Culture and Context:
Overcoming fragmented authority
By Susan Miller
Published on May 19, 2006 - 03:53 AM
A recent editorial by Harlan Ullman in the Washington Times, Rethinking homeland security (via Homeland Security Watch) suggests that problems at the Department of Homeland Security stem from “the Constitution and the principles of federalism and checks and balances.â€
Today, multiple, overlapping federal, state and local jurisdictions preclude establishing clear lines of authority and accountability that actually put people in charge. Without those, assignment of responsibility is meaningless. Bluntly put, no single person or organization is (or can be) in charge of homeland security.
On a much smaller scale, a brief paper by Olivia Golden, "Overcoming Barriers to Success in the Public Sector: Lessons from the 2005 Innovations Finalists, looks at the 2005 Innovations in American Government Award finalists to categorize and analyze the problems the finalists were trying to address. The root problems, Golden finds, were often
o Failures in the political environment, such as conflicting goals or a stalemate among different political interests
o Fragmented operational authority, where no one person had control of enough pieces to solve the problem.
Sounds like Homeland Security.
The Washington Times editorial suggests homeland security would be better served with the creation of an oversight board -- that functions the way the Federal Reserve or the Securities and Exchange Commission does – that could “regulate and set homeland security standards and policies, and, with DHS, to ensure compliance.â€
Golden’s paper looks at the solutions already implemented by public-sector entities (the award finalists) and suggests that the creative solutions used by these programs might be applicable to other problems in need of an innovative solution. Just as Washington Times’s Ullman, suggests, one solution involved an oversight board:
From among the finalists, Partnership for Results, in Cayuga County, NY, addresses fragmentation of authority most explicitly. It involves an entirely new governance structure, a board made up of the directors of key children’s agencies at the city and county levels, which has taken on the responsibility of collectively spending substantial resources according to agreed-on criteria. None of the directors has given up their authority over their own agency, but they have agreed to oversee substantial funds jointly.
Here’s another example she cites:
In the Iowa Charter Agencies project, agency directors get new authority over administrative functions that were previously outside their turf (such as personnel and contracting) in exchange for a commitment to specific results.
Take a read. It might suggest the idea you’ve been waiting for.
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