Public Management and Administration - Owen E.hughes

130 Public Management and Administration
Governments or the bureaucracy may try to persuade participants in the policy
process of the advantages of maximizing benefits, by including those from
the outside they are raising the possibility of compromise and political action.
Public policy-making, as distinct from its study, now seems to be an interesting
amalgam of several perspectives, and managerialism may be able to combine
them. Net benefit maximization is now the express aim of governments,
but the methodology of managerialism is that of economics rather than of oldstyle
policy analysis. At the same time, groups have been brought into policymaking
to a greater extent than before. But rather than mediating between
groups, public managers, or managers of public policy to use Lynn’s phrase, try
to persuade groups that there are advantages for them in net benefit maximization.
All parties in the process realize what the nature of the game is: politics.
The only problem with this rather sensible approach is how to classify it. It
could be viewed as political public policy, managing public policy, or as public
management.
Conclusion
Public policy and policy analysis form an approach to the management of the
public sector, one that caused a fundamental rethinking of public administration
in the 1970s and early 1980s. Adding more sophisticated forms of empirical
analysis meant that public administration went some distance away from
amateurism and towards professionalism. According to one admirer, policy
analysis, as a field and movement, has gone ‘a long way in reshaping the discipline’
of public administration (Goodsell, 1990, p. 500). This may have once
been true and the introduction of empirical techniques must count as an
advance on the traditional model. But public policy and policy analysis have to
a great extent been bypassed in the debate over managerialism. The influence
of policy analysis has waned somewhat since its heyday in the 1970s, while
public management incorporates analytical techniques, instead of them having
a separate existence and a separate discipline.
The public policy literature has been ‘too concerned with policy decisions and
the broad process of policy formulation and implementation with too little attention
to the roles and practices of managers of organizational entities within those
processes’ (Rainey, 1990, p. 159). Confronted by a decision to build a dam, any
government or government agency would gain by commissioning empirical studies,
even at the highest level of abstraction. These could be benefit–cost studies,
path-analyses, demographic or other social studies, but what these studies could
not do is to make the actual decision. In the end the political and managerial leadership
make the decision. Regardless of the quality of information, politicians
and other policy-makers must make such a decision based on the shifting sands
of political opinion. Even if the decision made goes against the most rigid and
empirically rigorous analyses that is not to deny its rationality. Too much is often
claimed of the public policy approach. If its advocates could accept that its role