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Institute
Introduction
(2007)
State, administration and governance in Germany: competing traditions and dominant narratives
(2003)
Germany
(2002)
This article contributes to the politics of policy‐making in executive government. It introduces the analytical distinction between generalists and specialists as antagonistic players in executive politics and develops the claim that policy specialists are in a structurally advantaged position to succeed in executive politics and to fend off attempts by generalists to influence policy choices through cross‐cutting reform measures. Contrary to traditional textbook public administration, we explain the views of generalists and specialists not through their training but their positions within an organization. We combine established approaches from public policy and organization theory to substantiate this claim and to define the dilemma that generalists face when developing government‐wide reform policies (‘meta‐policies’) as well as strategies to address this problem. The article suggests that the conceptual distinction between generalists and specialists allows for a more precise analysis of the challenges for policy‐making across government organizations than established approaches.
In 2013, large floods affected Germany heavily. The natural disaster transcended jurisdictional and organisational boundaries, necessitating a coordinative effort by disaster relief forces and their administrative and political leadership. In the aftermath, politicians and experts praised the improvement of the German system of crisis management, also in direct comparison with the response to the last German “flood of the century” of 2002. This chapter takes a public policy and organisational perspective to analyse the German disaster relief governance throughout all four crisis management phases. By highlighting the central features of the German governance arrangements and the main organisational changes implemented in reaction to the previous flood in 2002, we find that Whole-of-Government approaches are increasingly used by the federal and Länder government.