Transformative Government: A new tradition for the civil service in the era of sustainability transitions

Abstract

Many articles on transition highlight the urgent need for radical change, citing e.g. the Paris Climate Agreement, the Green Deal, IPCC reports, and the EU’s focus on societal missions and grand societal challenges (Janssen et al., 2022; Wanzenböck et al., 2020). Economists, philosophers, spiritual leaders, and mobility experts have also emphasized this urgency. Their broad-based existential unwillingness to accept the consequences of the climate crisis in all its facets demonstrates a search for a new sustainable equilibrium achieved only by system change. The overarching goal of this thesis is therefore to find a legitimate rationale and favorable institutional structures for the civil service, to support governments in facilitating guiding sustainability transitions. To achieve this goal, this thesis examines the tasks assigned to governments by transition scholars through the lens of Public Administration (Chapter Two), institutional acceptance of these tasks (Chapter Three) and tactical patterns of entrepreneurial civil servants executing these tasks (Chapter Four). Additionally, practitioners’ ideas for new institutional configurations to execute transition plans are explored (Chapter Five). I conclude that a new Public Administration tradition is needed to facilitate civil servants to execute transition tasks. With this aim, this dissertation introduces the concept of Transformative Government to legitimize transformative change for civil servants. This research aims to identify a legitimizable transition rationale for governments, incorporating both Transition Literature and Public Administration concepts. The current Public Administration traditions, that legitimize or delegitimize the actions of civil servants, are incompatible with system change. This thesis proposes a new rationale, called transformative Government, which connects sustainability transitions to accepted legitimacy claims from Public Administration. In practice, this means that the Transformative Government understands, accepts, and implements transition tasks based on a new normative framework. This rationale provides a new Public Administration tradition that prescribes and legitimizes actions needed for transition. It synthesizes notions of system change, administrative processes, legitimacy, and democracy to enable a legitimized pursuit of transition tasks. For this rationale to become a Public Administration tradition in the near future, it needs to be grounded in Public Administrative philosophy and theory. This thesis outlines some contours of this tradition following the comparative criteria set out by Stout (2013). A new tradition is needed when all existing traditions hinder systematic change to the point that inertia follows. The Transformative Government provides a new perspective to governments experiencing a systematic lock-in, producing an impossibility of working on systematic, sustainable change.