The ethical voids of the principal agency and stewardship approach

What justifies actions when public service tasks are executed in delegation within organizations or in the arrangement between organizations? There are two ways of dealing with this governance problem, namely the principal agency approach and the stewardship theory. In this chapter, a critical analysis is made of these governance solutions. At first sight, the principal agency approach asserts that the actions are justified when the consequences are in the interests of the owner of the delegating organization. In contrast, stewardship theory assumes that the good intentions of the executing actor suffice in the appraisal of the actions. As such, the principal agency is a consequentialistic approach, whereas stewardship follow an intentionalistic solution of the problem for moral justification. Both approaches leave an ethical void for the way in which the actions are performed. There are no instructions prescribed to appraise the actions in reference to values, and both approaches address human motivation in a way that it reinforces behaviors that are detrimental to the cause of the public service and to its beneficiaries. The position and role performance of the principals who are assigned to control the behavior of the delegees appear to be troublesome regardless of the governance doctrine. As the two governance approaches have become paradigms in the Dutch public administration, there is a challenge to overcome the counter-effective proposition assumptions on which they are founded. First glance of crises in the delivery of public services shows a striking similarity in the governance arrangements and patterns of failure.