Blame Avoidance in Cross-Agency Strategic Planning: Evidence from Emergency Planning

Strategic planning in the public sector refers to “a disciplined effort to produce fundamental decisions and actions that shape and guide what public sectors is, what it does, and why it does it.” (Bryson 2004, p 6). To... [ view full abstract ]

Strategic planning in the public sector refers to “a disciplined effort to produce fundamental decisions and actions that shape and guide what public sectors is, what it does, and why it does it.” (Bryson 2004, p 6). To proactively respond to increasingly cross-cutting, complex and “wicked” problems facing public governance, pubic organizations more and more opt to collaboratively develop strategic planning across departmental boundaries. Yet strategic planning involved multiple agencies makes their role and accountability systems increasingly blurred. Free-riding, buck-passing and the like behaviors are often complaints. These bureaucratic pathologies can be better understood under the lens of blame avoidance—“a set of interactions between elected politicians office holders and agencies with the general public, or voters at large to escape from blame” (Hood, 2002, p 16). From this perspective, public organizations’ strategic planning can sometimes be treated as a tool for agencies to avoid blame.

The purpose of this study is to integrate Hood’s blame avoidance gaming and Poister’s public strategic planning conceptual framework to examine the factors that influence public agencies’ behaviors of avoiding blame manifested in cross-agency strategic planning for emergency response. We identified a total of 7 internal, external and inter-departmental factors. The internal dimension includes factors of resource input and staff professionalization. The external factors are laws and policies, accountability mechanism, and environmental uncertainty. The inter-departmental dimension involves inter-organizational trust and inter-department transparency. Drawing on the extant literature, we developed hypotheses predicting impact of these factors on blame avoidance in the context of interagency strategic planning for emergency management. These hypotheses were empirically tested on the data collected from a survey of governmental officials who participated in cross-agency emergency planning from the Shanghai Municipal Government, China. The Shanghai’s emergency planning spanning multiple agencies provides us with an ideal case to examine our framework. Emergency management is one of the key performance indicators for Chinese government offices and therefore they have strong motivation to avoid blame. The results of our study indicate that cross-department factors not only significantly affect but also moderate the effect of internal factors on the behaviors of blame avoidance. When expecting to take a blame, agency officials refer to have either lower levels of inter-department transparency and resource input or higher levels of inter-department transparency and resource input. When expecting to take a credit, agency officials prefer to have a higher level of inter-department transparency because it can offset the negative impacts of inadequate resource input and a lower level of staff professionalization. The cross-departmental factor under different circumstances can supplement intra-departmental factors. The study enriches our understanding of public strategic planning by directing attention to the role of cross-department factors—trust and transparency on improving strategic planning in the public sector.

Keywords: Public Strategic Planning; Blame Avoidance; Cross-Agency Collaboration; Emergency Planning;