Flinders, M. orcid.org/0000-0003-3585-9010 (2023) Keep walking on the bright side: criticality, credit and challenge. Policy Design and Practice, 6 (3). pp. 381-388. ISSN 2574-1292
Abstract
In a recent article in this journal Mark van Ostaijen and Shivant Jhagroe (O&J) provided a highly critical analysis of Positive Public Administration (PPA). “[It] will not create a way out” they argued “but only a new way into traditional and intellectual problems that have haunted PA as a discipline” and was nothing more than “a rather romantic, nostalgic, and regressive turn to the past and the inability to actually innovate public administration as a field.” This response article argues that although O&J were correct to highlight the risk of co-option and the importance of criticality they are wrong to assume that PPA is for some reason unable to identify or cope with such pressures. By returning to PPA’s core emphasis on the interplay between levels of policy in the interpretation of policy success a multi-levelled framework is provided. This illustrates that the concurrent identification of “success-within-failure” (or vice versa) is possible and therefore identifying successful policy need not be uncritical. As such, PPA need not necessarily be associated with conservative, instrumental, system-affirming thinking in the way O&J assume. “Making public administration again” demands that its adherents hone the ability to range across different policy levels in ways that allow them to avoid the zero-sum trap that O&J identify (but then themselves fall into).
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | Positive public administration; Co-option; criticality; blame-avoidance; policy success |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Politics and International Relations (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 29 Aug 2023 10:39 |
Last Modified: | 29 Aug 2023 10:39 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Informa UK Limited |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1080/25741292.2023.2169982 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:202763 |
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