What is Old is New Again: Local Government Management

Raymond W. Cox III, Ph.D.

For more than a generation the MPA and the city management profession were closely linked. For many programs and schools the purpose of the MPA was to prepare a “new generation” of city managers and professional department heads. In 1992, NASPAA developed guidelines for those MPA programs that wanted to set up a local government management specialization within an MPA. The focus of that sequence of courses was on first leadership and management skills and second on local government-specific knowledge on basic administrative tasks such as budgeting and personnel. The goal was to give MPA graduates the requisite management “generalist” background to step into positions such as an assistant to a city manager, or as an ACM. An article written in the 1990 International Journal of Public Administration symposium for ASPA’s Section on Public Administration Education noted that:

“public management education must reflect three elements:

1. the political and ethical foundations of “publicness”,
2. the examination of the practice of management in public organizations, and
3. the skills needed to accomplish the task of management.”

Stated another way, the roots of public management education are in this generalist management orientation. The MPA was the degree of choice for those entering the city management profession because the degree “fit” the style, outlook, and approach of local management practice.

As the preamble to the 2004 revision of the 1992 guidelines note:

Local government is the most dynamic, innovative, and organizationally diverse element of all governments. It employees more persons, is the provider of more direct services, and the most likely point of contact between government and citizen. Whether we are concerned about the quality of drinking water, the speed with which snow is removed from streets, opportunities for recreation, or the response time of emergency medical services, it is municipal and county government that is most likely to have funded and/or provided the service. Everyday life is more inextricably bound to the services and programs of local government than to other elements of government. We depend on the effectiveness and quality of local government to make our lives more safe, healthy and “livable.”

...The quality of American local government, in short, is critical. It is crucial to the American quality of life; it is essential for the maintenance of American political values and practices. Since no government can be better than the quality of its leadership--including the people who are appointed to direct and administer its daily operations and activities--the availability of competent local leadership is similarly crucial.

Capable, professional leadership in local government must be stimulated, nurtured, and prepared. It should not simply grow out of experience nor be the accidental by-product of other professional education programs.

Yet, the last two decades have brought many changes to our approach to public management education. Despite a seeming continued emphasis on “management” because of first the “reinventing government” movement and then the “New Public Management,” we find that our academic preparation is now much more specific and technical than before the 1990s. The value of a generalist background has given way to an emphasis on policy analytic skills and/or sector-specific training (primarily for the nonprofit world). We have become much better at preparing people for staff positions such as policy analyst, or HR or budget analyst than as generalists, or line positions, such as ACM or even department head. While more technical training is necessary and even vital in the broader sweep of things, it has meant that the role of the MPA as preparation to be a local government management generalist has declined. The MPA, and especially the MPP, are more ‘technical’ in orientation than they were two decades ago. Furthermore, long gone is the day when the MPA was viewed by city councils as the only avenue of professional education and preparation for city managers.

This is the problem faced by the ICMA Advisory Board on Graduate Education and NASPAA’s Local Government Management Education Committee. If we are to have a role in preparing the “next generation” of city managers then we must ensure that a management generalist version of the MPA continues to be offered. The technical competencies required for success in an MPP program, or the approaches to the MPA that value performance measures such as efficiency over ethics and outcomes are not the path to reaffirming the centrality of the MPA to the future of the city management profession. Again, this is not to deny the skills MPP-trained staff bring; but it is to recognize that older notions of generalist competence and management skills are prerequisites to the exercise of organizational leadership, especially at the local level. For that matter it is a generalist management approach that is most amenable to the inverted leader-follower relationship advocated by academics and practitioners.

The focus of NASPAA’s Local Government Management Education Committee over the next couple of years will be to reaffirm the centrality of management practice and professional development to the quality of the public service. We will continue to work with the ICMA’s Advisory Board on Graduate Education as an advocate for the professional public service and to support a range of “Next Generation” initiatives at ICMA. Finally, we will be an advocate within the academy of the importance of the study of local government management practice, because we believe that it is in the transformation of those observations and practices into theories, competencies, and skills for the classroom that can best prepare students for the public service. More than nine decades ago, Justice Louis Brandeis called for the states to be the “laboratories of democracy.” We assert that local governments are both laboratories of democracy and of public management. We need to reassert our role as participants in those “laboratory” experiments.

Dr. Cox is chair of NASPAA’s Local Government Management Education Committee, and professor at that Department of Public Administration and Urban Studies, The University of Akron. He can be reached atrcox@uakron.edu.