Speakers:
Jody Freeman, University of California at Los Angeles
Charles H. Koch, Jr., College of William and Mary
Paul L. Posner, Managing Director, Federal Budget, Strategic Issues, United States General Accounting Office, Washington, D.C.
Elliott D. Sclar, Professor of Urban Planning, School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University, New York, New York
Thomas H. Stanton, Esquire, Fellow, Center for the Study of American Government, John Hopkins University, Washington, D.C. (view material) PDF file

Third party governance occurs when governments enlist other governments and non-governmental entities to carry out the business of government or to help it achieve its goals, using the powers or resources of the government. Third party governance in this sense is nearly ubiquitous: only a small fraction of the activity of government is conducted by full-time employees of the government. Governments procure goods and services for use in their own operations; they supply services to the public through private organizations; they subsidize the consumption of goods and services purchased in the marketplace; they cooperate with other governments and with private governments and associations in all of these activities, and also in the exercise of regulatory power; they charter private companies to perform essential public functions, such as the provision of public utility services, under government regulation.

In recent years, dissatisfaction with the performance and cost of government has led to shrinkage in the apparent size of government and growth in the volume of governmental activity carried out by non-governmental entities, in the name of capturing for public functions the presumed greater efficiency of the private sector. Although the tools being used to transfer functions to non-governmental entities are traditional and so are, considered individually, generally not problematic, the magnitude of the shift to private provision gives cause for concern because it is bringing about a qualitative change in the nature of government and its relationship to the governed: the extensive deployment and enlistment of private entities endangers the peculiar virtues of the public sector, which are political accountability and the practice of government under law.

The session will explore ways of maintaining accountability and legality where the terms and conditions of the relationship between those who create and those who excercise public authority are not established by hierarchical control through the executive culminating in legislative oversight but rather by contracts, agreements, and other terms of participation that are subject to bodies of law other than those that would apply were the functions being performed by employees of the government. This is a problem of increasingly urgent concern for the public administration as well as the administrative law communities, and so our interdisciplinary panel of speakers includes those who approach the issues as problems of program design and management as well as of accountability to the political branches and the courts.

Business Meeting at Program Conclusion.