On his book When the State Meets the Street: Public Service and Moral Agency
Cover Interview of April 29, 2018
The wide angle
We are constantly thinking about what it is that the
state ought to do—what sorts of policies it should pursue. But policy
implementation gives rise to another, equally important question: the question
of how the state ought to interact with citizens when pursuing such
policies. What standards should the state uphold when interacting with those who
are subject to its authority?
The first question (the what of policy) is settled by
and large in legislative chambers. The second question (the how of
implementation) is resolved in bureaucratic agencies within the framework provided
by administrative law.
Consider any policy selected through democratic procedures.
Regardless of its content, its implementation will have to respond to a further
set of normative demands. At the very minimum, we would want the policy to be
enacted in a way that is efficient, fair, responsive to the needs of individual
citizens, and respectful of them.
How to interpret these various demands, how to apply them to
specific cases, and how to resolve conflicts that arise between them are
normative challenges that are intrinsic to implementation. These are the sorts
of challenges that street-level bureaucrats must contend with.
Seen in this light, bureaucracy is not just an instrument
for the execution of public policy, but a crucible in which some of our abstract
value commitments are given practical countenance and the tensions between them
worked out. Any normative theory of the democratic state that did not engage
with implementation would thus remain incomplete.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The wide angle
We are constantly thinking about what it is that the state ought to do—what sorts of policies it should pursue. But policy implementation gives rise to another, equally important question: the question of how the state ought to interact with citizens when pursuing such policies. What standards should the state uphold when interacting with those who are subject to its authority?
The first question (the what of policy) is settled by and large in legislative chambers. The second question (the how of implementation) is resolved in bureaucratic agencies within the framework provided by administrative law.
Consider any policy selected through democratic procedures. Regardless of its content, its implementation will have to respond to a further set of normative demands. At the very minimum, we would want the policy to be enacted in a way that is efficient, fair, responsive to the needs of individual citizens, and respectful of them.
How to interpret these various demands, how to apply them to specific cases, and how to resolve conflicts that arise between them are normative challenges that are intrinsic to implementation. These are the sorts of challenges that street-level bureaucrats must contend with.
Seen in this light, bureaucracy is not just an instrument for the execution of public policy, but a crucible in which some of our abstract value commitments are given practical countenance and the tensions between them worked out. Any normative theory of the democratic state that did not engage with implementation would thus remain incomplete.