Book review: Strategies for Governing: Reinventing Public Administration for a Dangerous Century

This is an interesting and engaging book. Alasdair Roberts offers a coherent and comprehensive new direction for the field of public administration. His position is clearly argued. His proposals are provocative because they depart sharply from recent orthodoxy. At the outset, I want to be clear that I agree with much of Roberts’s argument. Although I offer critical perspective in this review, it is important that readers put my criticism in context. Roberts’s goals are ambitious, and what he delivers sometimes falls short of his aspirations. Let me begin by summarizing Roberts’s argument. I condense it here to four premises: