Accountability in Human Services Collaboratives—For What? and To Whom?

If the hollowing out of the state means not only privatization but, more generally, the leakage of authority emanating from elected law makers, then certain administrative arrangements can be part of the hollowing out process. One such arrangement is the human services collaborative, a school-linked health and social service program. The logic of collaboration is to give more programmatic discretion, including policy discretion, to line-level professionals. Is this sort of hollowing a good or a bad thing? Good, because it gives power to people who are close to the problems and the solutions. Good, too, because it delegitimates legislative efforts to control public administration through narrowly defining funding categories and closely overseeing expenditures. Becausefinancial controls are among the few tools of legislative control of administration, the desirable aim of protecting legislative power also has had the unintended consequence of making financial accountability a virtual synonym for the whole concept of accountability. The article distinguishes two meanings of accountability, accountability for such things as results and accountability to various parties. Accountability for must be settled before the system of accountability to can be properly designed. Brinton Milward (1994), who introduced the term hollow state into the public administration lexicon, means by it that the state chooses to deliver services through individuals with whom it does not have a direct employment relationship, (e.g., the individuals who work for contractor organizations). But the resonance of the term goes beyond this, for even a state that relies heavily on contract provision of services still exercises the essential powers of the modem sovereign, to wit, the power to levy taxes and the power to define the purposes for which tax revenues should be spent. To continue the metaphor, it is not, therefore, really hollow at its core. 197/Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory Revised version of a paper presented at the 1994 Research Conference of the Association of Policy Analysis and Management, Chicago, Illinois. The authors are grateful for financial support to the State and Local Innovations Program, funded by the Ford Foundation and administered by the Kennedy School of Government, and to the Center for the Study of Law and Society, University of California, Berkeley. They also acknowledge editorial advice from Edith Balbach, Brint Milward, and Mark Yessian. J-PART 6(1996):2: 197-224 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.70 on Tue, 06 Sep 2016 04:32:12 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Symposium on the Hollow State More to the point is the possibility that, owing to inevitable slippage in the direction and oversight of contractors, the contracting organizations and their employees, during the course of implementation, will introduce purposes not authorized by elected officials (Milward 1994). Behind the hollow state metaphor is another metaphor-perhaps only one of several other metaphors, to be sure-that of leakage in the channels of authority. Of course, it is not just private contractors that threaten a leakage of authority. Legislative delegations of authority to experts in the executive branch have been going on since the Progressive era, accompanied until the late 1930s by professions of concern over constitutional questions of appropriate scope. Resolving the constitutional questions did not resolve the political questions, which continue, particularly in regard to the delegations of authority to regulatory agencies. In the contemporary world of public administration, authority can leak from still another source-the misalignment of institutional structure and the purposes for which legislative and executive officials would like authority to be used. The most earnest authoritative efforts to improve policy often splinter on the rocks of antiquated overhead and control systems; incentives for cost shifting among agencies and among levels of government; narrow and inflexible categorical grant programs; singlemission agencies that are held to account for a narrow range of objectives or tasks; and so forth. Many of these imperiling conditions and institutions were created at some earlier time, for perfectly good reasons, by elected policy makers. But at any given moment, the current policy makers can only sit and lament about how little practical effect they can squeeze from their nominal authority.' In this article we explore a recent development in American public administration that promises to bring institutional structure and authoritative purpose into closer alignment. Ironically, it threatens, at the same time, to further hollow out another aspect of authority, namely the ability to impose accountability on these redesigned structures. The structures we have in mind may loosely be called collaboratives, that is, two or more organizations that pool energies and perhaps funds (at least some of which are public) and seek thereby to overcome the fragmentation of services created by a host of current practices and institutional arrangements. For instance, local social services, mental health, education, and juvenile justice agencies might collaborate to serve certain multiproblem families or children; vocational education, job training, and employment service agencies might work collaboratively among themselves and also with local business 198/J-PART, April 1996 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.70 on Tue, 06 Sep 2016 04:32:12 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Symposium on the Hollow State leaders to retrain and reemploy workers displaced by plant closures. In this article we analyze how these sorts of collaboratives further hollow the authority of the state-or, more precisely, how they shift authority from the legislature to the executive and from the top levels of the executive agencies to their lower levels and to their professional staff. Actually, we do not focus on authority per se but on its obverse, accountability. That is, we will show how a good accountability system implies such a shift in the locus of authority. But what is a good accountability system? Unfortunately, it is not possible to approach this question empirically since not enough collaboratives are up and running at the present time, and those that are running do not necessarily operate within a good accountability framework. Hence our approach is more conceptual. We assume the broad outlines of a generic collaborative operating at a tolerable level of effectiveness and efficiency, and then we attempt to design an accountability system that would work well to support it.