Design Oriented Public Administration: A Systematic Literature Review

This article takes stock of design oriented public administration and public management research, to identify and synthesize roots, theory, methods, risks, challenges, and alternatives. Via a systematic literature review based... [ view full abstract ]

This article takes stock of design oriented public administration and public management research, to identify and synthesize roots, theory, methods, risks, challenges, and alternatives. Via a systematic literature review based on the PRISMA-method we investigate a large number of articles and books on design in social sciences. These studies are analyzed based on the following themes: (1) antecedents, origins and related fields, (2) theoretical building blocks, (3) types of experimental methods in design sciences, (5) examples of value creation in public service delivery through design across research fields from a trans-disciplinary perspective and with a look of the international scholarship, (6) risks and challenges, and (7) alternative and opposing fields of research.

Resorting to a systematic approach of a complex and cross-disciplinary topic, a wide-ranging search of social science journals is undertaken, a large volume of references is identified and characterized, and the aggregation of diverse sources of evidence across research fields is accomplished.

The collected theoretical building blocks include goals (e.g. abduction, learning, adaptation), intended outcomes (e.g.kinds of artefacts, and policy fields of application such as environmental problem-solving), and an interactive design process (e.g. a built-and-evaluatecycle), with strong connections with ethics.

The article determines, compares, and discusses the peculiarities of designed practical interventions, including design experiments, niche experiments, pilot projects, and socio-technical experiments, of which the authors provide a taxonomy. Examples of the varieties of artefact-generating experimentalism, and the public value they generate, are provided. Risks and challenges are presented in parallel with how might scholars navigate the challenges. The authors take stock of progress on adaptive governance, collaborative governance, experimentalist governance, and knowledge governance, in order to propose an agenda for future experimentation,to build on progress made since the pragmatist experimentalism and Herbert Simon’s distinct agenda for the sciences of the artificial. The conclusions are evaluated based on expert feedbacks.

This article brings together and systematizes academic research on design science, and thus enhances our conceptual understanding of the foundations of design-led public administration and public management research. In this paper, we argue for design science to be recognized as a foundational science for public administration and public management research alongside non-experimental and mainstream experimental methods. On the basis of our review, we present the reader with some guidelines on how to do proper design-oriented research in public administration.