Minnowbrook: The Administrative Zeitgeist
(Minnowbrook Conference Centre, Syracuse University)
He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how. - Friedrich Nietzsche
As with human affairs, public administration goes through waves. The Minnowbrook Conferences launches a new wave once every 20 years at its landmark conference venue at Syracuse University.
Let us look at the three waves coinciding with the Minnowbrook Conferences.
Minnowbrook I (1968)
Nearly 200 years ago, Raja Rammohan Roy argued in his book, Exposition of the Judicial and Revenue Systems of India, that India cannot be governed by abstraction; by rules, reports and statistics, but place people at the center. A similar call was made at the first conference: public administration is much more than mere technocratic activity and labeled New Public Administration (NPA). The key themes of NPA were:
Social equity as a central goal of public administration,
Relevance of public administration to real societal problems,
Responsiveness to citizens, and
Democratic values over rigid bureaucracy.
In India, this started the loosening of the Weberian model of administration.
Minnowbrook II (1988)
Led to the rise of New Public Management (NPM). The key driver was PM Margaret Thatcher, who during the 1980s started to make Government more businesslike and improve its efficiency by importing ideas from private sector management models. In 1991, as India opened up its economy,chief ministers started to see themselves as private sector CEOs.
Minnowbrook III (2008)
The third Conference led to the emergence of a constellation of allied approaches: Whole of Government approach (WoG), or Joined up Government or Digitally networked Electronic Governance (DEG), or Oneness of Government. The basic notion was that Government is one and should act as a unified entity to solve complex problems.
The Minnowbrook Conferences led to four stages in India in the past 75 years:
Stage 1 (up to late 1960s): Our inheritance at Independence was a hybrid of two systems: Max Weber’s ideal bureaucracy, and the French prefecture designed by Napoleon Bonaparte. The main features of this system were centralization at multiple levels, hierarchical organization, where each position had a clear division of work and decisions were made based on a set of impersonal written rules.
Stage 2 (1970s-80s): The Weberian model gave way to New Public Administration with a stress on relevance, equity, change and social justice, encapsulated in the Garibi Hatao slogan. Concretely, this led to the 20-point Programme, which focused on land redistribution, housing for landless laborers, price control, expansion of public distribution system, promotion of small industries and rural employment programs.
Stage 3 (1990s-2000s): The rise of New Public Management led to adaptation of ideas and practices like performance budgeting, citizen’s charters, results-based performance evaluation, lateral entry, privatization of PSUs, partnering with NGOs for program delivery, rise of PPP models for public infrastructure development, and outsourcing of services.
Stage 4 (2010- present): Oneness, Whole of Government and Digital Electronic Governance showed up in India in the form of digitalization to integrate program delivery (JAM), roll-out of mission mode programs (Swachh Bharat), data driven monitoring (aspirational districts) and so on.
Each wave has a why that directs administrative policies and practices. Understanding the "why” enables administrators to understand the changing relationship between society, business and Government; developing meaning and purpose in their careers and life (more in the next article).
