John D. Donahue – författare

Government has become a refuge, and a relic, of America’s crumbling middle-class economy. As the public and private worlds of work have veered in different directions, the gaps between them are warping government work in unintended ways.Three decades of economic turbulence have rendered American workplaces more demanding and less secure, more rewarding for high-end workers and punishing for workers without advanced skills. This workplace revolution, however, has largely bypassed government. Public employees—representing roughly one-sixth of the total workforce—still work under the conditions of dampened risk and constrained opportunity that marked most of the economy during the middle-class boom following World War II.The divergent paths of public and private employment have intensified a long-standing pattern: elite workers spurn public jobs, while less skilled workers cling to government work as a refuge from a harsh private economy. The first trend creates a chronic talent deficit in the public sector. The second trend makes the government workplace rigid and resistant to change. And both contribute to shortfalls in public-sector performance.The Warping of Government Work documents government’s isolation from the rest of the American economy and arrays the stark choices we confront for narrowing, or accommodating, the divide between public and private work.

All too often government lacks the skill, the will, and the wallet to meet its missions. Schools fall short of the mark while roads and bridges fall into disrepair. Health care costs too much and delivers too little. Budgets bleed red ink as the cost of services citizens want outstrips the taxes they are willing to pay. Collaborative Governance is the first book to offer solutions by demonstrating how government at every level can engage the private sector to overcome seemingly insurmountable problems and achieve public goals more effectively. John Donahue and Richard Zeckhauser show how the public sector can harness private expertise to bolster productivity, capture information, and augment resources. The authors explain how private engagement in public missions--rightly structured and skillfully managed--is not so much an alternative to government as the way smart government ought to operate. The key is to carefully and strategically grant discretion to private entities, whether for-profit or nonprofit, in ways that simultaneously motivate and empower them to create public value.Drawing on a host of real-world examples-including charter schools, job training, and the resurrection of New York's Central Park--they show how, when, and why collaboration works, and also under what circumstances it doesn't. Collaborative Governance reveals how the collaborative approach can be used to tap the resourcefulness and entrepreneurship of the private sector, and improvise fresh, flexible solutions to today's most pressing public challenges.

A Brookings Institution Press and Visions of Governance for the 21st Century publicationChanging markets are challenging governance. The growing scale, reach, complexity, and popular legitimacy of market institutions and market players are re-opening old questions about the role of the public sector and redefining what it means to govern well. This volume—the latest publication from the Visions of Governance in the 21st Century program at the Kennedy School of Government—explores the way evolving markets alter the pursuit of cherished public goals.John D. Donahue and Joseph S. Nye, Jr. frame the inquiry with an essay on governing well in an age of ascendant markets. Other contributors (all from Harvard's Kennedy School unless otherwise indicated) address specific areas of market governance in individual chapters: Joseph P. Newhouse on the medical marketplace, Jose Gomez-Ibañez and John R. Meyer on transportation, William Hogan on electric power, Paul E. Peterson on K–12 education, L. Jean Camp on information networks, Akash Deep and Guido Schaefer (Vienna University of Economics & Business Administration) on federal deposit insurance, Frederick Schauer on ""the marketplace of ideas,"" Anna Greenberg on the ""marketization"" of politics, David M. Hart on the politics of high-tech industry, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger on information law, John D. Donahue and Richard J. Zeckhauser on the challenges posed by fast-changing markets, and Mark Moore on the spread of market ideology.

A Brookings Institution Press and Visions of Governance for the 21st Century publicationThe latest in a series exploring twenty-first-century governance, this new volume examines the use of market means to pursue public goals. Market-based governance includes both the delegation of traditionally governmental functions to private players, and the importation into government of market-style management approaches and mechanisms of accountability.The contributors (all from Harvard University) assess market-based governance from four perspectives:The demand side deals with new, revised, or newly important forms of interaction between government and the market where the public sector is the customer. Chapters in this section include Steve Kelman on federal procurement reform, Karen Eggleston and Richard Zeckhauser on contracting for health care, and Peter Frumkin.The supply side section deals with unsettled questions about government's role as a provider (rather than a purchaser) within the market system. Contributors include Georges de Menil, Frederick Schauer and Virginia Wise.A third section explores experiments with market-based arrangements for orchestrating accountability outside government by altering the incentives that operate inside market institutions. Chapters include Robert Stavins on market-based environmental policy, Archon Fung on social markets, and Cary Coglianese and David Lazer.The final section examines both the upside and the downside of the market-based approach to improving governance. Contributors include Elaine Kamarck, John D. Donahue, Mark Moore, and Robert Behn.An introduction by John D. Donahue frames market-based governance as an effort to engineer into public work some of the intensive accountability that characterizes markets without surrendering the extensive accountability of conventional government. A preface by Joseph S. Nye Jr. sets the book in the context of a larger inquiry into the future of governance.

Everybody knows federal agencies are brain-dead leviathans. Everybody knows that the watchword of federal management is ""that's the way we've always done it."" Everybody knows that any creativity within American government shows up only in the cities and states. Everybody's wrong. In 1995 the Ford Foundation's annual ""Innovation in American Government"" award competition was opened up to federal candidates and a third of the winners since then have been federal institutions. This book profiles the 14 federal award winners from 1995 to 1998 and challenges the conventional wisdom about the federal bureaucracy's capacity to adapt. Examples include the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which figured out how to identify and act upon business and government's shared stake in keeping dangerous products out of consumers' hands; and the Wage and Hour inspectors in the Labor Department, who deployed market leverage to put pressure on the garment-industry scofflaws whose sweatshops had evaded conventional enforcement. The stories show how pressure, promises, and professional pride can galvanize federal managers and front-line workers to overcome what are admittedly imposing impediments to change, and persevere with new ways to deliver on their missions. And they illustrate the unfashionable truth that innovation is within Washington's repertoire after all. Copublished with the Council for Excellence in Government

In Ports in a Storm a team of Harvard Kennedy School scholars focus diverse conceptual lenses on a single high-stakes management task—enhancing port security across the United States. Their aims are two: to understand how a public manager might confront that complex undertaking, and to explore the similarities, differences, and complementarities of their alternative approaches to public management.The book takes as its pivot point the singular case of U.S. Coast Guard Captain Suzanne Englebert and her leadership of efforts to secure America's ports after the September 11 attacks. The Coast Guard had always been responsible for securing America's ports and coastline. But now it was tasked with safeguarding these critical, complex, and vulnerable assets during a time of war, a job it clearly could not handle alone.Ports in a Storm considers the monumental challenge of driving rapid change in a complex system involving hundreds of private organizations and scores of government agencies with their operations intricately intertwined. The book examines Englebert's actions from varied conceptual vantage points, sometimes critiquing questionable calls but more often celebrating her initiative, creativity, persistence, and skill.The authors use the Coast Guard episode as a testing ground for the eclectic intellectual constructs they have been developing to guide public managers. Instead of starting with theory and searching for examples that fit, they begin with the concrete and then harness scholarship to the service of better practice. And rather than mimic management principles from the business world, they tailor their approach to the very different challenges of managing in a public sector context. The volume allows readers in both the scholarly and practical worlds to see how the theories measure up.Contributors, including the two volume editors, are Robert D. Behn, John D. Donahue, Archon Fung, Stephen Goldsmith, Elaine Kamarck, Herman B. Leonard, Mark H. Moore, Malcolm K. Sparrow, Pamela Varley, and Richard Zeckhauser.

Far from being another short-lived buzzword, ""globalization"" refers to real changes. These changes have profound impacts on culture, economics, security, the environment—and hence on the fundamental challenges of governance. This book asks three fundamental questions: How are patterns of globalization currently evolving? How do these patterns affect governance? And how might globalism itself be governed? The first section maps the trajectory of globalization in several dimensions—economic, cultural, environmental, and political. For example, Graham Allison speculates about the impact on national and international security, and William C. Clark develops and evaluates the concepts of ""environmental globalization."" The second section examines the impact of globalization on governance within individual nations (including China, struggling countries in the developing world, and the industrialized democracies) and includes Elaine Kamarck's assessment of global trends in public-sector reform. The third section discusses efforts to improvise new approaches to governance, including the role of non-governmental institutions, the global dimensions of information policy, and Dani Rodrik's speculation on global economic governance.

The governments of China and the United States - despite profound differences in history, culture, economic structure, and political ideology - both engage the private sector in the pursuit of public value. This book employs the term collaborative governance to describe relationships where neither the public nor private party is fully in control, arguing that such shared discretion is needed to deliver value to citizens. This concept is exemplified across a wide range of policy arenas, such as constructing high speed rail, hosting the Olympics, building human capital, and managing the healthcare system. This book will help decision-makers apply the principles of collaborative governance to effectively serve the public, and will enable China and the United States to learn from each other's experiences. It will empower public decision-makers to more wisely engage the private sector. The book's overarching conclusion is that transparency is the key to the legitimate growth of collaborative governance.