In 2020, the outbreak of the COVID-19 viral disease swept across the globe. In response to the health emergency, Antonio Guterres, secretary-general of the United Nations, warned that the COVID-19 pandemic was the world’s most challenging crisis since World War II and that it would contribute to enhanced instability, unrest, and conflict within and among states in the international system. As state leaders faced these challenges, questions arose about the best strategies for ensuring security, order, and prosperity and about the institutions best suited to translate these strategies into practice. Put simply, world leaders needed advice about the machinery of government.
In Strategies for Governing, Alasdair Roberts calls on scholars to provide such advice. Building off of the classic work, Woodrow Wilson’s (1887) “The Study of Administration,” Roberts reminds us to think more broadly about how governance and administration determine state priorities and constrain state leaders’ choices. This macrolevel approach to public administration focuses on understanding the strategies that state leaders adopt to provide effective, durable, and normatively defensible solutions to modern governance.
The book offers a series of propositions that help explain these strategies. Roberts begins with an acknowledgment of the importance of the state as a conceptual building block. Each state claims exclusive authority to regulate a specified territory but belongs to an international system and therefore must communicate with other states. Understanding the state, rather than government within the state, as the fundamental unit of organization in governance provides scholars with a broad perspective and allows for rich analysis of critical questions about governance.
Within each state, there are leaders who influence state goals and the means by which the state pursues those goals. These leaders act in predictable ways. Leaders will work to maintain and increase both their own and their state’s power and legitimacy. Thus, leaders will try to anticipate and respond to perceived threats to authority and will pursue opportunities for increased control. Roberts identifies the means by which leaders do so as strategies for governing.
Strategies for governing describe how leaders react to circumstances in order to organize state activities. Put another way, strategies for governing provide an overall view of how leaders exercise state authority. A key to understanding governance is the recognition that leaders face certain difficulties that make the strategies imperfect. These difficulties relate to uncertainty and to changing circumstances. First, the world is complex, and this complexity is far greater than leaders are capable of analyzing. As a result, leaders face uncertainty about which policies are most likely to advance state goals. In deciding what to prioritize, leaders have to make consequential choices to pursue some state goals at the expense of others. Second, not only is the world uncertain but it also is constantly in flux. As a result, leaders must regularly adjust strategies for governing as specific conditions change. Yet doing so is not easy, because leaders must work within an existing body of institutions.
Every state contains a complex set of institutions and Roberts recognizes four sets of institutions of interest: laws, organizations, programs, and practices. These institutions are the mechanisms by which leaders implement their strategies for governing. When governing, leaders must focus on creating and consolidating new institutions to help achieve state goals while also directing the administration and adaptation of existing institutions.
Given this framework, Strategies for Governing identifies key dilemmas that leaders face relating to state institutions and the exercise of state authority. These dilemmas result from such broad considerations as state security, legitimacy, and capacity, as well as from considerations of state institutional design. For example, leaders struggle with questions relating to the desirable level of connection to the international system and how closely to regulate citizen and state behavior to promote human rights while preserving state power. Leaders also face dilemmas with respect to the amount of discretion that various actors should possess and the appropriate emphasis to place on tenets such as efficiency, planning, and consideration of long-term consequences.
The propositions found in the book provide scholars with theoretical foundations for understanding a multitude of empirical phenomena. The COVID-19 pandemic provides a nice example. One who seeks to understand her government’s response to the public health crisis may be tempted to begin her analysis with an exploration of specific executive or bureaucratic actions. However, these aspects of government operate within a larger context, and the governing strategies developed by these entities are the product of a complex set of macrolevel factors.
At a time where there are disciplinary incentives to engage in research that explores microlevel research questions, Roberts calls on scholars to think more critically about governance. Taking a macrolevel view of public administration allows us to reevaluate our assumptions regarding the building, running, and reform of institutions. Additionally, Roberts warns against some current trends in political science and public administration research. Three such trends are an emphasis on methodology, presentism, and siloed thinking. First, Roberts recognizes that tendencies to overlook critical questions about governance in favor of smaller management problems within the public sector are only exacerbated by our disciplinary fascination with methodology. Although rigorous and sophisticated methods are valuable research tools, they are just that—tools to aid scholarly analysis of pressing questions in governance. As put succinctly by Roberts, “the research agenda for public administration ought to be driven by the importance of questions and not by methodological preferences” (p. 125).
Despite the scholarly emphasis on methodology, researchers often fail to acknowledge that the choice of time frame applied to scholarship has a profound effect on analysis. Roberts notes that exploration of empirical phenomena that exist in the present can lead us to underestimate the malleability of states and institutions, as well as the transitory nature of strategies for governance. Today’s research tendencies toward presentism cause scholars to overlook the long-term factors that shape the behavior of states and their leaders.
Finally, the book implicitly warns against information silos. As Gillian Metzger puts it, although research specialization most certainly is desirable, when scholars “interact largely as passing strangers, acknowledging each other’s existence but almost never engaging in any sustained interchange,” our ability to explain important empirical phenomena is limited (“Administrative Law, Public Administration, and the Administrative Conference of the United States,” George Washington Law Review 83 4/5], 2015). Roberts effectively echoes this sentiment: scholars who seek to understand state behavior in the international system must recognize the role of administration, and scholars of administration must recognize the importance of the state.
Overall, Strategies for Governing has broad implications for research, teaching, and practice in a variety of disciplines and subfields. The book’s insights provide readers with fresh perspectives on important research questions in public administration, public policy, American politics, international relations, and comparative politics. Perhaps most notably, Roberts encourages us to return to first principles and to address the “what” and “how” of government.
