On his book When the State Meets the Street: Public Service and Moral Agency
Cover Interview of April 30, 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.
Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017
It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016
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.