2018 Conference

Individual Paper Presentation

Much of the current literature on sustainable economies address the need to effectively manage the transition from unsustainable growth to one that holds sustainability as a core attribute. And yet, while most discussions include policy suggestions on how to manage the transition in a way that protects or enhances social cohesion, very little consideration has been given to reconciling this to current trends in public management, nor to how future policy makers will evaluate the success of programs under a sustainability framework. This paper attempts to bridge this gap by introducing concepts of ecological economic theory to public management research. First, it suggests that in a constrained growth economy, traditional techniques for evaluating public policy may no longer be valid for measuring Pareto optimal outcomes. This is due to the labor market assumptions of those models. Second, a review of the literature on trends in public management suggests that governments may be ill designed to respond to constrained growth so long as they continue to pursue the neoclassical economics-inspired New Public Management reforms currently in vogue in the United States and elsewhere. Finally, this paper offers suggestions on how public policy schools have a core role to play in legitimizing sustainability as a focus for public managers and what public policy evaluation will look like in the future. This includes a special focus on tackling poverty and inequality within a sustainable framework.