Democracy and Public Management Cases

Abstract

Over the past two years, universities in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America have asked to use some of the Kennedy School's public management teaching cases in their own programs. They also ask how they might develop and teach new cases set in their own nations. In almost every instance, the calls have come from nations on the frontlines of the worldwide movement toward democratization: South Africa, Chile, Hungary, and Spain. There is good reason to think this more than coincidental: For schools of public policy and management, democracy is likely to breed interest in and cases, in turn, may provide a means to sustain and enhance democratic governance. Bringing this American pedagogy to newly democratizing and developing nations creates a new set of writing and teaching complications. The public management teaching case-the narrative account of strategy, tactics and policymaking in the public sector, written to frame a specific point or otherwise be provocative-dates to the mid-1940s, when the late Merle Fainsod and others set out to capture the details of the responses of public managers to their political environments. It was the goal of these case pioneers to augment the traditional public administration curriculum, with its emphasis on technical skills. At the same time, the head of the first formal effort to write and distribute such cases on a large scale recognized that such documents could play a role in the body politic, as well as in the classroom. Harold Stein, first director of the Inter-University Case Program, founded in 1951 with funds from the Carnegie Corporation, wrote in 1952, of the utility of a blow-by-blow account of policymaking and/or implementation. A most painful problem of public enlightenment in a democracy is to secure understanding of the fact that quick and easy answers to the government's problems are frequently more appealing than wise, wrote Stein, adding, perhaps a bit optimistically that an intimate acquaintance with the laborious processes by which public decisions are made should, one hopes, lead to more balanced judgments on what governments do [1952]. Stein, of course, took for granted the existence of the underpinnings of democratic government, one which would permit case research to proceed at all. But he surely would not have disagreed that democracy is a prerequisite for the development-and use-of public management cases. The ostensibly routine act of writing and teaching cases (in which a detailed account of the factors impinging on a public decision is produced and then held up for open discussion and critique in a classroom setting) requires a democratic context, both in government and in the classroom. Absent a democratic environment, it would be both impossible and pointless to seek to develop public management teaching cases. Both their production and use depends on key attributes of officialdom in democratic societies. Official candor: The development of cases requires public officials to provide accounts not only of their final decisions and public pronouncements