Keep walking on the bright side: criticality, credit and challenge

In a recent article in this journal Mark van Ostaijen and Shivant Jhagroe (O&J) provided a highly critical analysis of Positive Public Administration (PPA). “[It] will not create a way out” they argued “but only a new way into traditional and intellectual problems that have haunted PA as a discipline” and was nothing more than “a rather romantic, nostalgic, and regressive turn to the past and the inability to actually innovate public administration as a field.” This response article argues that although O&J were correct to highlight the risk of co-option and the importance of criticality they are wrong to assume that PPA is for some reason unable to identify or cope with such pressures. By returning to PPA’s core emphasis on the interplay between levels of policy in the interpretation of policy success a multi-levelled framework is provided. This illustrates that the concurrent identification of “success-within-failure” (or vice versa) is possible and therefore identifying successful policy need not be uncritical. As such, PPA need not necessarily be associated with conservative, instrumental, system-affirming thinking in the way O&J assume. “Making public administration again” demands that its adherents hone the ability to range across different policy levels in ways that allow them to avoid the zero-sum trap that O&J identify (but then themselves fall into).