Essay by Jennifer Pahlka and Andrew Greenway: “..To truly reverse the dramatic decline in state capacity, governments need to take radical approaches that can win public trust. In his classic 1967 book, Inside Bureaucracy, the economist Anthony Downs described how institutions that lose their ability to adapt eventually embark on a slow death, becoming hollow shells of rules and procedures. Once they reach this point, he argued, they must be either reborn or destroyed. Today, advanced democracies around the world need to give serious attention to institutional rebirth—rebuilding state agencies into departments of now, unencumbered by people, precepts, and processes of past eras. But they also need to consider which legacy agencies are beyond reinvention and should be shut down altogether.
Not every broken institution has to be rebuilt from scratch. Governments do not have the time, resources, or political bandwidth to turn over the tables in every part of the state at once, nor would doing so be wise. Relentless, incremental improvement of existing agencies remains an important part of statecraft. But if they are going to solve the current crisis, democracies will have to get comfortable with creating new institutions. Curing what ails democracy today will require many things, but no other remedies will stick if governments can’t deliver what they promise.
TEST, LEARN, REPEAT
There is no single correct formula for institutional rebirth. An institution might be considered reborn when it has installed a new operating model that allows it to achieve its stated mission. Some legacy institutions hold valuable assets—authorities, data, know-how—that are not easy to move to a new home, so governments need to figure out how much of the existing system is irretrievably broken and what if anything needs to be preserved. It is critical to get the degree of newness right…(More)”.
