The Guerrilla Government

One of the most interesting subject this semester its one named “The Public Administration and Political Phenomena”, in which we read a lot of texts of different topics related to the career, like the bureaucracy of Max Weber, the New Public Administration or the Open Government, but the one that I think was the most interesting was one related with the ethic in the public administration that talk about the “guerrilla governments”.

Now you’re probably asking yourself what I’m talking about? "Guerrilla government" is Rosemary O'Leary’s term for the actions of public workers who work against the wishes of their superiors, principally because they are dissatisfied with the actions of public organizations, programs or people and typically, for strategic reasons, they decide not to publicly express their annoyance. That is how these public workers, for many reasons, don’t follow the current within their institutions and perform actions that they consider correct even though they go against the instructions of their superiors.

Examples of this guerrilla governments are the case of Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese diplomatic that lived in the Nazi Lithuania during world war II who clandestinely signed a lot of visas to save Jewish refugees or the case of Mark Felt, second in command in the FBI in the 70’s who secretly leads to reporters exposed the Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Nixon.

The previous examples demonstrate that sometimes the guerrilla governments are good in some occasions, because expose bad practices in the public administration or solve injustices that occur in the society.