Commentary: Messy Business: Leading in Regeneration

• Author: Aidan Culhane
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12774
• Published date: 01 September 2017
• Date: 01 September 2017

Messy Business: Leading in Regeneration 705

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 77, Iss. 5, pp. 705–706. © 2017 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12774.

Aidan Culhane is a consultant at WK

Nowlan Real Estate Advisors in Dublin,

Ireland, advising on housing and planning

matters. A chartered town planner and

former special advisor at the Irish Housing

Ministry, he also served as an elected

member in local government for 12 years.

E-mail: aculhane@wkn.ie

Commentary

T he authors of “Managing the Entanglement:

Complexity Leadership in Public Sector

Systems” have produced a thought-provoking

and intriguing take on leadership, moving—as they

set out to do—from theory to empirical exemplars.

As someone who has spent many years around

leadership in the built environment, regeneration, and

spatial planning area, I believe that this article offers

particularly fresh perspectives on some very familiar

questions. The most interesting insights come out of

the article ’ s discussion of leadership as a process rather

than as a quality or trait. Thus, the authors’ firm

assertion that leadership is a product of relationships

and interactions rather than the command-and-

control exercise or “great man thesis” of traditional

thinking is a welcome and refreshing perspective in

public management. The article ’ s choice of urban

regeneration projects and the focus and analysis of

some of these processes of enabling leadership are

key to developing the insights that the authors have

achieved.

Urban regeneration projects are an ideal testing

ground for leadership theories. Although usually

coordinated by public sector or quasi–public sector

entities, they necessarily involve a multiplicity of

stakeholders, from those who live in the area to

landowners and other commercial, political, and

other interest groups. Such projects, by definition,

take a long time to deliver, involve the expenditure of

relatively large amounts of money, are disruptive, and

seldom produce exactly the result that was envisaged

at their inception. In short, they are complex,

multidimensional projects that require a very high

degree of oversight and coordination to deliver.

Unsurprisingly, but nonetheless usefully, the authors

discern that a higher degree of adaptive and enabling

leadership is required for projects with a higher level

of complexity. While administrative leadership can

dominate in more straightforward situations, a wider

range of strategies and greater sophistication are

required to cope with more complex situations. Thus,

the authors detect that greater deployment of adaptive

and enabling leadership strategies is positively correlated

with the complexity of the individual situation.

One of the strongest challenges in regeneration

projects is legitimacy in the context of actors’

acceptance of each other ’ s rights or relative power

to take decisions affecting the wider group. Thus,

residents may perceive their “stake” or interest in

the project as superior to those of the public sector

leadership agencies that see themselves as funders or

managers and thus as having the greater “say” in the

direction of the project. The nature of regeneration

is that the interests of the future communities must

be considered as well as those of existing residents, so

participants need to strike a careful balance among

many interests. Inevitably, impacts on the wider area

come into play, and further single-interest groups or

factions of larger groups emerge. In all cases, then,

there is a high degree of contested space with regard to

progress and decision making within the project. This

is where leadership is required.

Although it lies outside the scope of the article, a

normative evaluation of the approaches pursued in

enabling leadership techniques would be interesting.

It is inevitable in projects such as those under

discussion that questions as to whose interests are

best served by decisions are a key source of suspicion,

argument, and conflict. Leadership from the public

sector is generally tilted one way or another between

democratic and bureaucratic functions, where political

and economic imperatives may outweigh the small-d

democratic wishes of stakeholders in a particular

project. However, these scalar judgments are integral

to public management issues and particularly germane

in the hothouse environment of regeneration projects.

To anyone familiar with regeneration, or any

multistakeholder environment, the four core tensions

identified in the article will ring particularly true.

However, the dualisms set up by the authors neatly

and usefully codify and encapsulate a wide variety

Aidan Culhane

WK Nowlan Real Estate Advisors, Ireland

Messy Business: Leading in Regeneration