Inclusive management is a pattern of practices by public managers that facilitate the inclusion of public employees, experts, the public, and politicians in collaboratively addressing public problems or concerns of public interest.Feldman, M. S. & A.M. Khademian. 2002. To manage is to govern. Public Administration Review 62 (5): 529-541.Feldman, M.S., A.M. Khademian, and K.S. Quick. 2009. Ways of knowing, inclusive management, and promoting democratic engagement: An introduction to the special issue. International Public Management Journal 12 (2): 123-136.
In the inclusive management model, managers focus on building the capacity of the public to participate in the policy process. One way this capacity is built is through the structuring and maintenance of relationships by managers. Managers operate in a myriad of relationship structures that are used for making decisions, implementing policy, and identifying public priorities. These relationships give shape, pose constraints, or present opportunities for the way public policy is pursued.
Definition
The management component of the compound idea of inclusive management signifies that inclusion is a managed, ongoing project rather than an attainable state.Feldman, M. S., and A. M. Khademian. 2000. Managing for inclusion: balancing control and participation. International Public Management Journal 3 (2): 149-167 The inclusion component means something different from the commonplace use of inclusion and exclusion to reference the socioeconomic diversity of the participants. The understanding of inclusion in this analysis emphasizes diversity in terms of the necessity of a diversity of perspectives to promote civic discovery in a deliberative setting. Inclusion involves active boundary spanning across differences in perspectives, institutions, issues, and time, which may or may not be founded upon work to integrate socioeconomically diverse participants.
The inclusion part of the idea is perhaps best encapsulated by the "50/50 rule", a term used by public managers in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to invoke a variety of meanings.Quick, K. S., and M. S. Feldman. Distinguishing inclusion and participation. Paper presented at the Public Management Research Conference, Columbus, Ohio, October 2007 Sometimes "50/50" means that process and outcome are equally important, in other words that the effects of a process on community building are as important as the task completion. Sometimes it means that ideally 50% of the people involved in a process have participated in prior, related processes and 50% are newcomers, such that each policy-making effort acknowledges past conversations or decisions yet remains open to new ideas that may alter the previous consensus. From the perspective of the 50/50 rule, things like process and outcome or task and community are not in a trade-off relationship, and indeed are not even separable.Feldman, M.S. and K.S. Quick. 2009. Generating resources and energizing frameworks through inclusive public management. International Public Management Journal 12 (2): 137-71. In this context, concluding that participation was done "for the sake of participation" rather than to effect the outcome would be a damning critique. Keeping process and outcome, newcomers and old-timers, and past and present in play are ways of creating connections across individuals, groups, interests, and issues. Tasks are accomplished, yet opportunities continue to be open for revising as well as for moving on to the other issues and tasks that emerge or are next in line. This sense of inclusion is part of an ongoing stream of issues and people involved in one process or concern rolling forward into another echoes theorizations of democracy and civic engagement as an ongoing inquiry and never-finished project.Dryzek, J.S. 1990. Discursive Democracy: Politics, Policy, and Science. New York: Cambridge University.Fung, A. and E.O. Wright. 2003. Deepening Democracy: Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance. New York: Verso Books.
Relationships with other public management and policy-making ideas
Inclusive public management is a newly characterized form of public management following the more traditional forms of public administration, espoused by Woodrow WilsonReich, R. B. (1988). The Power of Public Ideas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. and political scientists including Frank Goodnow and Charles A. Beard. Analyses of inclusive public management contribute to a stream of practice and research regarding New Public Management popularized by Osborne and Gaebler,Osborne, D. & T. Gaebler, 1992. Reinventing Government. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. particularly recent contributions on reconceptualizing members of the public as partners or coproducers of public services rather than as "customers" of government.Denhardt, R. B. & J.V. Denhardt. 2000. The new public service: serving rather than steering. Public Administration Review 60 (6): 549-559. Inclusive public management describes some practices of participatory democracy, sharing with deliberative democracy an emphasis on participants making decisions through deliberative processes rather than the mere aggregation of individual interests through voting or other mechanisms, the idea being that through deliberative processes that enable communicative rationality and civic discovery,Reich, R.B. 1988. Policy making in a democracy. In The Power of Public Ideas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 123-156. new understandings and resources of public value or the public good may be realized. It intersects with other fields of research and practice on collaborative governance that describe collaborative processes for making and implementing public policy and urban or regional planningHealey, P. 1997. Collaborative Planning: Shaping Places in Fragmented Societies. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.Reich, R.R. 1988. Policy making in a democracy. In The Power of Public Ideas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 123-156.Forester, J. 1999. The Deliberative Practitioner: Encouraging Participatory Planning Practices. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Abers, R.N. 2000. Inventing Local Democracy: Grassroots Policy in Brazil. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers.Innes, J.E. and D.E. Booher. 2003. Collaborative policymaking: Governance through dialogue. In M.A. Hajer and H. Wagenaar, eds. Deliberative Policy Analysis: Understanding Governance in the Network Society. London: Cambridge University, pp. 33-59.Roberts, N. 2004. Public deliberation in an age of direct citizen participation. American Review of Public Administration 34 (4): 315-353.O'Leary, R. and L.B. Bingham, eds. 2006. Big Ideas in Collaborative Public Management. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.O'Leary, R. and L.B. Bingham, eds. 2009. The Collaborative Public Manager: New Ideas for the Twenty-first Century. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Zeemering, E.S. and R.J. Durham. 2009. Expanding the scope of policy leadership through networks: Grand Rapids, Michigan. In J.H. Svara, editor. The Facilitative Leader in City Hall: Reexamining the Scope and Contributions. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, pp. 189-212.Innes, J.E. and D.E. Booher. 2010. Planning with Complexity: An Introduction to Collaborative Rationality for Public Policy. New York: Routledge. Inclusive management also aligns with recent writings on network governanceBooher, D.E. and J.E. Innes. 2002. Network power in collaborative planning. Journal of Planning Education and Research 21: 221-36.Hajer, M.A. and H. Wagenaar, eds. 2003. Deliberative Policy Analysis: Understanding Governance in the Network Society. New York: Cambridge University Press.Goldsmith, S. and W.D. Eggers. 2004. Governing by Network: The New Shape of the Public Sector. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.Agranoff, R. 2007. Managing within Networks: Adding Value to Public Organizations. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. to the extent that they focus upon cross-boundary collaborations within networks.
Distinguishing inclusion and participation Inclusive management practices are one way to enact public participation and civic engagement, which may be implemented in a variety of ways. Inclusive management practices are not the same as citizen participation or as inclusion as the latter term is typically used in democratic theory to denote the involvement of ethnically or socioeconomically diverse persons or groups in a decision-making process. Instead, inclusive management theories make a distinction between inclusive practices and participatory practices, which are intersecting dimensions of any civic engagement process. Inclusion is not a term for describing participation that has been done particularly well. Indeed, participation may be done well or badly, as may inclusion. Rather, inclusion and participation are two different approaches to public engagement, with different implications for the roles of the parties involved, the kinds of decisions reached, and the kind of community fostered by engagement. A process may be characterized by one, neither, or both, along two intersecting dimensions of low to high inclusion and low to high participation. The following table identifies the features of high participation and high inclusion.
High Participation High Inclusion Many people are invited to participate and/or do participate. Efforts are made to make the process broadly accessible and representative of public at large. Community input is collected and influences decisions. The focus is frequently on a particular proposal or topic, and the process may be conducted on a one-time basis. | Diverse views are engaged. The process is deliberative, yielding new understandings of problems and opportunities for action. The participants in the process take part in defining the problem, the process for decision-making, and the decision outcomes. Individual processes are part of an ongoing stream of issues, not one-time or one-issue discussions.
Diversity and representation
Quick and Feldman's distinction between inclusion and participation addresses the place of diversity in civic engagement. One potential source of confusion is that the inclusion component of the term inclusive management means something different from the commonplace use of inclusion to refer to the socioeconomic diversity of participants and adequacy of representation or the proportional representativeness of participation in an engagement process. Given the everyday use of the term, characterizing a process that has not had socioeconomically diverse participation as "inclusive" is confusing and may be misread as being dismissive of diversity. Diversity certainly does have a place in inclusive practices. Within the framework of distinguishing inclusion and participation, however, it is not an either/or proposition to decide whether a diverse process is or is not inclusive or participatory. Nor can diversity be assigned to the dimension of inclusion or participation. Instead, diversity can be engaged through participation- or inclusion-oriented strategies, but it has different meanings in these two orientations.
Participation orientation Inclusion orientation Meaning of diversifying the process Engaging a diverse array of persons Engaging a diverse array of perspectives Contributions of diversity Different persons, who are presumed to bear a diverse array of perspectives related to their identities, produce a fuller range of input that is representative of the community. Different perspectives, when brought into deliberation, facilitate learning and civic discovery. Practices for encouraging diversity in the process Invite many people to participate. Make the process accessible (e.g., provide language translation, child care, or transportation assistance; choose convenient time and place for hard to reach constituencies).