During the Reagan era, three common remedies for reforming public and private bureaucracies animated popular debate: hierarchies, markets, and clans. This article uses natural resource management as a window for exploring the political economies, consequences, and paradoxes of these reforms as applied during the 1980s. It then offers a fourth alternative to restructuring public agencies that incorporates the virtues of markets, hierarchies, and clans while attenuating their deficiencies. In the process, reform centers on deregulating agency practices while regulating agency incentives. Premised on the need to restructure public agencies for accomplishment rather than control, this alternative has three primary prescriptions: deemphasize the administrative orthodoxy, selectively deregulate agency operations, and restructure units when feasible and appropriate on a flow-of-work or modular basis.
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