Executive Summary

The headline of a recent National Public Radio poll says it all: "Americans Distrust Government, but Want It to Do More." If we are to restore the public's confidence in an activist and progressive government, moving forward on a radical reinvention initiative to bring government into the Information Age needs to be a central task for progressives. From how they reauthorize major programs and develop new ones to how they manage existing ones, policymakers need to focus on transforming governance. This is not simply an interesting philosophical exercise, rather it is central to determining the shape of our government. For more than any other factor, it is policymakers' understanding and belief in a particular governing system that shapes their decisions about the kind of government they create.

In a poll for the Democratic Leadership Council shortly after the 2000 election, Mark Penn, former pollster for President Clinton, found that, "While Al Gore won on the individual issues of the campaign, he lost on the broader meta-themes of the election. George W. Bush's central messages of smaller government and of changing the tone in Washington were able to overcome his deficiency on the issues and position him closer to the center, at least rhetorically." In other words, Americans have not given up on their desire for activist government, but they rightly no longer trust a big, bureaucratic government to be an agent for progressive change. This points to a central dilemma for progressives who believe in activist government. Unless we can create a governing system that works in the New Economy, it will be difficult to restore Americans' faith in and desire for activist government. Without fundamental reinvention of government, conservatives will be much more likely to successfully assert that state failure is always a bigger problem than market failure, thereby cutting the legs out from any new progressive governance agenda. In short, progressivism should not be defined as the embrace of a particular type of governance, but rather as a commitment to activist exertion of the public to collectively solve problems, using the most effective available means.

This report lays out a new framework for rethinking government for the Information Age. It is based on the view that because our current government is structured along an administrative model perfected in the heyday of the post-WWII mature industrial economy, bureaucratic government is now a poorly honed tool to promote progressive change. Creating effective governance for the New Economy will require a fundamentally new approach, relying more on networks, information technology (IT) systems, and civic and private sector actors, and less on hierarchical, rule-based, bureaucratic programs. If bureaucratic government was about managing government agencies, albeit to achieve public aims, network government is about influencing the strategic actions of other actors. But let's be clear: Network government is not a conservative's paradise, for their vision of small government implies letting other actors make their own decisions free from collective influences (of regulation, funding, or incentives). Network government very much involves government promotion of collective action to advance the public good, but by engaging the creative efforts of all of society.

The prevailing technological and economic system largely shapes the government of an era. Organizations, whether public or private, are attuned to the technological, social, and organizational environment and so resemble each other. Each phase of America's economic development has produced a new organizational paradigm, both in the corporate world and in government. The rise of the factory-based, industrial economy in the 1890s brought about wide-scale municipal and state government reform, coupled with an increased federal role. The mass production, post-war corporate economy engendered the New Deal and Great Society frameworks that relied on the centralized state and "big government."

But the very nature of today's New Economy makes stove-piped, hierarchical bureaucracies ill-suited to addressing current problems and challenges. In an era when the economy is more entrepreneurial, competitive, fast-moving, networked, and technology-based and less hierarchical, the prevailing model of governance should also reflect these realities. In particular, the IT revolution promises to provide new tools to transform government. Government, however, lags behind these changes.

If networks are the core concept of a new form of government, then it is time to shift from thinking about government to thinking about governance. Public management is a narrow field, focusing on the deliberately taken actions of public agencies to address discrete problems. While public management is part of governance, not all governance involves public management. Governance is a broader concept and implies better aligning the actions of all actors -- government, organizations, and individuals -- to public ends. Therefore, a key task of governance is to help ensure that complex networks produce socially desirable results. This means that we need to replace the concept of hierarchical bureaucratic government with the concept of government as a manager of policy networks containing all relevant actors, including agencies at all levels of government, quasi-public and other nonprofit organizations, private companies, and even citizens.

Fortunately, the new information-based technology system offers the tools to create a new governance system that suits the underlying organizational, economic, and social realities. Instead of trying to achieve ends through command and control regulations and managed programs, governments can use information technologies to build self-governing systems, facilitate functioning markets, empower people with information, and create systems of accountability. IT cannot and should not do away with all bureaucratic government. It can, however, provide new tools for transforming a significant share of what government does and how it does it.

We believe that technology-enabled, networked governance will let government at all levels accomplish its traditional goals, but more efficiently. Beyond cutting costs, this is about enabling fundamentally new and more effective ways of addressing public policy concerns. In particular, information-rich economy and societal governance can be transformed in six key ways:

1. from bureaucratic and rule-driven government to entrepreneurial and flexible government;
2. from bureaucratic programs to empowered social entrepreneurs;
3. from top-down control to bottom-up complex adaptive systems;
4. from bureaucratic solutions to market-enabled solutions;
5. from information controlled by the bureaucracy to information freely available to everyone; and
6. from compliance with rules to accountability for results.

Creating network government will entail three major steps:

Step 1: Reinvent government agencies, particularly through information technologies. In any governing system, government agencies will still play important roles. To play these roles effectively, bureaucracies will need to be fundamentally restructured to give them considerably more flexibility and accountability and move more rapidly to e-government. Policymakers should:

• Reform civil service, including increased pay for performance and reformed personnel management systems;
• Establish performance-based organizations and nonprofit, government-sponsored corporations that have greater flexibility than traditional government agencies, but also more accountability for results;
• Forge "skunk works" that focus on innovation and futures planning for government; and
• Create functionally-oriented, self-service e-government.

Step 2: Foster third-sector networks and manage for accountability. The new governing model requires shifting the focus from government (e.g., agencies, programs, and bureaus) to governance. In other words, in the networked world, much of what government does will shift from managing programs to guiding and funding networks. This will entail a considerably greater effort to empower the entrepreneurial nonprofit sector. Policy makers should:

• Provide organizations that carry out governmental missions more flexibly but demand accountability; and
• Empower both the third sector and citizens to solve problems and develop new ways to fund their efforts.

Step 3: Create information-driven, network governance. We have only begun to scratch the surface of harnessing information and communication technology to transform both the economy and how government works. The ability of IT to enable all kinds of information to be cheaply collected, widely shared, and available in real time makes it possible to govern in fundamentally new ways. As a result, the third major thrust to create a new governance strategy takes advantage of information technologies to solve public policy problems. Policymakers should use IT to:

• Foster bottom-up, complex adaptive systems in a wide variety of policy areas, including national defense, transportation, and health care. In these systems, individual actors, empowered with IT tools, take actions and make decisions that collectively lead to more optimal outcomes;
• Harness markets in the service of public goals, in areas such as tradable emissions permits and road pricing;
• Empower individuals with information; and
• Hold governments accountable.

Transforming bureaucratic government into network government is critical if we are to ensure that government effectively addresses the myriad of the challenges of the first half of the 21st century. But it also a critical political task. The political alternative to radical reinvention is not the status quo and a hopeless defense of big bureaucratic government, for most Americans have rightly lost faith in this. Rather, it is the conservatives' paradise: a significantly smaller government that devolves much more to untrammeled market forces. Unless progressives embark on a serious and sustained effort to transform governance, they will be, in the words of former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich, "left as the reactionary protectors of the bureaucrats, defending inefficiency, technological backwardness, and poor services at high costs." In short, the party that embraces network governance first will be the party that gets the allegiance of the American people for the foreseeable future. Americans want a government that solves problems and helps make their lives better.

Blueprint Keyword: Extra Rego

Robert D. Atkinson is the vice president of the Progressive Policy Institute and director of PPI's Technology & New Economy Project.