dan.honig@georgetown.edu

I’m an associate professor of public policy at University College London's School of Public Policy/Department of Political Science, and an associate professor (with tenure) at Georgetown' University's McCourt School of Public Policy. My most recent book, Mission Driven Bureaucrats (Oxford University Press, 2024), explores how the humans who work for the state often are or can be driven by a desire to help deliver on the things their agency does - educating children, helping sick people get better, ensuring the trains run on time. "Managing for compliance" - rules, regulations, targets - works for some kinds of tasks and people, but not others. I conclude based on my own research and that of many others that in some contexts what I call "managing for empowerment" - allowing autonomy, cultivating competence, and creating connection to peers and purpose - is more likely to lead to better organizational performance. Compliance levers are useful; but we have been pulling those levers (and more or less only those levers) for a half-century now in our attempts to improve Government. In all the many places that hasn't worked, it's time to try something else.

Institutions, Aid, Development, Elections, COVID19