Hybridity and Responsible Leadership in Public Administration

Wolfgang Seibel University of Konstanz [email protected]

Kongress der Deutschen Vereinigung für Politische Wissenschaft (DVPW) Duisburg, 21. – 25.9.2015 Sektion „Policy-Analyse und Verwaltungswissenschaft“, Panel „Die ‚Grand Challenges‘ der Verwaltung“ Not for circulation outside the DVPW-Sektion „Policy-Analyse und Verwaltungswissenschaft“. Please do not cite or quote without author’s permission.

Abstract This paper addresses the challenge of hybridity in public administration for responsible leadership. In particular, the paper (1) gives an account on definitions of hybridity in the relevant research literature, (2) tries to assess the relevance of hybridity in public administration, (3) conceptualizes the linkage between hybridity and responsible leadership as a basic requirement of democratic government, (4) analyzes an exemplary case of hybridity as an incentive structure causing administrative irresponsibility, and (5) suggests some conclusions that pertain to the consequences of hybridity and responsible leadership in public administration in general. The basic argument is that the challenge for responsible leadership is not the increased structural complexity of hybrids relative to traditional public administration or further risk factors such as multiple stakeholder arrangements, inconsistent governance mechanisms or fragmented accountability. Rather, it is the inherent incentive to ignore these risks even when the stakes are high and risk management is made easy through appropriate regulation. Part of the paper’s conclusion is that, unlike what the recent “new public value” school of thought suggests in terms of expanding the value basis of public administration, it is imperative to differentiate between the very basic values of democracy and responsible government and the diversity of second order values that necessarily shape the environment of every public administration body. Protecting everybody’s physical integrity, safeguarding human and civil rights, enforcing the rule of law, guaranteeing due process, transparency and individual accountability of elected and appointed officials remain the bedrock of public administration however pluralistic and differentiated its organizational structure and the environment of societal values to which it is exposed.

2 1.

What is Hybridity in Public Administration? Taxonomic and Analytical Approaches

Two major innovative strands of literature shaped the scholarly debates on public administration during recent decades, namely the New Public Management movement and the literature on the modes of governance. “New Public Management” already by mere wording indicates the insertion of private sector elements into public administration and, thus, an overlap of two sector-specific logics of governance (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011). Similarly, the notion of public governance itself refers to the coexistence of hierarchical and lateral or relational as well as of formal and informal types of structuration in public organizations (Benz 2010; Benz, Lütz, Schimank and Simonis 2007; Rhodes 1997, 2007). Finally, the debate on market failure or government failure in the 1980s led to a research on an institutional alternative, a “third” sector beyond the market and the state (Anheier and Seibel 1990; Hansmann 1980; James 1989; Rose-Ackerman 1986; Weisbrod 1988). These three discourses build the context of a new interest in hybridity in general and in public administration in particular (e.g., Billis 2011; Christensen and Lægreid 2011; Dennis, Ferlie and van Gestel 2015; Gulbrandsen, Thune, Brostad, Borlaug and Hanson 2015; Seibel 2015a, 2015b; Skelcher 2012; Skelcher and Smith 2015; Spyridonidis, Hendy and Barlow 2015). The empirical impulse of this recent discussion is that in a broad variety of public policy fields several sector-specific institutional forms overlap. With respect to contemporary democracies and developed welfare states, the overlap has been referred to as “welfare mix” (Evers and Laville 2005; Seibel 2015b) based primarily on a macro-analytical perspective with two different points of reference. One is the variety of institutional arrangements of modern welfare states and, basically, capitalist democracies. The second point of reference is the combination of sector-specific institutions and the provision of welfare-related services in a given country. While the former perspective is primarily connected to a cross-country comparative view, very much influenced by classic pieces of research on the varieties of welfare states in general and related typologies (especially Esping-Andersen 1990; see also Arts and Gelissen 2002; Castles, Leibfried, Lewis, Obinger and Pierson 2011), the latter focusses on the arrangement of overlapping sectoral segments in a given country or a given policy field (cf. Evers and Laville 2005 for an overview). It is in this second strand of literature where the notion of hybridity became particularly relevant since it is typically the arrangement of overlapping sectoral segments that characterize the “welfare mix” in question. Examples are tax-exempted foundations in the field of education or science, private voluntary associations providing public goods such as social

3 services of various kinds or private goods such as housing provided by public enterprises or cooperatives (cf. Seibel 2015b for a discussion of the various analytical perspectives). It was only recently, however, that students of public administration proper started to address explicitly hybridity as a phenomenon of public organization in general (cf. the symposium “Understanding Public Hybrids” in Issue 2 of the 2015 volume of Public Administration, edited by Nicolette Van Gestel, Jean-Louis Denis and Ewan Ferlie). In this new scholarly debate, the notion of hybridity is basically used to denote what is meanwhile commonplace in the discipline of public administration: that traditional bureaucracy and hierarchical government have been complemented or in some segments even been replaced by a multi-facetted arrangement of state and non-state agencies, third sector organizations, constant interaction of public authorities and civil society initiatives, inter-organizational and interpersonal networks etc. Hybridity, in other words, is used as a common denominator for both the structure-related and the agency-related aspects of the post-modern state and bureaucracy, Weberian style. In this vein, Denis, Ferlie and Van Gestel (2015) distinguish four theoretical perspectives on hybridity and public organizations: one that focusses on shifts in structures and governance, such as hierarchy, networks, market; a second one that focusses on institutional dynamics of hybrids themselves; a third one focusing on hybrid agency and practices with an emphasis on inter-personal networks; and a fourth one that focusses on hybrid roles and identities of individual actors. Although Denis’, Ferlie’s and Van Gestel’s categorization is a taxonomy of analytical perspectives rather than an attempt to get a sharper definition of the phenomenon itself, it yields valuable insight into the variety of hybridity in public administration. One aspect is, indeed, that modes of governance such as hierarchy, market-driven competition or networking not only may coexist but also change their composite nature. A second aspect is that regardless of those shifts and changes of structures and governance mechanisms certain structures, systemic properties and values or ideologies do prevail as a sort of “embedded archetype” so that competing structures and governance mechanisms create inconsistencies and tensions as crucial characteristics of hybridity.1 A third aspect of hybridity is its dual character as a generator of and response to a diversity of agency patterns and practices. Hybridity in the form of, for example, public and private actors working together for a common purpose or in a common organizational framework not only create and represent hybridity, but the very hybridity itself is the basis of

1

Denis, Ferlie and Van Gestel (2015, 5) refer to Hinings and Greenwood 1988, Greewnwood and Hinings 1993, and Thornton, Ocasio and Lounsbury 2012 as representatives of the „embedded archetype“ school of thought.

4 stable coexistence and the mobilization of synergies. In this perspective, hybridity provides for boundary transformation and permeability in society and organizations without which structural differentiation in complex societies would be unthinkable (cf. Denis, Ferlie and Van Gestel 2015, 7, referring to Lamont and Molnàr 2002). A fourth perspective on hybridity focusses on the human individual exposed to diverging role expectations and related logics and patterns of action. It is emphasizing multiple identities or changes in dominant identities as well as the construction of new identities and related challenges and dilemmas (Denis, Ferlie and Van Gestel 2015, 8, referring to Llewellyn 2001; Fitzgerald, Ferlie and Buchanan 2006; Witman, Smid, Meurs and Willems 2011). However, a taxonomic approach to the analysis of hybridity necessarily refrains from establishing an operational definition of hybridity. An encompassing overview over a broad variety of conceptual approaches that are somehow related to hybridity in public organizations may just imply to discover hybridity everywhere depending on the respective theoretical lens through which phenomena of formal organizations and human agency within them are being analyzed. My own proposal for a conceptualization of organizational hybridity (Seibel 2015a) sets a different focus in suggesting a dual perspective on hybridity that, in essence, pays tribute to the institutional reality of “sectors” that do overlap in many instances and thus represent manifest hybridity but also takes into account latent hybridity in the form informal coexistence of sector-specific governance mechanisms. Manifest hybridity appears, for instance, in the form of state-owned firms and publicprivate partnerships (as an overlap of public administration and private business), tax-exempted foundations (as an overlap of private business and civil society), service-providing voluntary associations (as an overlap of civil society and the state) or cooperatives (as an overlap of civil society, the state and private business). The state, typically in the form of public administration agencies, is directly or indirectly involved in all of the manifest types of hybridity, either as immediate participant or as a supervisory or regulatory authority.

5

Source: Seibel 2015a.

Latent hybridity, by contrast, refers to the overlap or coexistence of sector-specific governance mechanisms in the sense of system-specific patterns of social coordination. The origin of this analytical perspective is Oliver E. Williamson’s seminal book on “The Mechanisms of Governance” (1996) that classified as “hybrids” a combination of governance mechanisms such as contractual arrangements combined with hierarchical authority. The innovative aspect of Williamson’s contribution was that he linked analytically institutional structures to what makes institutions ultimately work – the governance of human agency. Franchising, for example, is a combination of competition-based autonomy and hierarchy, the former the characteristic of a free market, the latter the core-ingredient of formal organizations just like public bureaucracies. This comes close to the notion of “embedded archetype” and related institutional logics (cf. Hinings and Greenwood 1988; Greenwod and Hinings 1993; Thornton, Ocasio and Lounsbury 2012) insofar as it refers to the sector-specificity of governance mechanisms as a dominant but not uncontested pattern of social coordination. For instance, the hierarchy of legal authority is the dominant governance mechanism in the public sector just like competition and exchange are the crucial mechanisms shaping the behavior of private businesses while participation characterizes civil society organizations. None of these mechanisms may appear in its pure form but they form the core of social coordination in the respective sector and, consequently, of legitimacy and support both inside and outside the respective institutional segment. The hierarchical governance of the rule of law, the survival of a firm in a competitive environment and the participation of members or clients represent the bottom line of organizational sensemaking and legitimacy in the public, the private and the civil society sector respectively.

6

Source: Seibel 2015a.

Accordingly, latent hybridity in the form of overlapping and coexisting governance mechanisms may exist but it does not alter the fact that, in a given institutional setting, a particular governance mechanism is dominant and enjoys more support and legitimacy than competing mechanisms, especially when inconsistencies and tensions among those mechanisms occur and prioritization is required. Hierarchy and competition are accepted in the public realm and in the business world respectively but they easily become anathema to civil society activists. Conversely, participation of members and clients is a core-value in the non-profit or civil society sector but will be rejected by civil servants committed to the notion of neutrality and the public interest under the rule of law. Formal hierarchy is part and parcel of business firms but can be contested on the grounds of survival in a competitive environment as the ultima ratio of managerial performance. It is important to realize though that latent hybridity in the sense of overlapping and coexisting governance mechanisms and related inconsistencies or tensions2 is neither a new phenomenon in the public sector nor has it remained unaddressed in organization theory and the discipline of public administration. Quite on the contrary, classic contributions to public administration theory and the concept of civil society gained prominence through a description of hybridity avant la lettre: Philip Selznick in his classic study “TVA [Tennessee Valley Authority] and the Grassroots” (1949) analyzed how a public agency, behind the smokescreen of

2

See Seo and Creed 2002 for a general description of intra-institutional contradictions and tensions due to multiple logics of social coordination and interaction.

7 reformist ideology, became captured by private interests due to the ostensibly democratic mechanism of cooptation that in reality undermined the official goals of the agency. Robert Michels (1911) described what he termed “the iron law of oligarchy” using Germany’s pre-World War I Social Democratic Party (SPD) as an illustrative case of counter-intuitive hierarchical conditions in a party committed to the ideal of an egalitarian society. Graham T. Allison and Morton H. Halperin (1972) coined the notion of “bureaucratic politics” in a classic description of rivalry and competition within the otherwise hierarchical environment of governmental authorities. What I am advocating for is thus a middle-ground approach that combines the advantages of the sector-centered and the mechanism-centered perspective on hybridity while avoiding the shortcomings of a merely taxonomic classification. Detecting latent hybridity is what the mechanism-centered perspective makes possible, while the sector-centered perspective enables us to limit the range of hypothetically relevant mechanisms. While the limitations of a merely sector-centered perspective are quite obvious since it focusses on manifest hybridity only, the limitations of a purely mechanism-centered perspective are considerable as well. Overemphasizing the flexible and recombinant nature of overlapping governance mechanisms may lead to concept stretching in the sense that hybridity is defined as a ubiquitous, de-institutionalized phenomenon. After all, somehow under certain circumstances in a broad variety of institutional arrangements, governance mechanisms always overlap. Accordingly, overemphasizing the informal while neglecting formal arrangements in an attempt to discover pure mechanisms that create hybridity may leave us with just basic truisms of social analysis in the vein of structural-functionalism, which is that social structures entail a broad variety of latent functions (Merton 1968b [1957]). In reality, manifest and latent functions have different statuses in terms of relevance and legitimacy and it is the sectors – the public, the private and the civil society sector – that predominantly shape that relevance and legitimacy of relevant mechanisms and, by the same token, limit their range and nature.

2.

The Relevance of Hybridity in Public Administration

There is no quantitative assessment of the relevance of hybridity in public administration. However, the phenomenon is relevant enough to spur a whole array of accounts and conceptual assessments whose tenor is that classic bureaucracy, Weberian style, has become an inappropriate concept for the description of public administration in general (cf. Dunleavy and

8 Hood 1994; Rhodes 1997, 2007; Dunsire 1995; Gray and Jenkins 1995; Denis, Ferlie and Van Gestel 2015; Christensen and Lægreid 2011; Gulbrandsen, Thune, Worlaug and Hanson 2015; Hood 1991; Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011 – to name just a few authors contributing to related diagnoses). None of these descriptions and accounts is declaring classic bureaucracy obsolete, being entirely replaced or superseded by hybrid arrangements involving public-private partnerships, inter-organizational and inter-personal networks or co-production of public goods and services with citizens and civil society organizations. Rather, there is good sense in assuming an implicit consensus in the literature that classic bureaucracy as a system of formal organizations shaped by vertical and horizontal division of labor, clear-cut boundaries vis a vis the societal and political environment and, accordingly, autonomy as a prerequisite of unfettered and uncompromised implementation of the rule of law and legitimate orders along a seamless chain of command in accordance with shared standards of professional performance continues to form the core of public administration. Hybridity in public administration should thus be recognized as a peripheral phenomenon whose relevance, however, should be neither ignored nor overstated. Relative to the standard model of public administration, hybrid arrangements represent an alternative form of provision of public goods and services. At the same time, manifest and latent forms of hybridity such as public enterprises or public-private partnerships, competition and rivalry or participation and civil society involvement in the hierarchical environment of public administration challenge public administration precisely because they deviate from the routines and established patterns of classic bureaucracy and the way the latter is being regulated and managed. Accordingly, a first general hypothesis is that the non-routine character of hybridity and public administration creates new ‘zones of uncertainty’ in Crozier’s (1963) sense whose control requires particular attention and leadership efforts. The deficiencies and pathologies of classic bureaucracy are well studied and, in principle, predictable and manageable. We know about the dilemmas of hierarchy (G.J. Miller 1995), the information asymmetry between ‘principals’ and ‘agents’ and the related risk of moral hazard seducing the ‘agents’ to do what the ‘principals’ don’t want them to do (Akerlof 1970; Grossman and Hart 1983; Holmstrom 1979). We know about the resulting strategies for blame avoidance (cf. Hood 2011) that comes with every sort of delegation of risky tasks (Bartling and Fischbacher 2012; Bovens Schillemans and Goodin 2014; Hamann, Loewenstein and Weber 2010; Gaelmard 2014). And we also know about the responsiveness versus autonomy dilemma (cf. the classical studies by Kaufman 1960 and Selznick 1949): On the one hand, public officials have to ‘keep track’ and to remain unimpressed and unaffected by local stakeholders or partial interests of their respective clientele. On

9 the other hand, they are required to remain open-minded and ready to come up with appropriate case by case solutions in accordance with the local circumstances and expectations. We also know about the detrimental effects of bureaucratic routines in terms of means becoming and end in themselves and the resulting effect of goal displacement (Merton 1940) and in terms of overall organizational sclerosis (Crozier 1963). All this is, in a way, well know territory for accomplished public officials. The realm of hybridity, by contrast, is unknown territory. Hybridity in public administration represents the irregular as opposed to the regular, the unpredictable relative to the predictable, the opaque versus what is transparent and structural complexity as opposed to the relative simplicity of monocratic bureaucracies. What one may derive from this is that manifest and latent hybridity and public administration not only create new zones of uncertainty but also a risk-prone environment that reduces the likelihood of successful coping with standard pathologies of conventional bureaucracy and increases the likelihood of new weaknesses and deficiencies to occur. Hybridity in public administration, I will be stating and explicating in the remainder of this paper, is a risk generator in its own right that weakens fundamental principles of administrative responsibility as a core-ingredient of democratic government. This argument is based on both theoretical considerations and an empirical illustration.

3.

Hybridity and Administrative Responsibility

The normative yardstick of public administration being based on hierarchy, clear-cut jurisdiction and the rule of law is a consequence of public administration as a system of delegated resources and power. In a strict sense, it is not even linked to the constitutional state and democratic government but to any sort of delegation. He or she who delegates power and resources has good reasons to ask for proper and reliable usage and the users have to respond to those demands. Today, we associate this problem with the microeconomic principal-agent literature (Akerlof 1970; Grossman and Hart 1983; Holmstrom 1979) but the classic definition for the realm of public administration in a constitutional state and democratic government was given by Carl J. Friedrich in the 1930s in his seminal study on “Constitutional Government and Politics” (1937, esp. 224-243). Friedrich characterized the modern constitutional state as being based on the dual mechanism of concentration and delegation of power and resources. Public bureaucracy, according to Friedrich, is the core of modern government since it is the organizational body to which power and resources is actually being delegated. A constitutional state is

10 one in which the principle of responsible government is institutionalized and thus established as a covenant that binds every single member of the governmental apparatus. The institutionalization of responsibility as a binding principle of government and bureaucracy, however, takes different forms inside and outside the organizational body of public administration, both of which required for holding public officials accountable. While the external safeguards are based on power sharing and divided jurisdiction, the essential internal component of responsibility is monocratic hierarchy and organizational cohesion. In the golden words of Woodrow Wilson, the “indispensable conditions of responsibility” imply that public attention must be easily directed, in each case of good or bad administration, to just the man deserving of praise or blame. There is no danger in power, if only it be not irresponsible. If it be divided, dealt out in shares to many, it is obscured; and if it be obscured, it is made irresponsible. But if it be centred in heads of the service and in heads of branches of the service, it is easily watched and brought to book. – Wilson 1887, 213 – 214.

The external safeguards of administrative responsibility, by contrast, are independent bodies of control and auditing empowered with the authority to define and to sanction noncompliance in the various segments of governmental activity. This affects financial auditing, an independent judiciary and parliamentary oversight. However, institutionalization is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of responsible government and administration. As, again, Carl J. Friedrich stated in an influential article of 1940, institutional controls of responsible government and bureaucracy necessarily remain insufficient due to the considerable discretion of public officials even under the conditions of democratic government and the rule of law. Therefore, Friedrich wrote, institutionalized controls have to be complemented by the personal ethics of public officials and a related sense of responsibility (Friedrich 1940). Friedrich thus made the assumption of responsibility an issue of leadership based on professional and ethical standards beyond formal accountability: an awareness of potential consequences of one’s own decisions and the readiness to be held accountable for them (cf. Plant 2011) – which, by the way, was close to what Max Weber (1988 [1919]) had characterized as the core of an ethic of responsibility (Verantwortungsethik) as opposed to an ethic of conviction (Gesinnungsethik). From this emerged a controversy that became known as the Friedrich vs. Finer debate. The British political scientist Herman Finer (1941) challenged Friedrich’s emphasis of responsibility as an ethical standard rather than an institutional arrangement arguing that making responsible government and administration independent from the personal traits and virtues of

11 elected and appointed officials was one of the great achievements of the age of constitutionalism. Responsible government and administration, according to Finer, had to rely on institutions that allow for correction and, if necessary, punishment in case of non-compliance. It is this debate that formed the point of reference for the distinction between responsibility based on a sense of duty or public ethics and accountability in the sense of being answerable to a superior and/or a separate institution in charge of control and correction (cf. Finer 1941, 336, for a brief discussion of ‘responsibility’ as opposed to ‘accountability’; cf. also Jackson 2009). Friedrich’s perspective and philosophy, however, was reinforced by yet another classic contribution to the theory of public administration democratic government, Dwight Waldo’s “The Administrative State” of 1948. Waldo rejected the notion of separating politics from administration and emphasized that, instead, public administration officials in a democratic state have to share the basic ideals of democracy on which the public service is based. This was conform to Friedrich’s concept of public ethics, a sense of responsibility in particular, as an indispensable complement to the institutionalized arrangements of accountability working on the basis of rules, corrections and sanctions. Recently, Waldo’s ideas resurfaced under the headline “new public service” or “public value governance” (Denhardt and Denhardt 2011; Stoker 2006; Rosenbloom and McCurdy 2006; West and Davis 2012; Williams and Shearer 2011; Bryson, Crosby and Bloomberg 2014; Moore 2013). Hybrid arrangements affect all three dimensions of responsibility and its safeguards in public administration, the intra-organizational and the external variants as well as the ethical dimension. Hybridity is obviously the opposite of what Woodrow Wilson had in mind when he wrote about clear-cut hierarchy and of “[power] centred in heads of the service and in heads of branches of the service” as a prerequisite of responsibility in public administration. Hybridity increases structural complexity in general and thus increases information asymmetries and related principal-agent problems. More specifically, multiple stakeholder arrangements akin to hybridity contribute to fragmentation and divided chains of command instead of monocratic hierarchies. This may turn into veto player behavior of the stakeholders and split loyalties of staff members. Divergent and inconsistent governance mechanisms weaken the commitment to the dominant and legitimate mechanisms, for instance to the rule of law and relevant regulation derived from it in favor of business-like mentality or involvement in inter-agency turf wars. Also, enforcement of accountability through financial auditing, judicial control and parliamentary oversight may be fragmented and just concern separate segments of a hybrid arrangement.

12 In sum, hybrids create an unfavorable environment for responsible leadership through a variety of counterincentives. They make it more demanding and burdensome to exert control and they make it easier to evade personal accountability.

Table 3.

Hypothetical counterincentives for responsible leadership in hybrid arrangements

risk factor

potential consequences

structural complexity

increased information symmetries and related principal-agent problems

multiple stakeholder arrangements

veto player behavior of stakeholders; split / divergent loyalties of staff

inconsistent governance mechanisms

tensions and conflicts among participants

fragmented accountability

selective enforcement through financial auditing, judicial control and parliamentary oversight

This, however, only underlines that leadership does matter. Precisely because hybrids, despite their alleged proliferation, represent the exception rather than the rule in terms of institutional arrangements in the public sector, their handling represents the very non-routine challenge that in the literature on the subject is praised as leadership’s finest hour (cf. Selznick 1957 for a classic account; see also Bertelli and Lynn 2003; Fairholm 2004; Van Wart 2003 or Boin and t’Hart 2003 for similar assessments). What is more, their non-routine character may make hybrid arrangements attractive in the perception of leading staff since it can be linked to the notion of innovation, modernization, entrepreneurship and other alternatives to conventional bureaucracy. In a way, hybrids are sexy. They are particularly tempting when it comes to pragmatism and ‘pragmatic’ problem-solving in public administration (cf. Hildebrandt 2005, 2008; H. Miller 2004; Shields 2003, 2008, for a discussion on pragmatism in public administration). To discount those appeals and to resist the inducements that make the assumption of responsible leadership costly and the evasion from personal accountability easy is what characterizes leadership under such conditions. Awareness of potential consequences of one’s own decisions and the readiness to be held accountable for them may, however, require particular intellectual and ethical traits of leaders such as judgment and courage. The case outlined in the next section of this paper illustrates both the necessity of those traits and the potential consequences of their absence. It is an exemplary case that demonstrates

13 how hybridity in public administration may increase the risk of irresponsible leadership behavior even when the stakes are high and clearly visible and when institutional mechanisms designed to secure accountability and responsible leadership are basically strong. At the same time, it is an “extreme case” (Gerring and Seawright 2007, 101–105) that is instructive precisely due to the selection bias on which it is based: When the incentives for irresponsible leadership behavior created by a hybrid arrangement are powerful and decisive even under unfavorable circumstances – high risks, strict rules, sound accountability standards – they will be even more powerful under less restrictive conditions. What the case also illustrates is the decisive role of leadership behavior and the ambiguity of new public values that supersede the traditional values of commitment to the rule of law, professional standards, compliance with accountability requirements and, last but not least, a sense of responsibility.

4.

Hybridity as a Generator of Irresponsibility: The Duisburg Loveparade Disaster of 2010 as an Exemplary Case

Sequence of Events and Key Decisions3 On 24 July 2010, a techno-music street parade known as “Loveparade” in the German city of Duisburg ended in a crowd panic that claimed the lives of 21 people and left more than 500 injured. The responsible organizer of the Loveparade was an event management firm, Lopavent GmbH (GmbH standing for Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung, the equivalent to a British or US limited liability company). The event had several predecessors, mostly in Berlin and two in the cities of Dortmund and Essen. As a street parade it required permission by public authorities, in this case by the municipal administration of the city of Duisburg. Under the aegis of the head of division of security and law (Dezernat für Sicherheit und Recht or Dezernat II) the municipal administration convened a task force in charge of planning a preparation of the Loveparade in September 2009. It initially consisted of representatives of the Duisburg city administration, the event management firm Lopavent, the owner of the compound envisaged for the concluding segment of the Loveparade and a public marketing firm (“Wirtschaftsförderung metropoleruhr GmbH”).4

3

I am indebted to Timo Wenzel for his assistance in mobilizing the relevant documents. Most of the documentary evidence is accessible at https://search.wikileaks.org/?q=loveparade. 4 Document no. 2 (see list of cited documents in the appendix).

14 It soon became apparent that the envisaged compound for the final segment of the Loveparade was the critical factor as far as the security of the visitors was concerned. The number of visitors was calculated in the order of one million people and more. Moreover, not only the compound itself but also the routes of access and evacuation turned out to be especially delicate since they were leading through a tunnel of 24 meters width with one single ramp branching off to the compound itself. That ramp of 18 meters width had to serve as way in and way out creating the obvious risk of congestion given the expected size of the crowd that would have to use it. The related security risks were clearly articulated in the task force in charge of the planning and preparation of the Loveparade. According to the records, this happened as early October 2009.5 It was also clear from the very outset, however, that the event enjoyed strong political support since it was an integral part of a publicity and marketing campaign not only for the city of Duisburg but for the entire Ruhr area. The Ruhrgebiet, the heartland of what used to be Germany’s coal mining and iron and ore industry, is a disadvantaged region that nonetheless had won the prize of a prestigious initiative of the European Union as a “European capital of culture”. The very “Wirtschaftsförderung metropoleruhr GmbH”, the public marketing firm participating in the task force for the planning and preparation of the Loveparade 2010, was in charge of an entire program under the headline “Ruhr. 2010 Kulturhauptstadt Europas” [Ruhr. 2010 European cultural capital] of which the Loveparade was an integral part. Political pressure to organize the Duisburg Loveparade 2010 under any circumstances still increased when the city of Bochum, also located in the Ruhr area and thus participating in the very same program, cancelled its own Loveparade scheduled for the summer of 2009. What was at stake in the perception of regional politicians was the prestige of the Ruhr area altogether as far as the capability of planning and organizing a spectacular event with a particular appeal to young people was concerned. When concerns about security issues connected to the Loveparade were voiced by the head of the Duisburg police department, public criticism was so harsh that even the resignation of the police chief was requested.6 When the task force for the planning and preparation of the Loveparade met on 2 October 2009 the head of division of the Duisburg municipal administration (Dezernat für Sicherheit und Recht or Dezernat II) who chaired the meeting explicitly reminded the participants that after the cancellation of the Loveparade in Bochum at short notice the Duisburg Loveparade was definitely “politically desired”.7

5

Document no. 4. Document no. 1. 7 Document no. 3. 6

15 However, it was only in early March 2010, more than four months into the planning process, that the municipal administration of Duisburg realized that the design of the Loveparade with the final segment being held on a closed compound with limited access and evacuation routes implied a transfer of jurisdiction for risk assessment and public permission to the office of regulation and supervision of construction [Bauordnungsamt]. The Bauordnungsamt – or Amt 62 according to the organizational chart of the Duisburg city administration – clearly stated that permission could not be given for the envisaged event site. Bauordnungsamt officials also made it clear that violation of the relevant legal provision (the Sonderbauverordnung Nordrhein-Westfalen or decree for special construction of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia) would make any official involved liable under criminal law.8 From this point on, four and a half month before the event in question, both the substantial security risks and the incompatibility of the conditions at the event site and the related legal stipulations were known to the officials in charge and documented in the files of the Duisburg city administration. In the files, it was also clearly stated that an indispensable prerequisite of any permission of the Loveparade was a formal application to be submitted by the event management firm Lopavent GmbH with substantiated documentation of the relevant security measures.9 This should have been clear enough. What followed instead, however, was a protracted process of planning and further preparations in which part of the Duisburg city administration sided with the event management firm Lopavent in the blunt attempt to manipulate the fact and figures of the Loveparade and to obstruct the clear and binding stipulation of the relevant security regulation while the office regulation and supervision of construction (Bauordnungsamt, Amt 62) remained determined to enforce the law. Ironically, the leading figure among those determined to ignore the law and to issue the permission to organize the Loveparade under any circumstances was the head of the division for security and law within the Duisburg city administration (Dezernat II). This man was a close associate of the mayor of Duisburg who had expressed unmistakably his will to have the Loveparade taking place in his city. Both were Christian Democrats. The opposite number as head of the division for urban development (Dezernat für Stadtentwicklung or Dezernat V) to which belonged the Bauordnungsamt or Amt 62 was a Social Democrat. He, however, kept a low

8 9

Document no. 5. Ibid.

16 profile and did nothing to buttress the position and action strategy of the Bauordnungsamt that belonged to his own jurisdiction. Under the condition of this power asymmetry between those compliant with the legal security stipulations and those determined to obstruct them, the event management firm Lopavent GmbH managed to outmaneuver the Bauordnungsamt. The head of the division for security and law of the Duisburg city administration (Dezernat II), in transgression of his own competent jurisdiction, commissioned several separate expert reports that focused on crowd management issues. This was clearly intended to circumvent the unmistakable security stipulations of the law whose enforcement was, in turn, the task of the Bauordnungsamt. None of these expert reports that were submitted only in June and July 2010 and thus just a couple of weeks or even days before the Loveparade itself referred to the relevant legal provisions.10 Moreover, they were vague and peppered with salvatory clauses. But they nonetheless served as justification for the permission of the Loveparade which was ultimately pushed through by the head of the division for security and law (Dezernat II) of the Duisburg city administration. Instead of backing the responsible unit of his own administration vis-à-vis an applicant – the event management firm Lopavent GmbH – the head of Dezernat II of the Duisburg city administration formed an alliance with that very private firm against the relevant security regulation and the administrative unit tasked with enforcing it.

Graph 1.

Public-private coalition building and inter-agency rivalry in the planning and preparation process of the Duisburg Loveparade of 24 July 2010

Division of Security and Law (Dezernat II) of the Duisburg City Administration & Private Event Management Firm Lopavent GmbH

Division of Urban Development (Dezernat V) / Office of Regulation and Supervision of Construction (Bauordnungsamt or Amt 62) of the Duisburg City Administration

The borderline between the rule of law and a compliant public administration and private interests was not only blurred but the role and competence of public and private actors

10

Documents nos. 9, 10, 11.

17 were virtually inverted. In a meeting on 18 June 2010 the representatives of the event management firm Lopavent GmbH admitted one more time that they were not able to guarantee more than one third of the evacuation space on the event site of what the legal security provisions required.11 While this was astonishing and yet another unmistakable sign that authorization of the Loveparade was just not possible, the head of the division for security and law of the Duisburg city administration (Dezernat II) instructed, again in transgression of his own competent jurisdiction, the office of regulation and supervision of construction (Bauordnungsamt) to “cooperate” with Lopavent GmbH and to support the latter in the development of a security concept for the Loveparade scheduled for 24 July 2010. This not only meant to provoke a collision of interest – after all, the Bauordnungsamt as a public authority was tasked with drafting a security concept that it subsequently would have to evaluate and to certify – but also to task the Bauordnungsamt with a job it was not competent to do namely the development of an accurate evacuation plan on the basis of crowd management data and simulation models it could possibly not have at its disposal. The representatives of the Bauordnungsamt participating in the meeting of 18 June 2010 articulated precisely this, but to no avail. Their superior, the head of the division of urban development (Dezernat V) construction affairs, supported this stance through a handwritten remark on the margin of the report written by the head of the Bauordnungsamt stating that the envisaged procedure was not conform to proper administrative practice and that the division of security and law – instead of his own division – would have to take all the relevant decisions.12 This statement was right and wrong at the same time. While it was entirely correct that the envisaged procedure violated basic principles of proper administrative practice, the head of the division of urban development (Dezernat V) was wrong in assuming that it was at his personal discretion to concede the jurisdiction for the relevant decision to the division of security and law. On the contrary, it was his own personal obligation to make sure that the Bauordnungsamt evaluated the Lopavent security concept in accordance with the legal requirements and, if necessary, to deny authorization of the Loveparade as soon as the requirements were not met. Instead, the head of the division of urban development affairs bluntly refused to be involved in

11

Document no. 7. The German original read: „Ich lehne aufgrund dieser Problemstellung eine Zuständigkeit und Verantwortung von [Amt] 62 ab. Dieses entspricht in keinerlei Hinsicht einem ordentlichen Verwaltungshandeln und einer sachgerechten Projektsteuerung. Die Entscheidung in allen Belangen obliegt [Dezernat] II.“ [Due to the nature of the problem I reject jurisdiction and responsibility of [office] 62. It is in no way in accordance with proper administrative procedure and an appropriate control of the project. In every respect, the decision lays with [division] II.] - Document no. 7. 12

18 the relevant decision making – a classic case of blame shifting that was itself improper and an act of irresponsibility. It was, ironically, the private event management firm Lopavent instead of the authority actually in charge that filled the vacuum created by the failure of the head of the division of urban development (Dezernat V) to insist on a proper evaluation and certification of the security concept. Representatives of Lopavent GmbH participated in yet another meeting, held 25 June 2010 and devoted to the unresolved security issues. The prime purpose of this meeting was not the development of a security concept itself but an agreement on how to evaluate such a concept. That agreement entailed the intent to commission another expert report on the evacuation plan to be developed, according to the previous instructions by the head of the division of security and law of the Duisburg city administration (Dezernat II) in cooperation of Lopavent GmbH in cooperation with the Bauordnungsamt that ultimately would have to certify it. This agreement was, as it says in the minutes of the meeting of 25 June 2010, “approved” by the participating representatives of Lopavent GmbH.13 So the private event management firm that, according to the legal provisions, was obliged to submit a security and evacuation plan and to have it evaluated and certified by the relevant public agency participated in deliberations whose subject was the very procedure of evaluation and certification whose result directly affected the private firm applying for permission. Another telling detail of the replacement of what should have been an independent and unfettered examination by an irregular procedure was that the group of consulting engineers authorized to perform the evaluation of the security concept was, according to the information provided on their website, a spin-off of the chair of the very professor of physics at the university of Duisburg who himself was authorized to evaluate and to certify the report of the engineers who were his former students and PhD candidates. Not only was this series of collision of interests not corrected or terminated, they were, instead, literally designed and organized by the Duisburg city administration with the obvious intent to suspend the regular procedure of an independent assessment of the security and evacuation concept for an event involving approximately one million visitors. Exhausted by what may be called a war of attrition against an alliance of high ranking public officials and the private event management firm, the office of regulation and supervision of construction (Bauordnungsamt) finally gave in and issued the permission to have the Loveparade held as planned. That happened on 23 July 2010 – 24 hours before the event. In revealing

13

Document no. 8.

19 clarity, the wording of the authorizing permission made apparent that the security requirements of the relevant legal provision, the Sonderbauverordnung, were not met by the security concept submitted by Lopavent GmbH.14 In issuing the permission anyway, the Bauordnungsamt, under the relentless pressure of the head of the division of security and law of the Duisburg city administration (Dezernat II), made use of an administrative discretion whose existence it had explicitly denied so far.15 On the afternoon of 24 July 2010, panic broke out in the totally overcrowded tunnel leading to the event site and on the ramp that branched off to the actual compound where the final segment of the Loveparade was taking place. Most of the 21 casualties were caused by thorax contusion. The ramp, serving as access and exit at the same time, turned out to be a fatal trap without escape routes – a fact that was known to the private organizer and the relevant authorities of the Duisburg city administration from the very outset but had not prevented the relevant authority to issue a permission that should never have been given.

Case Analysis The planning and preparation of the Duisburg Loveparade of 2010 was a process in which hybridity in public administration came to bear and unfolded its undesirable consequences in an almost classic fashion. This entailed both manifest and latent hybridity. The cooperation of the Duisburg city administration and the private event management firm Lopavent GmbH was a typical case of public private partnership. It was manifest and as such uncontested. However, it turned out to be a permissive environment for irresponsible leadership characterized by risk taking behavior that inevitably put human lives in jeopardy and ultimately caused conditions on the ground that resulted in the death of 21 predominantly young people. However, what exactly were the mechanisms that made reasonable people taking disastrous decisions at the expenses of others and why did nobody seriously intervene to stop a disaster in the making despite early warnings and crystal clear-legal provisions that should have compelled the decision makers to prohibit the Loveparade altogether? And how exactly were those mechanisms connected to the hybrid nature of the organizational structure in which the decision making process was embedded?

14 15

Document no. 12. Document no. 6, p. 5.

20 Out of the above mentioned four risk factors of hybrid arrangements that potentially create counterincentives for responsible leadership – structural complexity, multiple stakeholder arrangements, inconsistent governance mechanisms, fragmented accountability – structural complexity and fragmented accountability were irrelevant. Quite on the contrary, the organizational structure was a simple hybrid in the form of public-private partnership and the jurisdiction for the authorization of the Loveparade lay with one single authority, the Bauordnungsamt or Amt 62 of the Duisburg city administration. The accountability structure was onedimensional as well. The only question that counted was whether or not the security concept submitted by the private event management firm Lopavant was meeting the security standards laid down in of the relevant legal provision, the Sonderbauverordnung Nordrhein-Westfalen. However, the decisive factors that transformed a simple Yes or No question to be answered by one single authority in accordance with clear and unmistakable legal prescription into a quagmire of tensions and conflicts among the main participants and divergent loyalties of public officials were the multiple stakeholder logic of the public-private partnership and the inconsistent governance mechanisms that resulted from it.

Table 4.

Hypothetical risk factors of irresponsible leadership in hybrid arrangements and their actual occurrence in the course of the planning and preparation of the Duisburg Loveparade of 24 July 2010

risk factor

occurrence in the course of the planning and preparation of the Loveparade

structural complexity

irrelevant

multiple stakeholder arrangements

split / divergent loyalties of staff

inconsistent governance mechanisms

tensions and conflicts among participants

fragmented accountability

irrelevant

Indeed, the problem was not the coexistence of governance mechanisms as such but their incompatibility. One mechanism was the rule of law that, if uncontested, would have ruled out the authorization of the Loveparade from the very outset. There were, however, two powerful competing mechanisms that resulted from the multiple stakeholder logic akin to a publicprivate partnership. One was the economic and entrepreneurial interest of the private event management firm Lopavent GmbH to perform the Loveparade. The other one was a mechanism

21 of political entrepreneurship and prestige-seeking. These mechanisms were not abstract structural imperatives, they were brought to bear by key-actors with different levels of power resources and different options of coalition building. Those who promoted the Loveparade for the sake of profit and prestige could rely on the support of the public at large, the media and the local and political elite across the political parties. Hence the almost natural alliance of the city mayor and his men with the private event management firm Lopavent GmbH. By contrast, those in charge of enforcing safety regulation and security measures were on the defensive from the very outset and they had no political ally at all. They not even enjoyed the forceful support of the relevant head of division (Dezernat V) and immediate superior to the authority in charge, the Bauordnungsamt. These structural and micro-political conditions created multiple stakeholder arrangements of second order and related split loyalties. What should have been one single authority committed to one single goal – to guarantee that the Loveparade would be planned and organized in accordance with the legal security provisions – became fragmented into two opposing camps, the division of security and law (ironically, determined to ignore the law) and the office of regulation and supervision of construction (Bauordnungsamt) initially determined to enforce the law. Needless to say, the staff of the division of security and law of the Duisburg city administration had to observe the stipulations of the relevant security regulation just like the staff of the neighboring division of regulation and supervision of construction. However, they were directly exposed to the political pressure exerted by their own head of division who made it clear from the very beginning that it was the political will of the city mayor and himself to have the Loveparade performed in Duisburg under any circumstances. So they were probably subjected to what is known as group think, a tendency to suppress a deviant opinion under the social and psychological pressure of a peer group (Janis 1982). The staff of the division for security and law could not afford to form its own alliance with the staff of the Bauordnungsamt due to their own immediate loyalty to their superior and, at least to some extent, their career options. Split loyalties was also what the staff of the Bauordnungsamt was exposed to. On the one hand, these officials remained the true torch bearers of the compliance with the relevant security regulation. On the other hand, they too were acting under the strong pressure of the alliance of political promoters of the Loveparade urging them not to exaggerate their professional sense of duty (or zeal, as some critics probably thought). They probably also knew that they were running the risk of appearing as the proverbial nay-sayers and that their commitment

22 to law enforcement was likely to be perceived by the outside world as narrow-minded bureaucratic stubbornness at the expenses of an innovative project of modern entertainment and youth culture. Ultimately, split loyalties and political pressure made the essence of human security negotiable. The rule of law and the public interest amalgamated with the private interest of the event management firm Lopavent GmbH to an extent that made the ‘public’ and the ‘private’ virtually indistinguishable. The public authority in charge of evaluating and certifying the security concept of the Loveparade were corrupted. The corruption did not take place in the classic way of bribing public officials but in the more subtle form of subversion in the disguise of promoting a public event to the benefit not only of more than one million visitors but also of the city of Duisburg. The subversion, among other things, took the shape of the participation of the private event management firm Lopavent GmbH in internal meetings whose purpose should have been the operationalization of security standards and the measures to enforce them, if necessary against the will of the very event management firm whose representatives at the same time were sitting in one and the same room. The Loveparade disaster was thus far from unavoidable. Instead, it was the consequence of almost deliberate irresponsibility. What makes the case exemplary for the linkage between hybridity and the role of responsibility in public administration is that core-ingredients of both hybridity and irresponsibility are at display in an almost pure form. In this respect, the Loveparade case comes close to a natural experiment. The decision makers in charge were not facing a particularly difficult or “wicked” problem. As mentioned above, the structure of the problem as well as the interests and strategies of the key actors were simple and easy to define. Moreover, the nature of the hybridity in question – a classic case of public-private partnership – is as clear and transparent as are the governance mechanisms and logics of action attached to it. Accordingly, the motivations of the actors involved and the respective patterns of justification are easy to define as well. It does not take much sophistication or empathy to understand why the private event management firm wanted to realize the Loveparade project in the city of Duisburg, especially after the failure to do so in the city of Bochum the year before. And, not surprisingly, local and regional politicians across the board were eager to support the project for the sake of enhancing their city’s and region’s prestige and general standing. The rank-and-file officials in charge of evaluating and certifying

23 the security concept of the Loveparade had to make sure that the relevant regulation was enforced. All of these actors knew that security was not just an abstract notion but that, in reality, it affected the physical integrity of hundreds of thousands of people. So everybody knew the stakes involved, everybody knew the security risk zones that presented themselves on the compound envisaged for the final segment of the Loveparade and any key-decision maker knew about the incompatibility of those risks with what the law required in terms of security standards. So why then the series of disastrous decisions that led to a fatal outcome? The hybrid arrangement of public private partnership did not translate itself into unmasterable problems, they just implied a particular challenge to leadership performance. Even that challenge was not particularly dramatic, it ultimately came down to a Yes or No question: Whether or not to obey the law that required certain security standards to be met. What made the relevant decision dramatic was the failure of leadership and the failure of leadership consisted in a deliberate diffusion of responsibility – in other words, a diffusion that itself could have and should have been averted but was, in a way, suggested by the hybrid arrangement that shaped the planning and preparation of the Loveparade. Meeting the security standards that were unmistakably stipulated by the relevant legal provisions was the responsibility of the private event management firm Lopavent GmbH. What happened when key-decision makers within the Duisburg city administration adapted to the political pressure to make the Loveparade happen under any circumstances is that they allowed the responsibility for the fulfilment of the security standards to be shifted to the city administration itself. This in turn created not only an inverted incentive structure since it alleviated Lopavent’s obligation to deliver a sound security concept according to what the legal stipulations required. At the same time, it burdened the city administration with a task it was neither prepared nor equipped to assume, namely the co-development of a security concept whose main focus was crowd management. As a consequence, a pattern of path dependency emerged. Precisely because the Duisburg city administration had abandoned the role of an independent public authority whose prime obligation was to declare compliance or non-compliance with security standards clearly laid down in the relevant legal framework and instead had assumed the role of a co-responsible coorganizer of the Loveparade, any exit option became increasingly costly in the course of the protracted process of planning and preparation of the event. While the hybrid arrangement as

24 such certainly had created a permissive environment in which the initial diffusion of responsibility easily could take place, the anticipation of exit costs was a much more powerful and direct counterincentive to reasonable and responsible decision making. This makes salient the role of leadership and leadership failure which is at the core of the Loveparade disaster and, again, tightly connected to the phenomenon of hybridity. Obviously, the key-actors involved on both the public and the private side were not incompetent from a professional point of view. On the contrary, they were experienced and accomplished event managers and public officials. They did not fall prey to what is known as “skilled incompetence” (Argyris 1999) in the sense of the inability to break with professional routines whose skillful application is helpful and efficient under regular circumstances. Rather, the key-actors displayed a clear understanding of the non-routine character of the task they had to assume and they were eager to demonstrate their entrepreneurial capability and willingness to promote unconventional solutions. However, there is good sense in acknowledging that the failure of leadership was a composite of analytical incapacity, ethical insufficiency in the form of a lacking sense of responsibility and a lack of civil courage. Those public officials who were closely cooperating with the private event management firm Lopavent, despite or because of their obvious readiness to adapt the role of quasi-entrepreneurs as opposed to traditional bureaucrats, lacked, according to all evidence, an appropriate understanding of the pitfalls of the hybrid arrangement they were creating and sustaining. Accordingly, they probably also lacked an appropriate disposition to keep the undesirable effects of the hybrid arrangement under control. They were probably not even aware of those effects. As a matter of fact, no textbook knowledge is available when it comes to the nature and the pitfalls of hybridity in public administration. While the absence of awareness as far as the pitfalls of the hybrid arrangement were concerned was probably a contributing factor that explains naïveté in handling the situation, it could have been compensated by a sound sense of responsibility. After all, the stakes were high and sufficiently clear to everybody involved. What is more, the legal stipulations designed to protect the physical integrity of the visitors of a mass event such as the Loveparade were clear and strict. As the minutes of the relevant meetings show, the public officials in charge knew that the private event management firm Lopavent could guarantee only one third of the evacuation and escape routes required by the law. The determination of public officials to deliberately circumvent those legal provisions is at the core of their ethical failure and the essence of irresponsible leadership.

25

5.

Conclusion: Responsible Leadership in Hybrid Arrangements, New Public Value Governance, and the Limits of Pragmatism

The present paper states that the responsible handling of hybrid arrangements and public administration is particularly challenging but masterable. The challenge is not the increased structural complexity of hybrids relative to traditional public administration or further risk factors such as multiple stakeholder arrangements, inconsistent governance mechanisms or fragmented accountability. Rather it is the inherent incentive to ignore these risks even when the stakes are high and risk management is made easy through appropriate regulation. This is exemplified through an extreme case of leadership failure in a situation shaped by a typical hybrid arrangement of public private partnership, high stakes of administrative decision making and a strict and binding regulatory environment. What makes the case of the Loveparade disaster in the city of Duisburg in 2010 extreme (and thus exceptional) and, paradoxically, exemplary at the same time is that it demonstrates the force of hybrid arrangements as a permissive environment for irresponsible leadership behavior despite strong countervailing forces in the form of security issues and crystal-clear legal stipulation. Which underlines the general hypothesis that it is not hybridity as such that generates risk zones of blurred responsibility and related administrative failure but the coincidence of hybridity and a lack of awareness combined with a weak or absent sense of responsibility. Keeping the undesirable effects of hybridity in public administration under control is thus an issue of both factual and ethical judgment. The notion of factual judgment refers to the appropriate grasp of (A) the relevant institutional setting and its basic properties (e.g., the nature of hybridity and its inherent risks) and (B) the nature of the task at hand and the professional standards of handling it (e.g., managing crowds in a public space and related security regulation). This is not an unmasterable requirement at all since public officials are, in principle, used to it. It was Dwight Waldo (1948) who underlined that mediation and adjustment to contradictious organizational logics is what senior staff members in public administration do on a daily basis given the necessity to reconcile the spheres of politics and administration. The political sphere is concerned with what is desired and accepted by the public and their elected officials. The administrative sphere is concerned with the technical and professional aspects of a certain task. Accomplished leaders in public

26 administration are well prepared to handle both. Accordingly, they should not be particularly challenged by the additional plurality, complexity and divergent or contradictious requirements that come with the proliferation of hybrid arrangements in the public realm and the more or less complex tasks attached to them. And that is what is basically illustrated by the above case study. Dealing with the challenges of additional complexity and diversity of hybridity or the technical aspects of a public event was the least difficult problem the key-actors planning and preparing the Duisburg Loveparade had to deal with. By contrast, ethical judgment remains crucial and delicate when it comes to the challenges of hybridity for responsible leadership. Ethical judgment refers to the values shared by public officials. Especially when dealing with additional complexity and diversity, much depends on the ability of responsible leaders to rank the importance and legitimacy of the various mechanisms and organizational logics to which their respective institutional unit is exposed (cf. Moore 2014). Failure to perform this ranking of more or less legitimate incentives and requirements may be just as detrimental as is the failure to recognize their variety in the first place. Decision makers within the Duisburg city administration should have made the physical integrity of ordinary people an absolute value and they should have ranked strict compliance with security regulation higher than prestige-seeking through a spectacular street event organized by a private entertainment company. There is no recipe or routine for this kind of judgment, it is the core-ingredient of the very sense of responsibility emphasized by Carl J. Friedrich or Max Weber. The micro-structure of what makes responsible leadership in hybrid arrangements in the public sector particularly challenging is characterized by deviances from the standard organizational behavior and classic decision styles of traditional administration. The features of hybrid arrangements appeal to a sense of innovation and anti-conservatism, non-bureaucratic behavior and civil society involvement in public affairs. The blurriness of organizational structures that comes with the proliferation of hybridity in public administration is thus complemented by an ambivalent psychological appeal to leadership mentality. Under these circumstances, the value basis of responsible leadership should be firm and unambiguous. At first glance, this normative claim is in line with recent pleas for a “new public value governance” (cf. Bozemann 2007; Bryson, Crosby and Bloomberg 2014; Denhardt and Denhardt 2011; Meynhardt 2009; Moore 2014). Just in the Carl J. Friedrich and Dwight Waldo tradition, the new-public-value school of thought points to the role of the individual in public administration and of value-based individual action and decision making. The innovative part

27 is, however, the emphasis on value pluralism, institutional diversity and the social construction of what relevant values actually are (cf. Alford and Hughes 2008; Moore 2013, 2014). Some authors (e.g., Moore 2013, 2014) acknowledge a hierarchy of public values among which, for instance, efficiency, accountability, justness and fairness rank higher than responsiveness or participation. But the general thrust of this strand of literature is the notion of “what is public is … going far beyond government”, “citizens seen as problem-solvers and co-creators actively engaged in creating what is valued by the public and is good for the public” and that “government acts as convener, catalyst, collaborator, sometimes steering, sometimes, rowing, sometimes partnering, sometimes staying out of the way,” selecting “from a menu of alternative delivery mechanisms based on pragmatic criteria” which “often means helping build crosssector collaborations and engaging citizens to achieve agreed objectives”. Finally, “no one sector has a monopoly on public service ethos” so that “maintaining relationships [between the sectors] based on shared public values is essential” (all quotes from Bryson, Crosby and Bloomberg 2014, 446). So the “new public value” perspective is clearly shaped by a philosophy of value pluralism (cf. Alford and Hughes 2008; Moore 2014) and pragmatism in public administration (Hildebrandt 2005, 2008; H. Miller 2004; Shields 2003, 2008) and the related logic of appropriateness when it comes to public administration decision making (cf. Hood 1991; March and Olsen 1989, 2008). The problem with pragmatism is the repudiation of the notion of a priori judgment in the Kantian sense. There are instances of decision making in public administration, however, in which “synthetic” a priori judgment deduced from basic values is indispensable and where public officials have to keep a monopoly in the related public service ethos – for instance, when human lives are at stake and legal provisions designed to protect them are in place. The relevant officials of the Duisburg city administration in charge of planning and preparation of the Loveparade event were, instead, driven by a logic of appropriateness and hyperpragmatism. They soon abandoned their monopoly in defining security standards according to unmistakable legal provisions. They made the physical integrity of people attending a public event negotiable by delegating their exclusive responsibility for the evaluation and certification of security standards to the private sector firm bound by those standards. These officials defined private sector individuals as “problem-solvers and co-creators actively engaged in creating what is valued by the public and is good for the public”. They acted as “convener, catalyst, collaborator, sometimes steering, sometimes, rowing, sometimes partnering, sometimes staying out of the way,” selecting “from a menu of alternative delivery mechanisms based on pragmatic criteria” which meant “helping build cross-sector collaborations and engaging citizens to achieve

28 agreed objectives”. They thus firmly rejected the notion of the public sector having “a monopoly on public service ethos”. In other words, they did what the “new public value” school advocates for. As a consequence, those officials were not able and not willing to walk the line between pragmatism and mere opportunism and blame shifting. So there is good sense in defining hybridity as a permissive environment for misguided pragmatism and irresponsible leadership. Obviously, the praise of pragmatism that characterizes the “new public value” school of thought is the opposite of what could strengthen the even more indispensable sense of responsibility among public officials. Rather than broaden indiscriminately the value basis of public administration as suggested by the “new public value” school of thought, it is imperative to differentiate between the very basic values of democracy and responsible government and the diversity of second order values that necessarily shape the environment of every public administration body. Protecting everybody’s physical integrity, safeguarding human and civil rights, enforcing the rule of law, guaranteeing due process, transparency and individual accountability of elected and appointed officials remain the bedrock of public administration however pluralistic and differentiated its organizational structure and the environment of societal values to which it is exposed.

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Cited Documents [1] Letter Thomas Mahlberg MdB, 9 February 2009, Brief an den Innenminister Dr. Ingo Wolf von Thomas Mahlberg MdB. http://www.cduduisburg.de/index.jsp?index=presseandmid=20andcontent=jaandid=147, downloaded 11 March 2015.

[2] Minutes, meeting of 25 September 2010, Niederschrift über ein Gespräch zum Thema Loveparade 2010 in Duisburg. http://file.wikileaks.org/file/loveparade2010/loveparade-2010-anlage-03-protokoll-25-09-09.pdf, downloaded 11 March 2015.

[3] Minutes, meeting of 2 October 2009, Ergebnisniederschrift zur Besprechung Loveparade 2010. http://file.wikileaks.org/file/loveparade2010/loveparade-2010-anlage-04-protokoll-02-10-09.pdf, downloaded 11 March 2015. [4] Presentation Lopavent, 29 October 2009, Loveparade 2010 in Duisburg – Präsentation Lopavent. https://www.duisburg.de/ratsinformationssystem/bi/getfile.php?id=1458557andty pe=do, downloaded 11 March 2015.

[5] Minutes, meeting of 2 March 2010, Niederschrift über ein verwaltungsinternes Gespräch. http://file.wikileaks.org/file/loveparade2010/loveparade-2010-anlage-20-protokoll-02-03-10.pdf, downloaded 12 March 2015. [6] Letter Bauordnungsamt, City of Duisburg, to Lopavent, 14 June 2010, Eingangsbestätigung – Nachforderung fehlender Unterlagen von der Unteren Baubehörde. http://file.wikileaks.org/file/loveparade2010/loveparade-2010-anlage-24-nachforderung-fehlende-unterlagen-1406-10.pdf, downloaded 12 March 2015.

[7] Minutes, meeting of 18 June 2010, Protokoll eines Gesprächs bei Lopavent. http://file.wikileaks.org/file/loveparade2010/loveparade-2010-anlage-25-aktenvermerk-und-ablehnung-dressler18-06-10.pdf, downloaded 12 March 2015.

32 [8] Note for the files, meeting of 25 June 2010, Aktenvermerk über ein Gespräch bei Lopavent des Bauamtes. http://file.wikileaks.org/file/loveparade2010/loveparade-2010-anlage-26-aktenvermerk-abnahme-sv-25-0610.pdf, downloaded 12 March 2015.

[9] Note for the files, 12 July 2010, Aktenvermerk, Bewertung des Zu- und Abwegekonzepts durch Prof. Schreckenberg. https://www.duisburg.de/ratsinformationssystem/bi/getfile.php?id=1458579andtype=doXIV, March 2015.

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[10] Expert report, 13 July 2010, Entfluchtungsanalyse zur Loveparade 2010 der Firma TraffGo HT GmbH. https://www.duisburg.de/ratsinformationssystem/bi/getfile.php?id=1458601andtype=do, downloaded 12 March 2015.

[11] Expert report, 16 July 2010, Stellungnahme zur Entfluchtungsanalyse durch Prof. Schreckenberg. https://www.duisburg.de/ratsinformationssystem/bi/getfile.php?id=1458602andty pe=do, downloaded 12 March 2015.

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