Martin Lodge

Kai Wegrich

Governance Challenges and Innovations examines the capacity of contemporary governments to act upon and address the pressing problems of our time. What can public administration do, or be expected to do, during the current 'age of austerity' after waves of reforms that have changed the architecture of the state? This volume highlights four basic administrative capacities that matter for governance, i.e. coordinating various branches of the state,regulating markets, delivering services and implementing policy, and making sense of increasingly complex tasks through the use of knowledge and analysis. It features chapters that focus on the way in which thesecapacities have become stretched and how they have been adjusted; the way in which states have addressed particular governance challenges; and, finally, governance capacities and innovations outside the boundaries of the state.

Governance Challenges and Administrative Capacities

The Problem-solving Capacity of the Modern State

Tobias Bach

How to better coordinate policies and public services across public sector organizations has been a major topic of public administration research for decades. However, few attempts have been made to connect these concerns with the growing body of research on biases and blind spots in decision-making. This book attempts to make that connection. It explores how day-to-day decision-making in public sector organizations is subject to different types of organizational attention biases that may lead to a variety of coordination problems in and between organizations, and sometimes also to major blunders and disasters. The contributions address those biases and their effects for various types of public organizations in different policy sectors and national contexts. In particular, it elaborates on blind spots, or ‘not seeing the not seeing’, and different forms of bureaucratic politics as theoretical explanations for seemingly irrational organizational behaviour. The book’s theoretical tools and empirical insights address conditions for effective coordination and problem-solving by public bureaucracies using an organizational perspective.

Kai Wegrich

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