Failure and Fiasco: A natural state

General commentaries from the literature on public policy refer to a broad sense of pessimism that began to emerge in the mid 1960s about the potential of public policy to solve the deeper seated problems faced by governments and public agencies (Hill, 1997).....Upbeat assessments of the potential to improve government through scientific risk assessment, the study of organisational design and techniques of rational decision making infused political and professional rhetoric and helped to shape the theoretical and empirical mainstream of research into public policy (Parsons, 1995).

Researchers, in effect, wary of conceiving of social change as a process best investigated through methods derived from natural science, saw in evaluation a way of plotting social change that was truer to the complexity of human affairs and, in some sense, more democratic. Research and evaluation in education were influenced by this turn no less than were other fields of enquiry, the effects of American developments during mid-1960s being reported back and taken up by British advocates of evaluation in education from 1970 (Richardson, 2002, pp. 26-27).

The consequences of these developments in the years since have been significant not just for theoretical debate and emergent models of public service professionalism, they have also influenced the stance of governments to public service management as a state sponsored activity, taking it in a more managerial direction (Hood, 1991).

.........The political science literature lacks an overall frame or accepted theory of collapse and failure in public management and this constitutes a void at the heart of public management theory(Hood, 1998,pp.24,45).

Oxford Review of Education, Vol 33, May 2007