Ethos Issue 7, Jan 2010
Serving Beyond the Predictable
Jocelyne Bourgon
Changing Old Ways:
Redundancy and Contingency
Redundancy refers to resources that
can be deployed easily to explore
emergent situations, experiment
to enhance collective learning, and
perform other functions to promote
exploration, experimentation and
innovation. Redundancy builds
resilient organisations and improves
their adaptive capacity.
Contingent capacity, a related concept,
is the concept of building resources in areas of greatest vulnerability, allowing
resources to be deployed rapidly in these
areas. Public organisations that push
aggressively for efficiency gains may
erode their adaptive capacity.
Developing New Ways:
Participative Approaches
A participative approach to public policy
and policy implementation is not a
luxury. It reinforces resilience and the
adaptive capacity of society, particularly
when it allows decision making and
action at the community level.19
Complex issues can be large or
small20 and governments must intervene
appropriately to achieve the desired
outcome.17,20 Small-scale interventions
are a powerful way to gain insights
on preferences, potential outcomes
and unintended consequences, and
micro interventions can accelerate
collective learning, deflect risks and
increase resilience.
CONCLUSION
Building on the strength of public
institutions and organisations, governments are called upon to address complex
issues in the unpredictable nature of the
global economy, networked society and
fragile biosphere. They are called upon
to serve "beyond the predictable".
This role transforms the systems and
structures that served us well in the past.
It requires new capacities. Future public
sector reforms entail improving the
anticipative capacity of government and
building the innovative and adaptive
capacity of society.
As a result of a number of global
failures and crises, a search for balance
is under way to reconcile the private,
public and civil society spheres. The need
for a new balance reveals more clearly
than ever the need for an affirmative state able to provide services of high public
value, promote and defend the collective
interest in all circumstances and also to
serve beyond the predictable.
As a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Civil Service
College, Singapore, the Honourable Jocelyne
Bourgon spoke on "New Governance and
Public Administration: A Dynamic Synthesis"
in June 2009. Madame Bourgon is President
of Public Governance International, an
organisation dedicated to advancing
good public governance, and President
Emeritus of the Canada School of Public
Service, where she is project leader of the
NS6, an International Research Network
that is exploring the challenges of public administration in the 21st century. She is also
Distinguished Visiting Professor of Public
Administration at the University of Waterloo,
and Distinguished Fellow of the Centre for
International Governance Innovation.
These positions follow an extensive career
in the public sector where she led the
Public Service of Canada through some of
its most important reforms since the 1940s.
Selected positions include: Ambassador to
the Organisation of Economic Cooperation
and Development (2003-2007), Clerk of the
Privy Council and Secretary to the Cabinet
(1994-1999), Queen’s Privy Council of
Canada (1998-present), and Deputy Minister
in various departments: Transport, Canadian
International Development Agency, Consumer
and Corporate Affairs, and the Canadian
Center for Management Development.
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