Foundations for a more human(e) government

In an era of growing hostility towards government, how might we chart a more positive future direction? An article in the Australian Journal of Public Administration sets out the foundations for a new approach to public administration. Focusing on positive aspects of government along with increasing our capacity or empathy and humility can help shape this new approach. Being more human-centred and amplifying the positive stories of government offers a much more human(e) approach to how we govern. 

Turbulent times

We are in a transitional period for public administration. For example, the United States of America is in a state of extreme turbulence. The language around public service in the U.S. symbolises this increasingly hostile environment through patterns of revolution, erasure and trauma.  

Catastrophes are brewing as the U.S. Government abruptly cancels or cuts funding and programs across the nation and the world. The war on diversity, equity and inclusion is changing how we see the U.S. federal public service, as images and stories of women, people of colour, and trans people are being purged from government websites and buildings. For some, these and many other recent examples represent a regime attacking its own institutions. 

Foundations for the future

The article introduces four ideas to shape future thinking and how we might guard against hostility now and into the future.

1. Positivity

The current hostility toward public servants and the public service is part of a decades-long negative trope about government. Negativity pervades public service discourse. Psychological biases, political opportunism and relentless negative media help fuel this. We are much better at finding faults and assigning blame than we are at recognising success. 

Positive public administration offers a counterbalance to the negativity bias, focusing on how we can learn from successes to drive positive change. Practitioners have a key role to play, amplifying the positive stories of government and articulating the value that public servants create for community. 

2. Complexity

Many of our systems remain wedded to ways of operating where we develop standard rules and then apply them, at scale, to address public problems. This leaves us prone to pushing complexity aside and focusing on the technical rather than the relational aspects of governing. Many governments are poorly positioned to experiment, adapt and cope with change. 

A complex world needs flexibility, adaptiveness, foresight, experimentation and the engagement of ‘unconventional expertise’. This includes the idea of human learning systems which bring together human insight, judgement, humility and empathy with more relational ways of operating. Others have argued for more adaptive approaches that draw on data, human-centred design and collective intelligence to work through seemingly intractable problems. These types of approaches signal a movement towards new ways of thinking that grapple with complexity and provide practical tools to help us do it. 

3. Humility

The third foundation is humility. This connects to more relational modes of operating and can help in confronting complexity.  In humble government, policy making begins with an acknowledgement of uncertainty. Humble governments make it clear that they do not have all the answers, opening space for being more experimental and engaging more with community. The role of government is about fully realising the promises made to constituents and involves shifts in power. 

4. Empathy

The final idea is empathy—the ability to put ourselves in the place of another and see the world as they do. In bureaucratic systems, empathy loses out by design. Bureaucracy’s power comes from the removal of emotion and empathy by devising seemingly optimal legal rational rules. 

Arguments in support of empathy let public servants be human with an emphasis on working together with constituents and communities. These approaches stress the importance of public servants building relationships with the people they serve so they can better understand their strengths and needs. Rather than models that are built on control, trust shines through when we focus on empathy. 

The bottom line

Public administration and management is an iterative field (at its best) and shifts in policy come from the interaction between practice and scholarship. When woven together, positivity, complexity, humility and empathy can be mutually reinforcing, as we navigate a hostile world and chart a course forward towards a more human and humane public administration. 

• Foundations for a more human(e) government: Reflections at a transitional moment – Janine O’Flynn, Australian Journal of Public Administration, June 2025.

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