Fifty years as the fourth pillar of public administration: A polycentric extension of the social equity framework

Abstract

While public consideration of social equity pre‐dates Minnowbrook (Blessett et al., 2019; Burnier, 2021), the field formally recognized social equity as its fourth pillar after the conference (Frederickson, 1971). The National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA, 2000), Svara and Brunet (2004, 2005), and Johnson and Svara (2011) outlined a unified social equity framework along four dimensions: procedural fairness, access, quality, and outcomes. We build on this important work by offering a polycentric extension, which considers what social equity means when government programs are often place‐based and delivered in an intergovernmental context with multiple decision‐making units across spatial levels (e.g., state, city, neighborhood) simultaneously. Using the Community Development Block Grant as an example, we demonstrate the importance of careful consideration of geographic levels in the delivery of public goods for understanding the program's social equity implications. The polycentric framework can be a useful tool for evaluating the social equity of policies.

Whose Neighborhood Needs? Assessing the Spatial Distribution of Federal Community Development Funds

“…Our results held across specifications and even after accounting for other federal investments, temporal decision-making (e.g., lagged CDBG investments), and city and time fixed effects, and they start to connect the different dimensions of social equity using a polycentric extension of the social equity framework (Stokan, Hatch, and Overton 2022). This work demonstrates that city-level procedural fairness mechanisms have implications for access equity at the neighborhood level.…”

“…Svara and Brunet (2004, 2005) and Johnson and Svara (2011) argue that there are four social equity dimensions to consider: procedural fairness (the mechanisms by which we allocate our scarce public resources), access equity (the equitable distribution of those resources), quality equity (the features of those programs/policies that increase equity) and outcome equity (the ability of those resources to improve equitable results). Place-based policymaking in fragmented urban regions creates unique social equity concerns because one or more of these dimensions may be superficially satisfied in the pursuit of ulterior motives to compete for economic growth (Stokan, Hatch, and Overton 2022). This paper centers on two social equity metrics.…”

From big data to higher bureaucratic capacity: Poverty alleviation in China

“…As digital governance expands, bridging the digital divide becomes increasingly crucial to ensuring the delivery of government services (Chen & Hsieh, 2009). More research on measures to increase digital inclusion and equity (as a component of social inclusion and equity) is therefore needed (McCandless et al, 2022; McDonald III et al, 2022; Stokan et al, 2022).…”

Establishing an Agenda for Public Budgeting and Finance Research

“…In recent years, social equity has become a key topic for both our governments and our society as a whole (Guy & McCandless, 2020;McCandless et al, 2022). While much of the discussion has centered around policy-making and service provision (see Stokan et al, 2023), the budgeting issue continues to emerge as governments struggle with how to pay for the initiatives. Traditionally, we have viewed budget staff as neutral arbiters (Johnson & Kavanagh, 2021).…”