Politics, Policy and Public Administration: Essays in Honour of Professor John Wanna. By AndrewPodger, MichaeldePercy, and SamVincent, eds. 2021. Acton, Australia. Australian National University Press. 420 pp. $70.00 (paper). <scp>ISBN</scp> (print) 9781760464363. Available for free download at https://press.anu.edu.au/publications/series/anzsog/politics-policy-and-public-administration-theory-and-practice

There aren't many scholars in public administration with world-class stature as a pracademic and guitar-playing chops as a 1970s bass-playing punk rocker as well. But neither are there many scholars with the broad impact on the discipline over the last 50 years as John Wanna. This fascinating book celebrates his contributions from his working-class background in a Yorkshire factory town before moving to Australia to complete his education. He put down deep roots in the emerging public policy world of Australia's robust government reform movement. Together with his colleagues Glyn Davis and Pat Weller, both giants in their own right, Wanna launched an impressive career that attacked the major puzzles of budgeting, policy, politics, administration, and practice. That led to his major role in creating the Australia and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG), which itself has had influence far beyond Down Under. It is a glowing testimony both to his leadership of the field and his long-term personal connections with so many leading scholars that this festschrift appeared. The book is sweeping in coverage, starting with budgeting and financial management before moving on to the politics of Australia, the connection between public policy and administration, and the challenge of working with practitioners. The book begins with an exploration of Wanna's substantial impact on budgeting, led by his Managing Public Expenditure in Australia (Wanna et al., 2000). In a short introduction to the reprinted review of the book, Allen Schick shares important lessons he learned from Wanna. “One of the lessons I learned from John,” Schick writes, “is that budgeting is part of a portfolio of administrative practices, and that government cannot reform the way it allocates money unless it also reforms the ways it manages the civil service and delivers public services” (19). Schick continued (20), “experience is the mother of managerial innovation.” This analysis not only frames the core ideas of this lively book. It also shines light clearly on Wanna's insight into public administration and policy. Isi Unikowski points to the ongoing tension between political science and public administration—and about the connection between the worlds of theory and practice. In 1952, a paper prepared for the Committee on Public Administration of the American Political Science Association suggested “that academics who profess public administration spend their time fooling with trifles” (Martin, 1952). Along with one of the book's other contributors, Paul ‘t Hart, Unikowski contends that Wanna struck out along a very different path that strongly embraced the connection between theory and practice. In fact, ‘t Hart contends in an especially entertaining essay, Wanna was “a trailblazer for engaged, grounded, policy-relevant scholarship,” along a path that at the beginning “was disturbingly barren” (332). Peter Shergold writes about the other side of the problem: that too many of the efforts of the public administration community to connect with practice get “lost in translation” (339). His co-author, Andrew Podger, notes (354) “practitioners' frustration with academics.” Driving this frustration, he says, is that academics often have lived in the world of ideology and big-bang changes, while the pragmatism of practitioners often leads to incremental improvements that leave academics unimpressed. In fact, they write in the joint conclusion to their chapter that pragmatism has dominated the practitioners' world far more than ideology. In particular, the pragmatic focus has not been a dressing for an effort to push aside the priorities of the elected government, a finding that increasingly distances the experience of Australia, and many other countries, from the world of the United States. It is true, they note, that the “language of the practitioners in explaining the reforms has been economics-oriented” (363). That reflects their singular focus on economic policies as well as the language that helped give rise to their reforms. Of course, that has only further distanced the public administration community from the world of practice. The “lost in translation” problem has grown because the rise of economic theories—and language—has made it that much harder for public administration researchers to connect with practitioners. Throughout the course of his career, Wanna has insisted that what is truly distinctive about public administration is the link between practitioners and academics, Unikowski notes (380). It is that link, he says that gives the field its most fundamental value, and it is the connection with practitioners that provides academics with the strongest and most important compass for their work: framing questions, because practitioners can share the biggest issues that they are wrestling with; exploring problems, because academics can examine how other practitioners are dealing with similar questions; and probing issues, because academics can lay out alternative ways of examining the questions. Wanna ranks as one of the most successful scholars in recent memories in bridging the gap between theory and practice and between researchers and practitioners. That has been especially important in Australia, because a series of governments there has been far more intentional than in the United States about launching major reforms. Indeed, Australia is an important hybrid, between the relatively pure form of government reforms that New Zealand has championed and the challenges of making reforms work in even larger and more complex nations like the United States. The result has been an impressive career of bridgebuilding work that this book explores. The bridges have been most important through the reforms that have often posed big questions, through new (at the time) terms like “the new public management” and “governance,” as Jim Jose notes. Indeed, the state is still the central actor, he explains, but the far bigger puzzle has been how to characterize its role. R.A.W. Rhodes examines the succession of big ideas that have shaped the Australian public service—the progression from traditional public administration to the new public management to the new public governance, based respectively on hierarchy, markets, and networks (236). Rhodes not only examines the bridging that these reforms have brought, from the worlds of “metagovernance” (the collection of tools used by the state in steering collaborations) to “decentered governance” (by focusing on instrumental action that grows from the beliefs of actors in the process). That, in turn, leads Rhodes to make a powerful, effective, and surprising case for storytelling, an approach that “encourages us to give up management technologies and strategies for learning by telling stories and listening to them” (248). These narratives, he contends, create the foundation for shared meaning and understanding. And that, in turn, can help bridge the gap between theory and practice. That is especially important, John Halligan notes, because performance information—the bedrock of administrative reforms in New Zealand and Australia, the other Westminster governments, and eventually in the United States—often goes unused, as John Halligan explains. His comparisons of the way different nations have launched performance management, as well as his analysis of the contradictions in the process, provide valuable insights that stretch far beyond Australia. In particular, Halligan contends, “Performance management frameworks have neither gelled not become durable as multipurpose fixtures.” In large part, that is because the basic purpose of performance management “remains unresolved,” especially when it gets caught up in transitions between governments (124). Although Halligan's analysis focuses on Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, this conclusion is surely just as telling for the United States as well, where maintaining a consistent approach to performance management has often fallen to changes in presidential administrations. Stein Helgeby explains that a large part of the reason for the “partial success of performance frameworks” is the way the frameworks become captured by the metrics they produce (94). He explains that the use of performance measurement depends largely on the signals it sends about what is valued and what is of use—and about the need to sync the process of collecting information and using it. In fact, Helgeby suggests, the entire budgetary framework “is many things simultaneously, in a perpetual process of renegotiation” (89). It is the constellation of forces that shape the creation and use of performance information, argues Lewis Hawke. It is a stirring compliment to Wanna's career that the project brought together so many distinguished scholars and practitioners, that they contributed so many intriguing essays, and that they speak so clearly to each other. There is a portion of the book focused squarely on the impact of his work on Australian politics, but it is yet another compliment to Wanna's influence that so many of the essays reach beyond the Australian experience to arguments and lessons that touch so deeply on the core issues of public administration. Public administration indeed has its most important roots in its reach across the fields of research and practice, education for future public servants, and the continuing education of those already in the field. In the course of his career, Wanna has led in each of these areas. But, most importantly, it is his truly remarkable gift for positioning himself at the intersection of these important cross-currents: to learn from practitioners about the questions they most need answers, to speak to researchers about how those questions can best be answered, and to craft educational strategies for public servants, present and future. The field, not just in Australia but across the world, is struggling at this intersection, with researchers producing work that practitioners too often do not find useful and with practitioners too often failing to connect with the often-useful insights from researchers. It sometimes seems that the divide is growing, and some leaders on both sides have suggested that political polarization and abstract research are combining to make it impossible to close that gap. Wanna's own career, as well as the essays in this marvelous book, demonstrates that need not be the case. The book's chapters write a game plan for how. Donald F. Kettl is Former Dean and Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy. Email: [email protected]

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