Structure of Governance
Unbundling Public Organisations
The unfinished agenda of structural dis-aggregation post NPM
“Public service must be more than doing a job efficiently and honestly. It must be a complete dedication to the people and to the nation” — Senator Margaret Chase
The unjust and inconsiderate killing of George Floyd has evoked discussion on restructuring policing in USA. There have been calls for defunding the police and exploring alternatives to policing which have been variously interpreted as:
- re-allocation of police budget to other essential services
- unbundling of the functions of police to specific tasks that can be handled in a more humane way e.g. by trained counselors for mentally ill and homeless people (who constitute a high percentage of those arrested), social workers manning crisis intervention groups for de-escalation etc.
Herein, let us focus on the second aspect of the suggestion for public organisations at large that are at forefront of public service delivery and are critical to achieving holistic, sustainable development with social stability. It entails more than a mere structural arrangement for efficient formulation and implementation of policies as public organisations today are expected to be paragons of democratic ethos where the voices of all segments of the society are responded to and rights of people are vehemently upheld.
The need for change
Public organisations often become calcified in their culture, perpetuating biases and institutionalizing discrimination against certain segments of the population. This can be corrected through change in organisational culture and training. However, the processes have found to be lacking in efficacy (as evidenced by the continuing racism in US). Hence, it may be useful to explore possibilities of a structural overhaul that best serves the people and the need of the times.
Also, the world is in a state of flux owing to the pressures of globalization, migration, changing demographic profile and technological revolution. This requires our public organisations to adapt to the changing environment. (How these pressures influence public sector organisations has been depicted in the figure below.)
In this emerging scenario, it is pertinent that we revisit the organisational design, composition and culture of public sector organisations. In this article, we shall explore the possibility of the most responsive and efficient arrangement of these organisations (exclusively with respect to their design).
Historical Context
The concept of organisational structure for public management has its origins in the Weberian ‘ideal-type’ bureaucracy wherein well-laid down rules, office hierarchy, specialization and rationality of decision-making was emphasized. This model was criticized for being too rigid and impervious to the expectations and needs of people. For all its faults, it is still celebrated as a system that preserves institutional memory for the good, is stable and serves one and all dispassionately. The biggest disruption to the Weberian structure came with the advocacy of NPM (new public management) where a dominating theme was agencification- dis-aggregation and decentralization of rigid structures with managerial autonomy, to be evaluated on measurable indicators. The wave swept across the developed world, only for people to realize soon that viewing citizens as customers/clients was untenable in public organisations.
The historical trajectory of public organisations/bureaucracy is extremely important to analyse before suggesting an apposite structure not only to identify the gain/loss from any structural change but also to see a pattern in recurring organisational culture (they are frequently found to replicate the old patterns of behavior).
Exploring solutions
Structures of public organisations see a lot of inertia when it comes to achieving optimal outcomes.
Public organisations face orthogonal stresses from market and democracy. While justification for resource utilization entails adhering to market principles of efficiency, economy and choice, upholding democratic principles requires public organisations to encourage people’s participation, respond to the needs of different segments in keeping with their cultural practices and be proactive towards equitable distribution of resources. Quality of public goods provisioning appreciates when the two combine but the problem is that they do not mutually reinforce each other. To achieve an optimal balance requires research and experimentation.
In this context, our aim is to maximize the two complementary ethos of public organisations to achieve an optimal outcome. A way forward is to adopt subsidiarity, thereby increasing the democratic content (while also reaping the benefits of avoiding diseconomies of scale characteristic of unwieldy centralized bureaucratic structures and ensuring that the rationality of maximizing personal benefits does not derail governance).
Subsidiarity is “a principle that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed at a more local level”. This principle is useful for vertical dis-aggregation of public organizations. Subsidiarity is compatible with emerging consensus on fostering human dignity and freedom. The benefits include improved accountability of governance (when it is brought closer to people), grassroots innovation for problem solving (due to stakeholder mentality that is encouraged), better chances for poor and marginalized to being heard.
In the context of policing, this would mean that functions of police that can be optimally done locally must be done at that level while the functions that require cooperation and coordination must be the preserve of a central authority.
Once the level of operation is identified, the next task is to identify the units of service delivery in the horizontal plane which are specialized and economically viable at the same time. The optimal modes of delivery must also be identified in parallel. The various modes of service delivery are direct, privatizing, outsourcing, collaboration, partnerships, and co-production.
Issues
Any effort at redrawing organisational design comes with its set of issues that hold the potential to derail the process. Interestingly, the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of organisational change is easier than the ‘how’ aspect of it. The proposed solution is also expected to encounter challenges when it comes to operationalization. Some of these challenges are discussed in the figure below.
These challenges can be overcome through meticulous planning when the intent for positive transformation is strong.
Conclusion
Public organisations operate in an extremely complex environment and are subject to pulls and pressures of a diverse set of stakeholders in governance with varying degree of power, competence and interest. Any organisational design must be mindful of this complexity. Any proposed change must be justified on the grounds of optimality of efficiency and people centricity. It is hoped that more empirical research would be done on the effect of organisational design on the efficacy of governance so that organisations of the future evolve to respond to the need of the times.
