The question posed by Dorte McEwen, Chief of Strategy and Analysis in Gentofte Municipality, in her master’s project is: What requirements does it place on administration to reinvent itself when the political working method changes? She has now been awarded the MPG Master Prize for the best assignment among summer projects.
What did you research in your master's project?
"The ideal for how the public sector should organise itself in these years is characterised by New Public Governance - including co-creation. In Gentofte Municipality, the political way of working has changed, as the politicians have scaled back the work in the standing committees in favor of policy development together with the citizens in task committees, where typically 5 politicians and 10 citizens prepare recommendations for the municipal council. In this way, representative and deliberative democracy are combined.
For the administration, this has meant new ways of working. In my master's project, I examine how the administration creates a sense of itself in the work with task committees, and what tensions arise - including how the work with task committees shapes the administration as an institutional practice."
Why did you choose that particular theme?
"I have been involved in developing, implementing and working with the task committees for the past 6 years. Engaging with the practical aspects and experiencing persistent challenges prompted me to take a step back and observe how the role of administration has evolved. I sought to understand the challenges that arise for us as an administration while working with task committees.
In our work, we have focused heavily on new politician and citizen roles, just as this is what research and the media typically focus on. But does the administration think differently about itself? And what constitutive significance does the model and the administration's way of understanding its task have? I thought there was a lack of knowledge about the significance of the introduction of a new rationale for public value creation based on New Public Governance and co-creation for the public management values.
What can you conclude based on the project?
The project as a whole demonstrates how the administration, in its work with task committees, must reinvent itself as a significantly different entity. It successfully adapts and aligns multiple logics and their diverse sources of identity, legitimacy, and authority in novel ways. The administration tackles the challenges that arise using a both/and approach, initiating additional activities to uphold the values of various logics. This explains why working with task committees is perceived as demanding both in terms of time and cognitive effort.
The administration operates in the tension between the fundamental unpredictability of co-creation and the requirement to design a process that ensures task committee create a recommendation within the framework of their mandate. These recommendations can subsequently be transformed into reality through adoption by the municipal council and implementation by the administration. This necessitates recommendations that align with previous political decisions and ongoing professional development. Balancing innovation, a core goal of co-creation, can potentially pose a challenge. The administration now actively facilitates and leads the process, acting on the mandate from the political leadership, rather than remaining in the background as before. It seeks novel ways to uphold professional quality by engaging in dialogue, thereby equipping politicians and citizens for their roles. Simultaneously, the administration learns from citizens’ perspectives. By establishing task committees as a collaborative community, the administration ensures that solutions benefit all residents in the municipality. Throughout these transformations, the administration’s ability to cultivate relationships becomes crucial.
What significance can your master's project have for your organisation?
"I hope that it can contribute to the further development of our management practices in the work with task committees and perhaps also in other contexts, in that the project's observations can be a starting point for joint reflection and experiments with practice and learning. Furthermore, I hope that it will focus on , that we need different logics - to know and be able to work in and combine different universes of meaning in order to create change. And that we can talk about the tensions we are in - not as an image of inadequacy and something that can be fixed, but as an image of complexity, and something that must be continuously dealt with, and where the choices we make have an impact on what kind of management we develop into."
The MPG program develops managers personally and professionally. How has working with your master's project contributed to that development?
"For me, the master's project has basically been a professional immersion, where I expected - and have gained - new professional insights. At the same time, the master's project has drawn and collected learning from several modules on the education, which has been a nice rounding off of a long process. Along the way, where I have analyzed my interviewees' universes of meaning, I have also caught sight of my own, and in this way have also been able to observe and confront my own preconceptions and preferences, which has contributed to my personal development. So even though I have written the master's project alone, have I nevertheless caught sight of myself in the dialogue with others."
