Making Public Policy Work

Event Summary

In observing politics at the end of the 20th century, former President Reagan described government as "the problem, not the solution." In her book, Harvard University's Elaine Kamarck explains that such dissatisfaction with government is in fact a widespread rejection of bureaucracy, occurring in democratic, developing, and communist countries alike.

Governing Ideas

Series Index

Event Information

When

Thursday, March 01, 2007
2:00 PM to 4:00 PM

Where

Falk Auditorium
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC
Map

Event Materials

Contact: Brookings Office of Communications

E-mail: events@brookings.edu

Phone: 202.797.6105

Kamarck's The End of Government...As We Know It: Making Public Policy Work (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2007) also argues that this revolution in governing brings new challenges, more questions, and a renewed debate over how to make public policy work.

On Thursday, March 1, Brookings hosted a discussion featuring Kamarck, a public policy lecturer at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, Brookings Senior Fellow William Galston, and Nonresident Senior Fellow Donald Kettl.

Transcript

ELAINE KAMARCK: As you probably know, in the last two decades in not just the United States but in most of the advanced industrial/advanced information economies around the world, democracies, have seen a real revolution in governance. Lester Solomon, who has written an enormous doorstop of a book on this topic, calls this a revolution in the technology of government. And what it basically means is that because of a variety of factors, we are now implementing public policy in ways that are unusual and fairly new.

It used to be you could basically say that the 20th century was the bureaucratic century. We are all familiar with FDR's tick. Every time he found a problem in the Depression, he created an organization to solve the problem. We're all familiar with that.

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