments. They have an increasing influence in national and international policy-making.
Mathews didn't suggest that that the nation-state is about to disappear or that the balance of power among governments no longer matters. She believed that national governments would remain the most powerful single actors in the international arena in the foreseeable future. What had changed however is that they are no longer the only actors that matter.
In a globalized world, governments, businesses and NGOs all are present on a crowded stage, all seeking to forwarding their own agendas. This trickles down to state and local jurisdictions in a multitude of ways, sometimes with harsh and unpredicted economic impacts.
In such an environment, intergovernmental management becomes the crucial factor in implementing solutions to the increasing array of complex problems that confront us. And for this reason, we might soon come to recognize that, for government, we are now in the era of intergovernmental management. What we accomplish in moving forward as regions, as nations and as a global community will increasingly depend upon on our intergovernmental management skills.
