Legitimizing transformative government: Aligning essential government tasks from transition literature with normative arguments about legitimacy from Public Administration traditions

Abstract The literature on transitions recommends that both the government and the civil service should engage with profound societal problems requiring a fundamental socio-technical system change. We analyzed a corpus of 100 publications to cluster the transition tasks that the transitions literature attributes to government. These tasks are set off against the normative arguments of the Public Administration (PA) traditions that legitimize government action. Our analysis shows that although some traditions present a normative basis for specific tasks, many of the transition tasks assigned to government do not align well with any of the PA traditions. Thus, the normative basis for legitimizing sociotechnical transitions provided by the PA traditions, is inadequate. This finding is consistent with the recently flagged urgent need for a new, legitimizing rationale for societal transition. We conclude by presenting the contours of transformative government as a new PA tradition to legitimize the government' s transition tasks.