Federalist No. 51: Is the Past Relevant to Today's Collaborative Public Management?

• Author: Lisa Blomgren Bingham,Rosemary O'Leary
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6210.2011.02465.x
• Date: 01 December 2011
• Published date: 01 December 2011

Lisa Blomgren Bingham is the

Keller-Runden Professor of Public Service

in the School of Public and Environmental

Affairs at Indiana University and a visiting

professor of law in the William S. Boyd

School of Law at the University of Nevada,

Las Vegas. Her recent research examines

the legal framework for public engagement,

dialogue, deliberation, and collaboration in

governance. She currently is working on a

book examining justice and the rule of law

in institutional and disp ute systems design.

E-mail: lbingham@indiana.edu

Rosemary O’Leary is the Distinguished

Professor and Phanstiel Chair in Strategic

Management and Leadership at the

Maxwell School of Syracuse University. Her

research, teaching, and practice focus on

improving the implementation of collabora-

tive governance efforts, including address-

ing the conf‌l icts inherent in collaborative

networks and understanding the impact of

law on collaborative policies.

E-mail: roleary@maxwell.syr.edu

S78 Public Administration Review • Special Issue

Lisa Blomgren Bingham

Indiana University

Rosemary O’Leary

Syracuse University

Federalist No. 51 is another of the most recognizable and

important of the Federalist Papers, famously arguing

that one f‌i rst must enable government to control the

governed, and then oblige it to control itself.  e authors

suggest that part of this obligation involves ef‌f ective

collaboration within a system of separate powers.  ey

then ask how this “collaboration imperative” can be

exercised in today’s contentious political environment.

Today’s public administrators are working in a new

landscape that requires them to be collaborative.

By collaborative we mean “the process of facilitating

and operating in multi-organizational arrangements

to solve problems that cannot be solved or easily

solved by single organizations. Collaborative means

to co-labor, to achieve common goals, often working

across boundaries and in multi-sector and multi-actor

relationships. Collaboration is based on the value of

reciprocity and can include the public” (O’Leary et al.

2009).

 ere are several reasons for the increase in collabora-

tive public management both in the literature and

in practice. First, most public challenges are larger

than one organization, requiring new approaches

to addressing public issues. Second, outsourcing

has grown in volume and dollar amount. By its

very nature, outsourcing is a collaborative endeavor

between the public agencies awarding the contract

and the organizations performing the contracted tasks.

 ird, the desire to improve the ef‌f ectiveness of pub-

licly funded programs is encouraging public of‌f‌i cials to

identify new ways of providing public services. Fourth,

technology is helping government agencies and per-

sonnel share information in a way that is integrative

and interoperable, with the outcome being a greater

emphasis on collaborative governance. Finally, citizens

are seeking additional avenues for engaging in gover-

nance, which can result in new and dif‌f erent forms of

collaborative problem solving and decision making.

More than a decade ago, H. George Frederickson

observed that public administration was moving “to-

ward theories of cooperation, networking, governance,

and institution building and maintenance” in response

to the “declining relationship between jurisdiction and

public management” in a “fragmented and disarticu-

lated state” (1999, 702). Frederickson emphasized

institutionalism, public sector network theory, and

governance theory as relevant to the future of public

administration

Lester Salamon observed that “[u]nlike both tra-

ditional public administration and the new public

management, the new governance shifts the empha-

sis from management skills and the control of large

bureaucratic organizations to enablement skills, the

skills required to engage partners arrayed horizontally

in networks, to bring multiple stakeholders together

for a common end in a situation of interdependence”

(2005, 16).

In earlier work, we have likened this approach to

public management to “lateral thinking”—a phrase

used to describe creativity that stems from taking

knowledge from one substantive context or discipline

and seeing how useful it is in an entirely dif‌f erent one

(Bingham and O’Leary 2008). For example, Leon-

ardo Da Vinci’s genius stemmed from his mastery of

lateral thinking; he moved f‌l uidly from art to science,

engineering, mathematics, medicine, architecture, and

beyond, f‌i nding universal rules of nature manifest in

widely varying contexts (Riding 2006). He dissected

the human arm and a bird’s wing and then tried to

engineer a machine to enable people to f‌l y; in this

way, he applied what he had learned from human

physiology and natural science to engineering. And so

it is with the public administration of the twenty-f‌i rst

century: new challenges and new ways of addressing

public policy problems by necessity demand collab-

orative approaches.

Feldman and colleagues provide a vision of a new

professional identity for public administrators: “ e

public manager as inclusive manager facilitates the

practice of democracy by creating opportunities for

Federalist No. 51: Is the Past Relevant to Today’s Collaborative

Public Management?