CHAPTER THIRTEEN

A VISION FOR COMPARATIVE THEORY AND PRACTICE

Horizons of the Comparative Voyage

The human instinct to compare is instinctual and thus inevitable, and its framework and form are difficult to capture. As far as public administration and policy are concerned, everything can and should be compared under the condition that evidence-based research is used that includes (a) a carefully developed methodology and (b) transparency in the choices made when moving from unstructured problem to evidence (Desai and Harlow, 2013). This book provides a very different way of looking at contemporary government across the globe. Systematic comparisons of political systems, of government bureaucracies, and of government policies are available in abundance, but they are usually limited to a small group of countries in one world region or—more often—simply a small group of developed countries. This book seeks to provide understanding of the structure and function as well as the role and position of governments in the world in terms of trends of convergence and divergence and in terms of policy transfers and diffusions. It is a unique comparative book because it is the first that provides a global perspective on all three elements that together comprise the political-administrative system: the political system, the government bureaucracy, and public policy. The fact that the realm of comparative studies is in many ways unclear or conceptually fragile only makes the challenge and prospective dividend for practitioners and scholars greater.

There are countless ways to sketch a vision for the comparative understanding of government through the umbrella study of public administration. Our way may be regarded as only one in a series of books (for references, see Appendices 1 and 2), but we claim it is unique not only in presenting a global perspective upon the public sector as a whole, but also because we did not pursue comparison with an eye on developing theory (that would have required a clear theoretical framework and a very systematic comparison). Instead we started this voyage with the desire to provide the type of understanding that is relevant to practitioners (elected officeholders, career civil servants) and students alike. One thing that has become clear to us at the end of this voyage is that comparative perspectives will only become more important in a world that is increasingly interconnected. We live in an interconnected world where policies in one field/nation/region/culture affect those in others. The policy emulation and transaction of ideas and reforms become evident in almost every country or public arena. As we demonstrate in Chapters 10 through 12, many countries initiate what at first seems a unique and independent program for change and reform but eventually takes a shape that has many similarities with other programs in other places. The convergence between structures, processes, reforms, and other dynamics of public administration and policy is no smaller than the divergence among them. It is important not because it helps understand how and why others (countries) do things differently, but because it helps us respect different ways of doing things. It provides anyone with a better-informed opinion about what is good and what could be better in one's own country and its government.

Thus, comparative perspectives have a civilizing effect. As far as the study of public administration is concerned, most handbooks have national roots, and much research is conducted within one political-administrative system. This does not allow enough room for a comparative look, something that this book wishes to provide. A comparative perspective helps to go beyond this local/national orientation. This could be done by including a comparative view in every class in public administration. We should redefine the way we teach public administration and make better government by using comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives. For instance, this may transform our basic approach toward teaching organization theory, human resource management, policy analysis, budgeting and finance, intergovernmental relations, and so forth, and toward making government policies in the wider context of public action (for instance, defense, police, judiciary, economy, finance, taxation, energy, planning, industry and trade, health care, education, social services, and so forth).

Comparison in Motion: Divergence and Convergence across Time and States

The development of government was enriched by comparative perspectives since its birth. We argued elsewhere (Vigoda, 2002b) that an ordinary citizen of an ordinary modern democracy fortunate enough to undertake a journey backward in time is likely to find meaningful similarities between government of our era and administrative systems of old cultures. This comparative look at cultures throughout history enlightens the study by providing a look at what others did, do, or intend to do in other places and times.

As we tried to convey in the early chapters of this book, the comparative approach has its roots in old institutions. For example, the foundations of government and the study of public administration can be traced back thousands of years, across cultures, and in various nations around the globe. The Bible mentions a variety of hierarchical and managerial structures that served as prototypes for the governance of growing populations. Ancient methods of public labor distribution were expanded by the Greeks and the Romans to control vast conquered lands and many peoples. The Persian and Ottoman empires in the Middle East, like imperial China in the Far East, paved the way for government in the early modern and modern ages, wherein Europeans in the Old and the New World were in the ascendant. Governments have copied practices from one another since antiquity (Raadschelders, 1998b), but it is not until our time of mass media and rapidly growing levels of communication that higher levels of comparative learning were possible. The high-speed telecommunication, data, and optical fibers replaced the trade routes of ancient times, and learning by comparison became extremely fast, more effective, and hyper responsive.

If analyzed comparatively, one can find similarities and dissimilarities among and between cases anytime and anywhere. This is the issue of convergence and divergence that will be discussed later in the chapter. Surprisingly enough, many states across many years used remarkably similar sets of concepts, ideas, and methods for governing and administering public goods, resources, and interests. They all employed and continue to seek professionals and experts from various specialist backgrounds. They all used, and continue to use, authority and power as the cheapest control system for individuals, governmental institutions, and processes. Contemporary governments all face similar administrative problems: how to achieve better efficiency, effectiveness, and economy in government, how to satisfy the needs of the people, and how to sustain stable political hegemony despite the divergent demands and needs of sectoral groups. This is very different from the past, where governments were merely interested in exploiting their populations. Not surprisingly, all states and cultures across time and geographic location also used similar managerial tools and methods aimed at solving problems of this kind. They all used, to varying degrees of effectiveness, division of labor, professionalism, centralization and decentralization mechanisms, accumulation of knowledge, coordination of jobs, complex staffing processes of employees, long-range planning, controlling for performance, and so on (Vigoda, 2002b; Vigoda-Gadot, 2009). Intuitively, one feels that nothing has really changed in the managerial and administrative process of public organizations for centuries, possibly millennia.

But this feeling is of course exaggerated. Some major changes have taken place in recent centuries to create a totally different political-administrative and societal environment and new rules, to which governments and citizens must adhere and by which they must adjust their operations. In fact, a new kind of governing has taken shape, in which government (i.e., not just the ruling elites) plays a central role. Among the major societal changes and reforms one can mention the communication revolution, the rise of media impact, and the phenomenon of a shrinking world. Some call it a global village and point to interconnectedness and light-speed interchange of data and knowledge among individuals, organizations, and governments. The major political-administrative changes include the legal separation of politics from administration (in many but not in all states), the separation of office and officeholder, the separation of church and state, the triumph of bureaucratic over collegial organization, and the provision of a constitutional foundation.

Comparative public administration uses similarities and dissimilarities to build its case for problem-oriented knowledge. As we pointed out in earlier chapters of this book, divergence and convergence are essential breaks in the wall of public administration as a science and as a profession. Despite basic similarities between older and modern governments, government in our time is an organism entirely different from that in the past. These differences include:

1. it is larger than ever before, and it is still expanding;
2. it is more complex than in the past, and becoming increasingly so by the day;
3. it has many more responsibilities to citizens, and it still has to cope with increasing demands of the people;
4. it is acquiring more eligibilities, but more than ever before it must restrain its operation and adhere to standards of equity, justice, social fairness, and especially accountability;
5. moreover, the modern study of public administration is considered an autonomous and independent member of the family of the social sciences, a classification that carries high esteem but also firm obligations and rigid constraints;
6. for many individuals who decide to become public servants it is also a profession and occupation to which they dedicate their lives and careers; and
7. most important, government is one of the most powerful institutions in modern democracies. It wields considerable strength and influence in policy framing, policy making, and policy implementation. Hence it is subject to growing pressures of political players, social actors, and managerial professionals.

An overview of the relatively short history of the study of modern public administration reveals that it is far more eclectic than might be thought. We demonstrated this practical eclectic nature in Chapters 9 to 12 where we showcased different solutions to similar policy problems as a function of a certain type of nation, culture, set of values, political structure, and other variants of the sociopolitical ecosystem. Recent decades have put the comparative perspective on stage again, mainly due to technological innovations and the communication revolution that made knowledge about theory and practice more open and transparent to many. What took ancient cultures many years of diffusion and learning is done today within seconds in the computerized world of information. Interconnectedness becomes the essence of learning, and comparing is the rule for action. Policy transfer and policy emulation, learning and change of institutions and practices, and globalization of know-how ventures take government actions to a new level (Levi-Faur and Vigoda-Gadot, 2004). The comparative approach, under such conditions, becomes not just inevitable but also essential and crucial for practitioners of government policies; that is, for those who turn ideas into action, and for those who study public administration for the purpose of knowing, understanding, and explaining.

The Comparative Approach in Service of Interconnectedness, Emulation, and Policy Transfer

Interconnectedness is perhaps the most influencing process in our lives in the twenty-first century. Who could imagine living in a world where global transactions between individuals, groups, organizations, states, and other international players were unknown to the majority of the population? Talking about the comparative approach in public administration and in government is meaningless without integrating knowledge in a borderless world. As we demonstrated in Chapter 7, administrative reforms diffuse from one place to another and are enriched by specific cultural tastes and values. The actions of the modern democratic state are largely a result of rethinking knowledge and reforming actions in other nations. Those who innovate by presenting new ideas grease the wheels of the democratic order and reinforce both the foundations of the free world and of governability under the conditions of a free and open society (Popper, 1991).

Modern society is global and individual countries can no longer really dissociate from this globalization, and in that process people and their governments redefine the boundaries between what is domestic and what is international and global. In a shrinking world, policy lessons are increasingly learned on a cross-national basis rather than on specific national experiences and are less and less constrained by cultural and geopolitical boundaries. To have know-how about other countries is increasingly conceived as essential and relevant for the economic competitiveness of states and for the welfare of their citizens. Epistemic communities, international organizations, and policy entrepreneurs transfer this know-how to domestic economic, political, and social settings that are often radically different from the original ones in which this knowledge was first learned.

Globalization of knowledge and international policy transfers were discussed in early political science literature. Take, for example, Ernest Barker's classic study of state expansion in Europe between 1660 and 1930. Barker's major attention was concentrated on the particular history of different countries, but he was well aware of their interdependence and existence as a “social community:” Barker suggested that when we consider the history of the Modern State . . . we cannot but recognize the debt which all States owe to one another. Each country has developed according to its own genius; and each has produced its own fruit. But each has produced some institution, or some method of public service, which has served as an example to others; and each, in turn, has borrowed from each. There has been a rivalry of methods, but it has not been unfriendly; one country has studied, adopted, or tried to improve the methods of another; and all have combined, however unconsciously, to promote the growth of a common Europe standard of administration and public service.” (Barker, 1944, p. 93)

So policy transfers and diffusions are an old phenomenon; we discussed them briefly in Chapter 7 and made a point for comparison of government and public administration based on the globalization and new public management movement. What makes our time unique is the diminishing meaning of geographical distance in general and of the increasing permeability of national borders in particular, hence the increase in the quantity and arguably the quality of these policy transfers and diffusions. At the time this book was written, we were more exposed than our predecessors to international ideas and therefore, arguably, may have learned more and be able to go through the learning process with a somewhat better grip on the difficulties of innovating based on the experience of others.

The issues discussed in Chapters 2 to 12 are increasingly documented and reflected in intensive and extensive scholarly debate in the literature of the social sciences at large and in organizational studies, law, political science, sociology, social psychology, history, and economics (Vigoda, 2002b, 2003b). On one side are proponents of globalization and interconnectedness by sophisticated media and communication tools, who advocate cross-national policy learning (and convergence) and believe it holds great promise for the advancement of comparative public administration, governance, and policy analysis. On the other side are globalization and interconnectedness critics who identify emulation, manipulation, and coercion as the major forces behind the changes that are widely evident across countries and policy spheres.

This debate, then, touches first on the meaning and origins of comparison in the study of public administration and governance. Is policy learning useful, effective, and implementable in our hyperconnected world? Where does culture make its impact? And is there any advice for governments that can lead policy makers to navigate the gateway of “true and false” in their decision making? As we try to demonstrate, the hyperconnectedness has not done anything for improving deep understanding of the world in which we live, and that is because we, as practitioners and as academics, tend to cling to what we know rather than seek comprehensive understanding. Despite all rhetoric about the “hollow state,” “collaborative governance,” etc., do people understand that government is the only actor that can still make binding decisions for the entire population? Governments provide more services than ever before. They not only extract resources (at least in the Western world) from their subjects, but also provide many new services to their citizens. We tried to show that today without governments we may very well plunge into chaos and anarchy in many spheres of our lives. Convergence and divergence in policy and management of governments will remain an issue even in an ultraglobalized and interconnected world. In Chapters 2 to 8 we pointed to converging trends in how a territory is governed; in Chapters 9 to 12 we learned about how countries tackle policy areas. There, too, there is convergence in terms of the types of challenges, but divergence as well, given national culture.

Comparative Public Administration and Governance: Between Transfer and Diffusion

Ginadomenico Majone suggested that far-reaching ideological, political, and economic changes begun in the late 1970s brought about “the transformations of the process and substance of policy making.” (Majone, 1996, p. 611) We hope that this volume, which looks at public policy, public management, and public sector reforms beyond the territorial state (though not without it), will add new insights into future work that tries to characterize convergence and divergence in comparative studies. We set out the common conceptual grounds for a discussion of the nature of cross-national and cross-cultural interaction in government and its study of public administration, with the help of ideas about policy transfer and policy diffusion.

The notion of diffusion, especially the formulations grounded in sociological institutionalism, has three advantages. First, sociology has an impressive tradition of diffusion analysis at the national (Rogers, 1995) and international level (Meyer and others, 1997), which does not have any equivalent in public administration, political science, or policy transfer literature. Note, however, that the pioneering work on diffusion research across the American states (Gray, 1973; Walker, 1969) is an exception. It is only with the policy learning/policy transfer literature of the 1990s that the issue again became a major focus of research in political science.

Second, the emphasis on transfer among members of the social system in the diffusion literature seems to allow us to look at the process outside the top-down and bottom-up approaches to change. This emphasis figures clearly in the literature on policy networks (Rhodes and Marsh, 1992; Van Waarden, 1992) and on governance (Rhodes, 1997), which emphasizes the fragmentation of political structures and the volatility of power. It connects naturally to the notions of epistemic communities (Haas, 1992), webs of influence (Braithwaite and Drahos, 2000) and transnational policy communities (Stone, 2003) as “channels of policy transfer” across nations.

Finally, we see some value in the “contagious” aspect of the diffusion perspective; that is, in the willingness of scholars within this research tradition to look beyond the structural aspects of the governing process to its internal dynamics (this does not mean, however, that all diffusion analysis pays attention to the contagious aspects of the process). Contagious-focused research examines how prior adoption of a trait, policy, institution, or practice in a population alters the probability of adoption for any remaining nonadopters (Strang, 1991, p. 325).

While comparative public administration enjoys much of the policy transfer approach, it is also open to the idea that “emulation” or “copying” might be a distinct and independent source of change, but there is no effort to look at it as a contagious, dynamic process of change. The policy transfer literature is essentially structuralist in its causal imagination. While the diffusion perspective offers these two advantages, it is often criticized as being politically neutral or uninformed. As diffusion analysis often focuses on broad historical, spatial, and socioeconomic causes for a pattern of policy adoption, it neglects the political dynamics involved (Jacoby, 2000, p. 8; Peters, 1997, p. 76; Stone, 2003, p. 4). Here the policy transfer literature that distinguishes between coercive and voluntary mechanisms of transfer seems to have the upper hand. Power in the sociological-institutional diffusion perspective is confined almost solely to the power of ideas, norms, and symbols. Yet these ideational forms of power are hardly coercive and interest driven, and frequently are not the major focus of the diffusion analysts.

We believe that our book confronts these problems and pitfalls in a relatively balanced way. We submit that comparative public administration and comparative policy analysis are to be enriched from the policy transfer, policy diffusion, and management of reforms literatures across borders and cultural perspectives, and it is possible to demonstrate how these approaches may inform each other. This is evident in the work of Stone (2003), who suggests that global policy networks make a major impact on the way policy is shaped on the global as well as national level. She distinguishes three models that combine the assertions about the power of ideas and knowledge with the network approach: the epistemic community approach, the embedded knowledge networks framework, and the transnational discourse community approach (Stone, 2003). She then places her “knowledge actors” in a framework of analysis that combines the policy network approach and the policy transfer literature, and in doing so opens up a new frontier for policy analysts. The move to the greater comparative and global level repeatedly raises the question about the centrality of the state vis-à-vis international organizations, nongovernmental organizations, corporations, and cities in these networks of power. Only a few of those organizations are mentioned and discussed in our Chapters 9 to 12, but there is also only so much one can cover in this type of book. Scholars diverge on this point, as they do about the two concepts of diffusion and policy transfer. In general, policy transfer seems to reflect the dominance of the territorial state in public administration and political science literature while the diffusion perspective reflects the notion that states are recipients of a normative order that is created outside them, and they are, therefore, secondary in importance to international norms. We believe that such a theoretical perspective is useful and constructive in integrating the many ideas about comparative public administration and policy as suggested in this book. The cases we present and analyze for public administration and public management reforms reflect both emulation and diffusion and thus enrich the comparative approach by increasing disciplinary connectedness and knowledge sharing.

Another major issue in the policy transfer and diffusion literature touches on the degrees and types of rationality that are involved in the process of change and reforms (Levi-Faur and Vigoda-Gadot, 2004). Some versions of the policy transfer literature, such as lesson drawing (Rose, 1993) and social learning (Hall, 1993) seem to perceive the process of transfer as a learning process. In this literature, the emphasis is on cognition and the redefinition of interests on the basis of new knowledge that affects the fundamental beliefs and ideas behind the policy. In some way related, though more demanding, are models of Bayesian learning (Meseguer, 2003). These models claim for the dominancy of probability in our life, in policy making, and in any other decision relevant to human action. Quantities of interest are governed by probability distributions, and optimal decisions can be made by reasoning about these probabilities together with observed training data. For example, in finance and economics, the strength of the price impact of unanticipated information depends on the relative precision of consumers' or traders' prior and posterior beliefs. By contrast, sociological interpretations of the process of change emphasize a group's norms rather than individual rationality.

See, for example, Martha Finnemore's argument about the notion of state interests. Finnemore suggests that

state interests are defined in the context of internationally held norms and understandings about what is good and appropriate. That normative context also changes over time, and as internationally held norms and values change, they create coordinated shifts in state interests and behavior across the system. . . . States' redefinitions of interest are often not the result of external threats or demands by domestic groups. Rather, they are shaped by internally shared norms and values that structure and give meaning to international political life.” (Finnemore, 1996, pp. 2–3)

This emphasis on the normative side of supposedly rational action suggests that emulation may be of some importance as a mechanism of policy (ex)change and public reforms. It also necessitates a distinction between learning and emulation as major features of the process of policy transfer. The distinction between the two may be based on the scope of information involved in the decision-making process. Policy learning is defined as the redefinition of one's interest and behavior on the basis of newly acquired knowledge, after watching the actions of others and the outcomes of these actions. Policy emulation, by contrast, is the redefinition of one's interest and behavior on the basis of newly acquired knowledge and after watching only the actions of others (Jordana and Levi–Faur, 2003). In comparative public administration we thus have to distinguish between the learners and the emulators by the extent to which adaptation to new behavior involves information not only about the actions of others but also about the consequences of those actions. The crucial difference is that the learner processes a greater amount of information than the emulator and is therefore less dependent and more autonomous.

Finally, the outcomes of policy transfers and diffusions are often presented through the expectation of convergence. Convergence theories postulate that growing international integration will have direct implications (for example, a change in the domestic distribution of political power) and indirect implications (for example, an influence on government policy) for domestic policy that will lead to similar policies and institutions. This is usually contrasted with divergence theories suggesting that growing international integration will not deflect states from their historically rooted trajectories, so that not convergence, but constant and perhaps even increasing variations will be the result for policies and institutions. The expectation of convergence in diffusion theory reflects a scholarly bias that is not necessarily implied and embedded in the theories of transfer and diffusion (Jacoby, 2000, p. 8). Indeed, Gabriel Tarde (1903), one of the founding fathers of sociology and author of The Laws of Imitation, describes the process of diffusion as one in which agents simultaneously converge on a fashion and distinguish themselves from others. The process of change and reformation may involve convergences and divergences at the same time. Many of the examples we present in Chapters 9 to 12 testify to this. The bias inherent in some of the diffusion and policy transfer literature toward a sort of “convergence” might best be balanced by a notion of change that considers both convergence and divergence as important dimensions.

Horizons for Comparative Public Administration and Governance

One of the most important debates in the social sciences in the last decade focused on the future of the nation-state (Marsh and Smith, 2004; Weiss, 2003). This future will be highly determined by the way we compare, emulate, and allow diffusion of knowledge and ideas from one actor to another, from one institution to another, and from one reform to others. Various scholars argue from different points of view that the power of the state, and thus of governments, is expected to decline and that new types of actors and political organization are gradually taking over responsibilities and policy capacities that were once the exclusive domain of the territorial state (Ohame, 1995; Strange, 1996). A forceful argument to that effect was made recently by Braithwaite and Drahos (2000), who argue that most states outside Europe and the United States “have become rule-takers rather than rule-makers.” That is,

the extent to which states have become rule-takers rather than rule-makers is greater than most citizens think, largely because when governments announce new regulatory laws they are somewhat embarrassed to disclose that the national legislature voted for those laws without having any say in shaping them. . . . For years some of Australia's air safety standards have been written by the Boeing Corporation in Seattle, or if not by that corporation, by the US Federal Aviation Administration in Washington. Australia's ship safety laws have been written by the International Maritime Organization in London, its motor vehicle safety standards by Working Party 29 of the Economic Commission for Europe and its food standards by the Codex Alimentarius Commission in Rome. Many of Australia's pharmaceuticals standards have been set by a joint collaboration of the Japanese, European and US industries and their regulators, called the International Conference on Harmonization. Its telecommunications standards have been substantially set in Geneva by the ITU. The Chair (and often the Vice–Chair) of most of the expert committees that effectively set those standards in Geneva are Americans. (Braithwaite and Drahos, 2000, pp. 3–4)

However, in this book we largely disagree with this observation and suggest a contradictory view: that governments are here to stay, that public administration is here to work and expand, and that alternative models for governance, however prosperous, will still have to run in the speed determined largely by political institutions and by professional government-controlled agencies. Despite dilemmas and paradoxes facing nations everywhere, bureaucracy and democracy in modern societies must work in collaborative patterns to make public services better everywhere, beyond frontiers and borders, time and culture, values and conflicts (Vigoda-Gadot, 2003b, 2009). Once again, governments are the prime actors in making decisions for societies as a whole.

In light of this view, our position is one in favor of a comparative perspective that may change the study. The evolution of different approaches to public administration (i.e., public management, public policy) inside and around the field (for instance, policy studies, public personnel management, information management, e-government, and so forth) carries promises but also risks for the study's position and role as the umbrella study of government. Peters (1996) noted that modern public administration greatly reflects lack of self-confidence both as a science and as a profession. That is, however, really the “traditional” perspective upon the study of public administration. We believe there is no identity crisis as soon as we depart from the notion that the study of public administration has to meet the standards and practices of the natural sciences (Raadschelders, 2011b), and thus it is that an intensified comparative look into existing and potential change has much to offer academic studies and practical development. The current incapacity to guide governments through a comprehensive route of public policy reform may change if and when greater and more systematic comparative perspectives are adopted. Much of the accumulated wisdom in the study of public administration has been obtained through comparison, through social experiments, the commission of policy errors, and learning from them about better ways to serve the people.

One should also take into account that the comparative road to knowledge carries costs. Inadequate comparisons may lead to wrong decisions. Making mistakes based on misleading comparative observations costs money, much money, from all of us, the taxpayers. Like good customers in a neighborhood supermarket, citizens should be aware of the services they receive, of the price they are asked to pay, and of governmental actions that should be taken to produce useful changes. Therefore it is in the citizens' interest as well as that of governments and its bureaucrats to adopt a combined global and comparative perspective into their process of policy and decision making. To that end, it is essential that a clear horizon for strong methodologies and comparative avenues will be developed, both quantitatively and qualitatively (Vigoda-Gadot and Mizrahi, 2014).

More so, demands for better operation are generally aimed at governments, but they should be, and are, also targeting scholarship. Science has the potential of exploring new knowledge, of developing new ways of looking at old things, of generating better explanations for relevant administrative problems, of applying sophisticated and useful professional methods, and, most important, of directing all available resources to produce successful and practical recommendations for professionals. Its prime goal is to design a comprehensive and global, comparative-based theoretical view of public systems that is clear, highly efficient, effective, thrifty, and socially oriented at the same time. This cannot be achieved without extensive understanding of the diversity, complexity, and interdisciplinarity of the study of public administration. The combined global and comparative route, again, is a most valuable instrument.

In many ways the persistent public mistrust of governmental services and institutions across the globe, together with the marked fragility of public administration as a science, inspired us in the voyage that we embarked upon and is presented before you. The fragile state of comparative knowledge of the study of public administration is the point of departure for a different kind of discussion, which is broader and multi-perceptional. Our core argument is that one can find many ways to depict administrative systems, their functionality, and their relationship with the public. The examples presented in this book demonstrate this heterogeneity in cases, reforms, and experience. A straightforward approach may be to simply compare the cases one is familiar with to others and look for anchors of analysis, for convergence and divergence. But a real progress that may be set as a challenge for future comparative studies is the integration of many comparative approaches into a comprehensive approach. Such a comprehensive approach, though, is not grounded in a desire for unity of knowledge. That is a classical and worthy desire, but irrelevant to understanding the social world. A comprehensive approach to public problems is one where elected officeholders, career civil servants, other stakeholders, and citizens tap into the knowledge sources relevant to the issue or problem at hand. Given that no public problem is alike, and given that it is reasonable to assert that public problems will vary with time and place, it is then obvious to suggest that the study of public administration explores how it can be the umbrella discipline for any public problem. A one-size-fits-all solution for the wide range of collective and public problems that governments face today is simply inconceivable.

There is another strong argument in favor of the combined global-comparative perspective. It allows for heterogeneity of views, ideas, value-based initiatives, and policies to walk in and make a difference. It also allows for systematic analysis of comparable principles and learning from their potential contribution. The answers it provides may not be applicable to all cases across all places and time, but their value is in looking at the small details of a larger picture.

Hence, a major assumption we make is that only mutual efforts and quality combination of critical knowledge from a variety of social science disciplines and methods can yield a real opportunity for making comparative public administration a real added value to our knowledge and tools. The translation of science into operative acts by government must rely on such sufficient wisdom, which can be accumulated from various cultural and national branches. The potential contribution of this volume is thus its effort to bring these views together and to produce a multifaceted comparative analysis of modern public administration.

Summary and Final Remarks

As demonstrated in many of this book's chapters, modern states across the world face serious problems of adhering to the public's needs and to a rapidly changing environment as well. Achieving one target is usually accompanied by painful compromises on others, and limited resources are frequently cited as the main reason for failure in the provision of services. Moreover, fundamental changes occur in people's lifestyles as well as in their beliefs and ideologies. They are intensified by high technology, communication systems, new distribution of capital, and the rise of civic values that have not existed before. All these lead citizens to perceive governments and public administration systems differently—through the lenses of values, beliefs, history, fears, and dreams.

Similarly, the role of the state and its relationship with bureaucracy and with citizens is undergoing a substantial transformation not only in the minds of the people but also in scholarly thinking. In a rapidly changing environment, government has a major function and embraces new aims that must be clearly recognized. It remains the best tool democracy can use to create fruitful reciprocal relationships between the state and citizens, but on a higher and better level. Borrowing again from Karl Popper's seminal work (1945), the underexplored path for global and regional development and prosperity is a participatory governance ethos (with liberal political values) where learning from others by comparative tools is a valuable asset. Hence, to uncover the major tasks and challenges facing governments today we require a cross-disciplinary strategy, comparative arsenals, and improved integration of all available knowledge in the social sciences and beyond.

We mentioned here and elsewhere (Vigoda, 2002b) that contrary to the heavy, formal, and inflexible image of bureaucracies, public sector organizations in America and Europe have been in a rapidly intensifying transition since the late nineteenth century, and that such transitions have been experienced in other parts of the world since the Second World War. We see the global and comparative avenue as one that deserves greater attention from academics and practitioners across the globe, and greater debate among those practitioners and academics who seek higher and more extensive understanding of bureaucracies and government systems. This process presents new challenges for the comparative method in public administration—and a greater obligation. Perhaps the most important is to integrate more widely existing knowledge of the social sciences with efficient public action and with quality governmental operation into the comparative vision. In the coming years, public administration will be evaluated by higher standards of providing understanding, by more rigorous comparative and other methodologies, and by more comprehensive understanding of successful and less successful cases of change and reforms. After all, the study of public administration and the art of government are in a continuous transformation along with life, technology, values, and institutions. Therefore the global and comparative vistas will continue to direct scholars and policy makers, scientists and public managers, as well as citizens and other interested agencies in their ways of thinking and action. Where else can these come from if not from looking at other units and at the universal puzzle of choosing among the right patterns for one's specific nation and culture? The exploration of new interdisciplinary horizons for comparative public administration is thus essential and inevitable for the successful passage of the field into the third millennium.

Almost all natural and social problems today are global by nature. As we tried to demonstrate in this book, they are pondered and evaluated by many in different ways and cannot be solved or resolved by a single actor. Global warming, climate change, and rising sea levels; the garbage patches in the Atlantic and in the Eastern and Western Pacific Oceans; migration; poverty and increasing income inequalities; terrorism; nuclear proliferation; epidemics and diseases; ethnic and religious conflict; the extinction of species; wars for water, for land, or for sea resources—the list is endless, and the expectations people have of governments are skyrocketing. We live in a highly interconnected world where it appears that change accelerates and where the challenges seem larger than ever before. The width of social time—that is, the time it takes for a message from one person to reach another—has decreased from months and days to mere seconds, and this has only been so in the past 20 years. A natural or man-made disaster, a major traffic accident, an unforeseen oil spill, a human tragedy, a terrorist attack, we will know about within hours if not faster. This 24/7 window to the news of the world has enhanced people's sense that the world is a dangerous place and that uncommon capabilities are needed to deal with the consequences of real disasters and with the potential of imagined events. Some may say that the characteristic for global challenges is that they are not interesting to the corporate world unless they would jeopardize the bottom line: profit. And even if it would threaten the bottom line, corporate actors do not have the authority to make binding decisions on behalf of all citizens. Other scholars and pundits may talk about the “hollowing out” of government.

By contrast, we argue that government is the only (formal and informal) actor in every society that can make binding decisions on behalf of the citizenry at large. In today's world people deal with the hazardous global natural and social environmental challenges through a variety of actors, and most prominent among them are governments and their experts. The new magic these governmental and expert actors embrace are, respectively, collaborative governance and interdisciplinarity. Thus, both collaboration (Vigoda-Gadot, 2003b) and interdisciplinarity (Vigoda, 2002b; Raadschelders, 2011b) are major horizons for future global and comparative studies in public administration. We suggest that what is needed to (re)solve global and public problems is not just government or governments that work globally. While they are the prime actor, they still need the involvement of other actors. In the end the necessities and possibilities of (re)solving global and public problems will depend on the extent to which public, nonprofit, private, and other actors (however defined) are willing to collaborate. In this process of collaboration interdiciplinarity is the tool by which knowledge will be best used to confront future horizons and challenges. Collaborating partners must use collaborative knowledge. Interdisciplinarity has the potential to find unconventional answers to unconventional problems. The comparative method is a vehicle to successful remedies to social ills and to growing public expectations.

Along this line, technological change is another prime factor influencing public administration as a science and as a profession. It has given people access to vast amounts of information and to instant electronic interaction even about trivial events (Facebook). The effects that this “informatization” has are not at all clear. There is, though, some indication that Internet and other communication media are rapidly changing how people's brains absorb information, and that these are literally rewiring the brain. Tools for comparison increase exponentially. The online environment is one that encourages superficial reading; people zap through or scan pages of a text rather than carefully reading and digesting it. As a consequence, the ability for information to be transferred from the short- to the long-term memory is declining quickly. This is important because the long-term memory is where the ability to understand complex concepts or schemas resides (Carr, 2010, p. 124). While a computer absorbs and stores information, the human brain continues to process it long after it has been received; to process and to digest; to digest and to compare. This is one major distinction, perhaps superiority, that human minds have over computers. The brain lives; a computer does not (Carr, 2010, p. 191). Hence, the information revolution is a threat to the consolidation of long-term memory and thus to the development and probing of complex schemas (Carr, 2010, p. 193).

Hard as it is, we cannot afford to limit our inquiries to disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives where global and public problems are concerned. The study that has the potential of elucidating the nature of global and public problems is that of public administration or public affairs. This was initially a study with an instrumental, technocratic focus and tradition (especially in the United States) but has grown to be so much more.

The study of public administration and governance cannot afford to develop a simple, parsimonious description of the world. Its scholars cannot afford to look at society from one specific perspective or angle the way that economists (scarcity), sociologists (interaction), psychologists (decision making as iterative process), and others do. This requires that we not only look at objective, factual, scientific evidence that can be presented as dissociated from the researcher and the degrees of which vary from randomized clinical trials, systematic reviews or meta-analyses of such trials at the top of the research quality hierarchy, via trials without proper randomization, natural experiments, quasi-experimental designs, time-series analyses with or without intervention, and regression continuity designs, to expert opinion at the bottom. Next to this, policy makers and scholars should also consider evidence as the outcome of an explicit sequence of choices made between the stage of the unstructured problem and the ultimate evidence presented. According to this logic any policy analysis starts with an unstructured problem that is in subsequent stages reduced to a researchable problem; this researchable problem is next defined by concepts, constructs, and relationships between variables, then translated into a formal model, of which attributes are next identified, to finally arrive at the evidence (Desai and Harlow, 2013, p. 21). The value-laden nature of many policy decisions, and especially the wicked problems (Rittel and Webber, 1973) among them, requires that in dealing with global and public problems governments not only rely on scientific evidence but also on information about the choices that have been made along the way that ultimately resulted in “evidence.” There is no scientific rationale upon which we can say that evidence is clear cut, not value laden, that no choices have been made about what is part of the researchable problem and what is not, that no choices have been made about how a concept was defined.

Given the highly increased awareness of what happens around the globe, the call for interdisciplinarity may no longer be sufficient. Global and public problems may actually require a-disciplinary inputs as well. Unity of knowledge in the classical sense is impossible because for each problem a different convergence of knowledge sources is required, and how they best converge can and does vary with time and with context. Elsewhere this convergence of knowledge sources around a specific problem has been called “differentiated integration.”' (Raadschelders 2011b, p. 190). Public administration as a study can best serve government by being disciplined in how it connects sources and bodies of knowledge to at least improve the comprehensiveness of the understanding of global and public problems.