Strategies for Governing: Reinventing Public Administration for a Dangerous Century by Alasdair Roberts

Author:Alasdair Roberts [Roberts, Alasdair]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Public Policy, Public Affairs & Administration, Political Science, American Government, General
ISBN: 9781501745607
Google: IZexDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 44612328
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2020-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

PRESENT OR FUTURE

When they wrestle over separation or connection with the rest of the world, leaders struggle with a geographical frontier. They decide how much a line on the ground will matter. At the same time, leaders also think about another border as they formulate a strategy for governing. This is the temporal divide between present and future, the invisible line that separates the present generation from the generations that follow. Institutions can be designed to give more weight to the interests of future generations. But leaders are often reluctant to do this, because they must also respond to more immediate challenges.

People are reasonably good at thinking about the future if they know that the welfare of their children is at stake. For example, parents are usually happy to invest in the education of their offspring. But people are worse at handling problems that will affect people they do not know many decades from now. For example, engineers warn about a looming infrastructure crisis in the United States, caused by the refusal to maintain roads, water and sewer systems, and public buildings. Why would we shortchange maintenance, given that we can foresee the likely consequences? Because we save a few dollars today, the harm will not be realized until much later, and it will be suffered by strangers. Similarly, experts warn of a budget crisis caused by our habit of borrowing to pay for current government expenditures. We are said to be mortgaging the future. And perhaps the most frightening example of shortsightedness is the problem of climate change. For decades, the world has been burning more oil, gas, and coal, despite mounting evidence that this damages the planet’s capacity to support life. Pessimists look at the historical record and argue that civilizations often destroy the environments on which they depend.1 They worry that we are in the process of doing this on a global scale.

But governments are not always shortsighted. In some areas, they are reasonably good at thinking about the future. In the United States, the Department of Defense regularly reviews threats to national security that will likely face the next generation. These reviews range broadly: the last assessment, completed in 2014, even acknowledged the danger that climate change would “devastate homes, land, and infrastructure.”2 Military planners also oversee research and development projects that span decades: for example, it took a quarter of a century to design and deploy the sophisticated F-22 fighter aircraft. Skeptics say that this sort of forward planning serves the interests of the defense bureaucracy, by stoking fear about national security and thus protecting its pet programs. A counterargument is that the bureaucratic self-regard has been enlisted as a check against shortsightedness on matters of national security. Leaders have built institutions with a vested interest in tending to future threats.

In fact, leaders constantly tinker with institutions in an attempt to cure shortsightedness.3 Sometimes they set up autonomous agencies with taxing powers to make sure that critical assets, such as airports or highways, are properly maintained.

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