Collaboration, Ethics, and the Future Public Servant

Abstract

If ethics are about how we are to live and collaboration a key expression of contemporary organizing, then interactions between the two are likely to influence how collaboration is organized and practiced. The contemporary public policy environment with its diversity, complexity, and interconnectedness disrupts established value positions by bringing them into contact with different others. It intensifies the dynamic between the global and the local, and the universal and the particular in the working out of moral judgments. Collaboration is a response to this changed public policy context but an additional disruptive force as it reveals the limits of actors’ capacity to see beyond their own “upbringing” political, professional, and personal. However, collaboration is also a spur to “looking again and learning.”

This chapter explores those interactions in order to develop a better understanding of the relationship between ethics and collaboration and to identify how public policy practice might benefit. In doing so, it highlights the challenges posed by collaboration to traditions and norms of ethical public conduct, and confronts questions of agency, identity, and performance in collaborative settings. It argues that collaboration draws attention to the constraints of existing ethical frameworks and creates the opportunity for new frameworks to emerge that are “local,” inclusive, and just, with specific implications for future ethical public servants.

This chapter is adapted from a chapter on “Ethics” in Sullivan, H. Collaboration and Public Policy forthcoming from Palgrave. The author is grateful for the publisher’s permission to use the material