Politics, Policy and Public Administration: Essays in Honour of Professor John Wanna. By Andrew Podger , Michael de Percy , and Sam Vincent , eds. 2021. Acton, Australia. Australian National University Press. 420 pp. $70.00 (paper). ISBN (print) 9781760464363. Available for free download at https://press.anu.edu.au/publications/series/anzsog/politics-policy-and-public-administration-theory-and-practice

• Published date: 01 November 2023
• Author: Donald F. Kettl
• Date: 01 November 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13738

Received: 25 September 2023

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13738

Politics, Policy and Public

Administration: Essays in

Honour of Professor John

Wanna

By Andrew Podger, Michael de Percy, and

Sam Vincent, eds. 2021. Acton, Australia.

Australian National University Press. 420

pp. $70.00 (paper). ISBN (print)

9781760464363. Available for free

download at https://press.anu.edu.au/

publications/series/anzsog/politics-

policy-and-public-administration-theory-

and-practice

Donald F. Kettl

University of Maryland School of Public Policy, College Park, Maryland, USA

Email: dfkettl52@gmail.com

There aren’t many scholars in public administration with

world-class stature as a pracademic and guitar-playing

chops as a 1970s bass-playing punk rocker as well. But

neither are there many scholars with the broad impact on

the discipline over the last 50 years as John Wanna.

This fascinating book celebrates his contributions from

his working-class background in a Yorkshire factory town

before moving to Australia to complete his education. He

put down deep roots in the emerging public policy world

of Australia’s robust government reform movement.

Together with his colleagues Glyn Davis and Pat Weller,

both giants in their own right, Wanna launched an impres-

sive career that attacked the major puzzles of budgeting,

policy, politics, administration, and practice. That led to his

major role in creating the Australia and New Zealand

School of Government (ANZSOG), which itself has had

influence far beyond Down Under. It is a glowing testi-

mony both to his leadership of the field and his long-term

personal connections with so many leading scholars that

this festschrift appeared.

The book is sweeping in coverage, starting with bud-

geting and financial management before moving on to

the politics of Australia, the connection between public

policy and administration, and the challenge of working

with practitioners. The book begins with an exploration of

Wanna’s substantial impact on budgeting, led by his

Managing Public Expenditure in Australia (Wanna

et al., 2000). In a short introduction to the reprinted

review of the book, Allen Schick shares important lessons

he learned from Wanna. “One of the lessons I learned

from John,”Schick writes, “is that budgeting is part of a

portfolio of administrative practices, and that government

cannot reform the way it allocates money unless it also

reforms the ways it manages the civil service and delivers

public services”(19). Schick continued (20), “experience is

the mother of managerial innovation.”

This analysis not only frames the core ideas of this

lively book. It also shines light clearly on Wanna’s insight

into public administration and policy. Isi Unikowski points

to the ongoing tension between political science and

public administration—and about the connection

between the worlds of theory and practice. In 1952, a

paper prepared for the Committee on Public Administra-

tion of the American Political Science Association sug-

gested “that academics who profess public administration

spend their time fooling with trifles”(Martin, 1952). Along

with one of the book’s other contributors, Paul ‘tHart,Uni-

kowski contends that Wanna struck out along a very differ-

ent path that strongly embraced the connection between

theory and practice. In fact, ‘t Hart contends in an espe-

cially entertaining essay, Wan na was “a trailblazer for

engaged, grounded, policy-relevant scholarship,”along a

path that at the beginning “was disturbingly barren”(332).

Peter Shergold writes about the other side of the prob-

lem: that too many of the efforts of the public administra-

tion community to connect with practice get “lost in

translation”(339). His co-author, Andrew Podger, notes

(354) “practitioners’frustration with academics.”Driving

this frustration, he says, is that academics often have lived

in the world of ideology and big-bang changes, while the

pragmatism of pr actitioners often leads to incremental

improvements thatleave academics unimpressed.

In fact, they write in the joint conclusion to their chap-

ter that pragmatism has dominated the practitioners’

world far more than ideology. In particular, the pragmatic

focus has not been a dressing for an effort to push aside

the priorities of the elected government, a finding that

increasingly distances the experience of Australia, and

many other countries, from the world of the

United States. It is true, they note, that the “language of

the practitioners in explaining the reforms has been

economics-oriented”(363). That reflects their singular

focus on economic policies as well as the language that

helped give rise to their reforms. Of course, that has only

further distanced the public administration community

from the world of practice. The “lost in translation”

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