Networks and Governments

• Author: Robert Agranoff
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12835
• Published date: 01 September 2017
• Date: 01 September 2017

784 Public Administration Review • September | October 2017

Danny L. Balfour, Editor

Robert Agranoff

Indiana University, Bloomington

Networks and Governments

Robert Agranoff is professor emeritus

at the School of Public and Environmental

Affairs, Indiana University, Bloomington.

Since 1990, he has been affiliated with

the government and public administration

program, Instituto Universitario Ortega y

Gasset in Madrid, Spain. He specializes

in intergovernmental relations and

management, and public/nonpublic network

studies. His current work includes two books

Crossing Boundaries for Intergovernmental

Management

(Georgetown, 2017)

and

Local Governments in Multilevel

Governance: The Administrative Dimension

(Lexington, 2017).

E-mail: agranoff@indiana.edu

Book Reviews

Anne-Marie Slaughter ,  e Chessboard and the Web:

Strategies of Connection in a Networked World

( New Haven, CT : Yale University Press , 2017 ).

304 pp. $26.00 (cloth), ISBN: 9780300215649.

“

A

grand strategy for the Digital Age

must at least partly be a strategy of

connection. It must accept the ubiquity

and power of networks and internalize both

their opportunities and their threats. But just

as the Digital Age subsumes the industrial age,

so must a grand strategy for our world operate

both on the chessboard and in the web.” Herein

lies the genius of this work. Unlike many who

have hopped on the bandwagon of networks,

Slaughter recognizes that networks are not replacing

governments and their influence, but arise out of

them and operate, exert power, and interact in

both traditional “institutional” and “networked”

fashion. It is imperative to “acknowledge the

state-based international order even as it makes

room for a people-based order.” An alert for

public administration–networks are not replacing

governments, but operate in dynamic interaction.

Based on a series of lectures delivered at Yale in

2013, Slaughter, a former state department executive

and former dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at

Princeton, develops a different look at foreign policy

and in doing so adds to our basic understanding of

networks in the current era. The chessboard is the

prevailing metaphor for understanding established

governments, once spelled out by Thomas Schelling

in Strategy of Conflict ( 1960 ), later articulated by

Joseph S. Nye, Jr. ( 2010 ), who described post-Cold

War global politics as a “complex three-dimensional

chess game” of military, economic and organizational

power. This is not the only domain, advances

Slaughter. It can obscure the web view, which is not

a map of separation but of connection, of the density

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 77, Iss. 5, pp. 784–786. © 2017 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12835.