Urban Policy in a Changing Federal System Proceedings of a Symposium (1985) / Chapter Skim
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10. Changing Conceptions of the Governmental Role: Their Meaning for Urban Policy
10. Changing Conceptions of the Governmental Role: Their Meaning for Urban Policy
Pages 254-276
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From page 254... ...
To find its beginnings we really need to look back 100 years, to the period beginning about 1880. After the Revolution the forces interested in a stronger central authority established a new set of institutions of governance, roughly in the period between the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 and the end of the initial Supreme Court tests of the new Constitution, about 1820.
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From page 255... ...
THE HOLD ORDER. AND THE REALIST CRITIQUE, AFTER 1970 Today that idea of the powerful national government is itself the subject of a realist critique.
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From page 256... ...
Attitudes and values have shifted. There is a reduced confidence that issues are best handled as national problems, by political decisions, in the administrative and regulatory programs of the public sector, or through the professional service institutions that government finances.
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From page 257... ...
PRAGMATI C RESPONSES We are therefore in a period of transition. The idea about social action embodied in the New Nationalism remains the dominant idea.
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From page 258... ...
a major advertising medium. · The reality of service, revenues, and costs in the suburbs is beginning to work a major change in the transit systems of major urban regions.
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From page 259... ...
Ralph Nader and Common Cause helped build this attitude; but the concern about the possibility of the Hamiltonian state falling again under the control of the Hamiltonian interests was a theme throughout the reform movement that followed the Osawatomie speech (Goldman, 1952)
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From page 260... ...
9. An appreciation of the way that even large, mature, bureaucratic institutions can be fundamentally changed by the forces set loose by technological and business innovations: the way UPS changed the Postal Service; the way the communications satellite broke up the broadcasting industry; the way the certificate of deposit and the money-market fund altered the savings and loans industry; the way the health maintenance organization has induced doctors to reduce their use of hospitals.
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From page 261... ...
Alan Pifer, formerly of the Carnegie Corporation, is at work on a study of future directions of federal social policy for the National Conference of Social Welfare. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development held a conference in 1982 on The Welfare State in Crisis, and the Ford Foundation is now beginning its
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From page 262... ...
has brought more sharply into focus certain advantages of a strategy that relies on a Revolution of the responsibility for action-downward, from the national government, and outward, from government to private institutions. These seem most critical: o The public use of the private interest.
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From page 263... ...
· A Revolution of responsibility will also permit the national government to concentrate its attention on those central questions that can be settled only at the national level foreign affairs and defense; the management of the economy; the protection of civil and human rights; the making of basic social policy. It ~ not necessarily true that a growing complexity requires a greater concentration of authority at the center: It may be quite the opposite.
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From page 264... ...
. So: The national government provides eligible veterans with hospital and medical care and produces those services through its Veterans Administration medical centers.
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From page 265... ...
Elected officials, in other words, would have to acquire a new view of themselves as essentially buyers of service, open to the possibility of buying from the enterprise they own directly (which is the essence of the traditional administrative arrangement) but open as well to the possibility of buying from others, or to the possibility of doing both, in combination.
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From page 266... ...
A service does not become a private service when the governmental body decides to have it produced by a private organization, when a county board, for example, contracts for the management or operation of the county hospital, or even when it sells the hospital and buys care in the community hospital system. That service is ~privatized.
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From page 267... ...
Some public school principals and some school teachers, similarly, have expressed an interest in having a contract relationship with their school district or school. The third misconception has to do with the standard of comparison, which should be the same for the service produced by the governmental body directly and for the service secured from others.
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From page 268... ...
struction and revitalization of the old public-service organizations comparable to the reconstruction and revitalization being forced on many of the major privately owned systems: the effort, frequently by government through statute or through the courts, to open up the railroad industry, the trucking industry, the airline industry, the banking industry, the communications industry, the health care industry to the forces of competition, as a way of stimulating innovation and restoring productivity. One of the interesting and important questions today is why a private sector that is being subjected to these pro-competitive policies by government is itself, with respect to the public sector and public services, so essentially protectionist.
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From page 269... ...
Substantial efforts must be made by business to strengthen the capacity of the nonprofit organizations that are major producers of public services for the public sector. This can perhaps be done through private-private partnerships that blend the corporations' strengths in capital and management with the strengths of the nonprofit organizations in commitment and in knowledge of the service field.
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From page 270... ...
But many if not most of the issues of urban policy do arise on the intrametropolitan dimension within particular urban regions. If most of these issues could be handled effectively at that level, the national government would be in a better position to deal with urban-policy issues at the national scale.
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From page 271... ...
A new effort to assert the real and legitimate interest of the national government in the effective governance of the urban regions should rest instead on a metropolitan definition of The city.. And the strategy for bringing into being the governmental structure or process needed to set and to implement an urban policy within a metropolitan region should be a strategy that moves through the powers of state lawmaking.
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From page 272... ...
Private institutions are more likely than the localities to understand -- as did the organizers of the Town Meeting for Tomorrow in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1964 (and the Kellogg Company executives in Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1982) -- that the competition most critical for their success is competition among the metropolitan regions, not between the municipalities within a region.
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From page 273... ...
of television programming, are gradually forcing local newspapers and local broadcast stations away from the coverage of national and international affairs, where they are now at a marked disadvantage, and toward the coverage of their own communities in which they retain a competitive advantage. One possibility, frequently raised, is that a revival of economic growth will relieve the pressures on government revenue and will permit a refunding of the traditional system of benefits and services.
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From page 274... ...
What is probably needed next, more than anything, is a broad discussion throughout the country that looks directly at the possibility that we are indeed moving to a new and different conception of governance; that sharpens the fundamental issues involved; and that focuses on the incentives and opportunities that need to be opened up to speed the introduction of the new and different ways of doing things, whatever these may be. In such a disciplined process of thinking-through this problem, in the public sector and in the private, it ought to be possible to address constructively and creatively questions both about what government can and should provide and about what government can and should produce, and to do this in a way that reconciles the need both for equity and for effectiveness and efficiency in the system.
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From page 275... ...
12. Washington, D.C.: International City Management Association.
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From page 276... ...
276 Yankelovi ch, Daniel 1977 Emerging Ethical Norms in Private and Public Li fe. Paper f or a seminar at Columbia Uni versity, New York.
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