The unpredictability, urgency and threat from heightened turbulence and crises has compelled public sectors to reconsider the choice of governance measures. The fluctuating levels of turbulence require public administrations to be adaptable in both decision-making and service provision to meet the shifting priorities of citizens. Public sector organisations have increasingly looked for repurposing and reinterpreting the measures available towards them, adopting hybrid solutions. This article incorporates a dynamic lens through the hybridity perspective to better understand the shifts in governance responses to fluctuating turbulence. The conceptual development of hybridity has been supported by empirical illustrations from 19 mini-cases of school closures and vaccination promotion from nine countries (Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway and Spain), collected through 109 interviews. The conceptual development highlights the role of different hybrid governance configurations in developing the necessary capacities for the different robustness strategies. Through advantages developed through synergies of complementing different governance tools, public administrations are provided the toolset for robust crisis governance.

In recent years, multiple and concurrent challenges (i.e., polycrisis) have emerged, threatening the stability of public sector organizations. Consequently, scholars have addressed this issue by examining and proposing policies and actions that governments can undertake to improve their resilience capabilities (Hernantes et al., 2019). In this complex scenario, accountability has emerged as a key factor to bolstering resilience. However, despite pivotal organizations (World Bank, European Council, United Nations) have shed light on the crucial association between accountability and resilience, empirical studies on the topic are still lacking. This study aims to fill this gap by empirically testing the impact that accountability has on the resilience of a country.

Building on prior literature, we develop a theoretical framework (Figure 1) that integrates the comprehensive accountability framework (Christie, 2018) with the process-based approach to resilience (Duchek, 2020) to outline the potential link between accountability and the resilience capabilities of countries. Moreover, we hypothesize that the country’s economic, social, and technological development levels may have a moderating effect on this association, either enhancing or diminishing it.

This study employs a quantitative research method, which includes linear regression and moderator analyses. We tested our models on a sample of 182 countries using a hand-collected dataset containing open data from several sources (United Nations, European Commission, World Bank, International Monetary Fund).

There are several points of interest in this research. Firstly, this research fills a gap in prior literature on public management, which has traditionally focused on individual dimensions of accountability when analyzing resilience, without considering accountability as a systemic concept. For instance, some authors focused on transparency (Al Balushi, 2020) while others on responsiveness (Duit, 2016) suggesting that both, when considered as separate concepts, improve preparedness to deal with risk. Moreover, by analyzing the mediating role of economic, social, and technological development, this study offers insights into the characteristics of countries that may impact the association between accountability and resilience. In doing so, the study integrates previous evidence that predominantly focuses on the socio-economic status of a country as crucial aspect of its resilience capabilities leaving out the technological aspect (Bolson et al., 2022), even though recent research has recognized the key role of technology in resilience-building processes (Cañavera-Herrera et al., 2022). Finally, this study advances knowledge on resilience by considering a polycrisis scenario and compiling evidence from prior studies that mainly focused on one crisis at a time (Shi et al., 2022).

What administrative-level values are central to public administration scholarship? What is the democratic content of those values? How are values understood to be democratic operationalized into norms of practice? To address these questions, we conduct quantitative (bibliometric) and qualitative (narrative) analyses of 9,288 scholarly papers from Scopus, the Web of Science, and ten leading journals in the field of public administration. Following the PRISMA protocol, our abstract and full-text to elicit 50 papers that we analyze in depth. Our analysis reveals two important strands of critique. First, concepts of “public value” and “public values” are often used interchangeably, complicating a systematic picture of administrative values in the literature. Second, most contributions do not carefully distinguish between the values of a single organization and those that apply across a broader set of organizations, making it difficult to understanding what scholars understand the core values of public administration to be. To constructively address these concerns, we synthesize those typologies of administratively relevant values and consider them in light of democratic theory, offering a theory-driven research agenda for the study of values and democracy in public administration.

What drives the prolific internal restructuring inside public sector institutions? Despite case studies highlighting considerable negative workforce impacts and criticism being leveled at their frequency, we have no empirical investigations into the occurrence, drivers, and methods of restructuring. This study analyses the documentation of all restructures in New Zealand’s public sector over a three-year period, revealing patterns in their impacts and in the narratives used to motivate them. It finds that a majority of restructures rearrange or replace existing roles, rather than reducing or growing their numbers. While some restructures make clear links between status quo issues and structural solutions, there is a ‘black box’ logic at the centre of most restructures, marked by ambiguous, abstract language and a high degree of inflexibility in the response to practical concerns raised by affected staff. With no evidence to the effectiveness of structural changes as a means to meet stated goals, this descriptive study asks to what extent restructures should be considered rationally motivated managerial devices for the transformation and improvement of public sector working environments.