Intergovernmental Relations: Guides to Development

Intergovernmental Relations: Guides to DevelopmentAuthor(s): William D. CareySource: Public Administration Review, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Jan. - Feb., 1968), pp. 22-25Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Society for Public AdministrationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/973575 .

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22 PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW

the muscle of the 97-pound weakling in the "before" pictures of a Charles Atlas advertise- ment. While they can analyze problems and devise overall strategies, they have no way of implementing them. Until they develop administrative and budgetary power to execute programs (which can be done only if they become truly regional rather than federal), the bullies in various administrations-federal, state, and local-can continue to kick sand in their faces with impunity.

A restrained and cautious view of the Re- gional Economic Development Commissions shows them to be but a facade of intergovernmental cooperation. They provide window- dressing for federally created, federally fi- nanced, federally operated and controlled new instruments and levels of government some- thing more akin to a unitary than a federal system of intergovernmental relations. Barring changes in the game's rules, the state partners will merely follow suit in an intergovernmental game in which all of the trump cards are held in one hand. One wishes there had been more public disceptation concerning the commissions four years ago; and, one hopes that there will be more in the next four months as their budgets and roles are reviewed by Congress.

Footnotes

1. (1) New England Regional Commission, a compact between the United States and the states of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hamp- shire, Rhode Island, and Vermont; (2) The Ap- palachian Compact between all or part of 12 states and the United States; (3) The Ozarks Regional Commission, a compact concentrating on 125 contiguous rural counties in Arkansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma; (4) The Upper Great Lakes Regional Commission, embracing 119 counties in northern Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin; (5) The Coastal Plains Regional Com- mission covering 150 counties in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia; (6) The Four Corners Regional Commission comprising 92 Rocky Mountain counties in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah; (7) The Delmarva Eco- nomic Development District covering 14 counties in the eastern shore area of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia.

2. Guidelines for Program Formulation for Regional Action Planning Commissions, U. S. Department of Commerce, Office of Regional Economic De-

velopment, Washington, D. C., 1966 (hereafter referred to as Guidelines).

3. A region is defined on the basis of common geographic, cultural, historical, and economic relations and it is one which has "lagged behind the whole Nation in economic development." Some of the lags mentioned in Title V of the Act are: low income, high unemployment, slow growth, out-migration, or inadequate facilities. The touch- stones are common relationships and economic lag.

4. Guidelines. 5. Multi-state Regional Planning: A Strategy for

National Growth Through Regional Development, U. S. Department of Commerce, Washington, 1966.

6. Guidelines (italics added). 7. Ibid. 8. Guidelines. 9. Ibid.

INTERGOVERNMENTAL RELATIONS: GUIDES

TO DEVELOPMENT

WILLIAM D. CAREY U.S. Bureau of the Budget

DESPITE THE PRETENTIOUSNESS of this topic, I do not plan to pontificate about the new federalism. Like most people, I see the future with fewer certainties than I had when the grass was green and the grain was yellow. My view is that the public business today is in a stage of exceptional fluidity, and because of this the public manager's first responsibility is to have an open mind, and his second is to want passionately to understand the meanings -not the forms-of his changing world. Even the term "public administration" itself is a handicap to the extent that it conjures up a catechism of rights and wrongs that instruct us on how to do our work.

The hard and terrible truth is that we age and cling to axioms and Bible texts while the ground under us shakes and trembles. Politics and government-like humanity-have their own cycles and each generation must develop its own wisdom. The difficulty is that it is so



INTERGOVERNMENTAL RELATIONS 23

much easier to retain than it is to forget, and I sometimes think that the memory system of public administration is so strong that it will be the death of innovation and experimentation. If so, the times will pass it by and we may find that public administrators are relegated, in John Gardner's phrase, to being mere tenders of the public machinery, while the decision- makers are a baffling breed with whom we can no longer communicate. All of which heresy is by way of suggesting that it is time for public administration to hold a Vatican II of its own.

We can approach the problems of government today both philosophically and clinically. What we must be careful about is to see to it that the clinical approach does not drive out the philosophical, because nothing transcends the need to ponder the uses of responsibility. I dwell on this because I have been in Europe meeting with representatives of 14 nations. Even as they respect our capacity to excel in economics and technology, they wonder if we really have any awareness of our power and responsibility. They see our economy advanc- ing at an incredible rate that is taking us in just a few more years to a trillion dollar annual level. And looking at us, they wonder if we have the compassion and restraint to admin- ister all this for good.

We are not very well organized to answer such questions. Nor am I prepared to leave them entirely to government. I think they must engage the centers of thought, rather than the engines of action. The really great questions are philosophical-as they have al- ways been when great changes have attacked and overrun order and social structures. Public administration has a responsibility, in my view, to help a society to order its purposes and its resources in relation to meanings, and not merely to needs, opportunities, and institutional forms.

Dimensions of Government

Government today certainly is motivated to address the problems of society more than at any time in the past. We have no shortage of objectives or enthusiasm. But there is a gap between policy design, program definition, and

effective delivery that accuses all of us. It would be tragic if great ideas should fail- should be picked to pieces by criticism-for want of imagination in getting them to work. "Creative federalism" is not just a catchy slogan. It is the beginning of a theoretical formulation of intergovernmental and public- private partnership in approaching actions.

Administration First, there is the administrative dimension.

It relates to how we effectively manage com- plex undertakings which are increasingly multi- agency, multiprogram, and multijurisdictional. To take an illustration, the President has di- rected that pilot tests be made, in 14 urban ghettos, of comprehensive multipurpose neighborhood centers, with the objective of con- certing scattered service programs for greater combined impact on people who are in trouble. At least four major departments and agencies of the federal government will usually be involved, with from 10 to 20 grant-in-aid components to be synchronized and state and local agencies and community action groups to be tied in.

This is a formidable undertaking. It begins with defining the concept of a multipurpose neighborhood center, and this is not easy. Then comes the question of how to identify the needs and desires of the neighborhood you are trying to help, and who in the community speaks for the neighborhood. In short order you find yourself up against the problem of sorting out what we choose to call "power structures" and probing the sensitive nerve of city and county politics. Meanwhile, back home there is the job of converting a couple of dozen bureau chiefs to believe in the generic idea of a multipurpose center, to agree on setting aside program funds, and to send the right signals to lower-echelon functionaries. While this is going on, delegates from the four departments are engaged in marathon negotia- tions to agree on guidelines and ground rules and to settle such momentous questions as whether the mayor or the federal team calls the turn, whether the community action agency is to run the center or simply "participate" (whatever that means), and whether the bricks and mortar or the services come first.



24 PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW

I have said enough, although I could say a great deal more, to suggest that the grandeur of the undertaking quickly breaks down in practice to the bumps and grinds that are the not-so-exotic realities of administration. It is futile to look for short cuts or straight-line solutions, because "people problems" are not the straight-line variety. More and more, administration means starting from scratch to assemble systems of services engineered to explore and test feasibility and effectiveness. It is improvisation-a term that is not found in many treatises on public administration; it is applied research, if the phrase makes you less nervous. It comes to the same thing. Harvey Sherman came close to it in his new book about concepts of organization, which he titled It All Depends.

What I think we must do is recognize that network administration has arrived as a way of doing government's business, and that it will affect and alter all the doctrines we have been brought up to believe in. The administrative dimension of creative federalism is frankly empirical, high-risk administration applied to institutional arrangements that are rather rigid and not likely to become flexible.

Information Next, there is the information dimension.

It is not too much to say that a fully developed society bent on rationalizing its social invest- ments needs an efficient information system in order both to select its goals and to formu- late workable strategies to accomplish them. We are prolific in collecting data but inadequate in transforming it into information. We are ingenious in devising creative models and "demonstration projects" but pathetically inept in evaluating them and in transferring the learning dividend into an incremental gain in program terms. We are generous in funding prodigious expenditures to rectify social dis- aster areas but mindless when we are faced with reasonable questions as to what we have to show for it in terms of altering root conditions. The problem is one of imbalance between the shares of effort and money going into gathering data versus producing meaning- ful information which can then be assembled into some mechanism of social reporting. For-

tunately, thoughtful scholars are beginning to hammer on these points.

Analysis The third dimension is the analytical one.

This is the job of defining the problem that exists and formulating alternative approaches in order to select the one most likely to produce the most for the least cost. Now this is not simply sophistication for its own sake. It comes as close as we can get, in the public sector, to analyzing problems of choice with the tools used in the private sector. It is an effort to be rational and systematic in design- ing public-or if you will, social-investment so as to optimize the returns, not in financial yields but in terms of social gains.

When the federal budget was only $3 billion a year, perhaps it did not matter too much how wisely we designed our public investment. But when the federal budget on a cash transactions basis is in the range of $175 billion, it matters very much what we do, why we do it, and how we do it. We cannot afford mistakes on this scale, particularly since we pay twice for what we do-for the investment itself and for the foregone opportunities that we passed up in order to make it.

Moreover, systematic analysis of problems of choice is our best defense against incremental budgeting-the process by which new com- mitments are invariably piled on top of a base which is taken for granted. If we know that our taxing system as it now operates will produce an additional $35 billion in new reve- nues over the next five years, assuming reasonable economic growth, it seems possible to weigh in advance the choices among tax reduc- tion as a stimulant, on the one hand, and a whole spectrum of innovative social invest- ments, on the other. In any event, the state of the art has brought us to the point where we now recognize that government can analyze problems of choice, and shape strategies for social investment, and it is my belief that this discovery will have deep effects upon man- agerial processes in the 1970's. I do not claim that the economics of choice will supplant the politics of choice, but the one will certainly illuminate the other, even though for as long as I care to look ahead- public decision-making



INTERGOVERNMENTAL RELATIONS 25

will remain a misty mixture of compassion and calculation.

Delivery The fourth dimension is that of delivery.

For example, we spend tens of billions of dollars in this country on medical research and medical care, and it is probable that the mind of man has never witnessed a more inefficient delivery system. The doctors are massed in the cities but not in the ghettos. The handful of medical schools are unable to generate adequate numbers of physicians. Once a doctor is licensed he is in business forever, regardless of whether his knowledge is obsolete in ten years. The medical care system is structured on the basis of every-man-for-himself, instead of organized so that skills are assembled in a sufficient critical mass to cope adequately, and at acceptable costs, with demand.

On another front, our social services are also fragmented so that welfare is colored blue, mental health green, family counselling orange, job placement red, and so on down the long, weary list. Again, we are right up against the problem of how to arrange government services so that they reach out to those who need them most, and deal with their needs effectively rather than with a glancing blow or at best a partial solution.

Geography Next, there is the geographic dimension, and

here I am speaking of the area or spatial aspect of planning and operations. We see evidence of the problem when we observe the maze of planning enterprises afoot all around us, func- tional planning in 57 varieties, propped up here and there with valiant attempts at comprehensive planning on a county, multicounty, statewide, or regional basis. We are using up our scant supply of qualified planners faster than they can be turned out. We are pyramid- ing planning upon planning. We are trying to plan without adequate data bases.

On the operating side, every federal agency has its own dogmatic convictions as to what administrative areas should look like. We

have 12-region systems, 10-region systems, 7- region systems; we have area systems and no regions; we have district systems. Within these various area structures, field offices are located without rationality and for reasons that seemed good 20 years ago. We simply do not understand the geographic dimension of creative federalism, and we have no criteria to go by. Yet, the geographic dimension is unavoidably linked to two of the other dimensions that I have discussed: the administrative and the delivery dimensions.

Innovation Lastly, there is the innovative dimension.

This is the terrain of lively ideas and trial approaches. We see it in the proposal for revenue-sharing, for block grants, for pre- financing of joint federal-state undertakings. It takes another form in the President's directive that heads of agencies must consult on program and administration with elected heads of state, county, and city governments. It emerges in the formation of multijurisdictional consortiums like the councils of government and the multicounty community action agencies. We find it in the stimulus toward neighborhood corpora- tions based on self-determination around a legal personality in the urban ghetto. We see it in the Model Cities approach to the re-crea- tion of viable urban complexes, and in the action of three federal departments in jointly funding the University of Minnesota to study the problems and technology of creating a, d operating a completely new self-sufficient city. We see innovation in the new regional educa- tion laboratories, in the heart-cancer-stroke centers, in the Public Television Act, in the drive for intergovernmental personnel mobility, and in the Chapel Hill Institute on State Pro- gramming for the 70s.

What it all adds up to is a disturbing question as to whether public administration as we understand it, research it, teach it, and practice it even begins to match the propensity of political action to recognize and respond to crisis conditions. Politics may turn the wheels, but administration must furnish the traction.



Documents

Intergovernmental Relations: Guides to Development