According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, if immediate steps aren't taken to contain the Ebola virus, by next January 1.4 million people in West Africa could be infected. Such a disaster should never be allowed to happen—but it might. So why aren't governments doing whatever necessary to prevent it?Last week, New York Times columnist David Brooks, a conservative and Republican, laid the blame at the door of 30 years of neo-conservative reforms. Brooks clearly thinks these theories have run their course and the jury is now in. They have gutted the capacity of both private companies and public institutions to see the bigger picture or to plan for the longer term.Lots of senior officials in Canadian public services would agree. They have argued for years that governments' policy capacity is all but gone. Thirty years ago, the policy shops in big federal departments often housed hundreds of experts, whose job it was to think about issues from the perspective of the community as a whole and the long-term. Today, these shops are lucky to have a handful of people.But if Brooks has put his finger on a serious problem, his solution will leave lots of people blinking. He seems to want to take us back to the days of monolithic departments. The problem, he suggests, is our faddish fascination with speed, flexibility, creativity, networks and so on. We need to get back to basic administration and big bureaucracies were good at that.This sounds nostalgic at best. Granted, the monolithic departments of the 60s and 70s could plan long-term, but they also had a notorious design flaw. Their size made them frighteningly insular and highly centralized. The result was a one-size-fits-all approach to policy that was usually biased to a few big urban centres.Today it is a basic principle of policymaking that every community is different and policies need to be implemented in ways that reflect these differences. No matter how smart the people in big policy shops are, this can't be done from the centre. It calls for lots of flexibility, creativity and networking—on the ground. The growth of the smaller, more diverse organizations that Brooks scorns was partly aimed at building the infrastructure to do this. If we want to get to the root of the problem Brooks is struggling with, I think we need to dig a little deeper.The neo-conservative revolution of the 80s launched a wave of change that is still advancing. A key goal was to make governments more responsive by making them more “customer-focused.” Businesses had begun using surveys to find out how customers felt about their products and services and what could be done to improve them. Reformers thought they could use these same tools to pierce the insularity of governments.  At bottom, the idea was to counterbalance the policy shops with new customer-feedback systems.As so often happens, however, the pendulum swung too far the other way. Rather than finding a better balance, many governments simply shed their capacity for real policy analysis. Instead of “the public interest” or “common good,” they started fixating on “customer satisfaction” and ensuring “taxpayers” get “value for money.” Economics has a term for this: maximizing wants.And that is the real problem. What people want is not necessarily what they need; nor is what they want always what's best for the community-as-a-whole or over the long-term. Deciding what is requires analysis, reflection, deliberation and a balancing of priorities—the kind of work that used to be done in the big policy shops.When Brooks criticises the failure to respond to Ebola as a failure of “governance,” he is rightly pointing out that this kind of thinking has gone missing. As long as Ebola is confined to Africa and the numbers aren't too high, North Americans will focus on other things and put no serious pressure on their governments to take action—until it's too late.The moral is that good governance requires a balance between the customers' wants and the community's needs. But if Brooks is right that we have lost this skill, he is wrong to equate the loss with the emergence of smaller, faster more flexible organizations. An alternative view is that countries like the US, Canada and the UK are slowly working toward a new and more collaborative model of governance. Building these organizations was only the first stage. Now it is time to focus on recreating this capacity within the new institutional infrastructure.In practice, this means turning what Brooks fairly describes as “loose networks” into cohesive communities-of-interest where ongoing dialogue between the organizations in a sector clarifies their shared interests, focuses issues and supports big picture thinking and longer-term planning. While emergency issues such as Ebola cry out for such discussion, lots of other policy areas desperately need it too, from urban planning to the environment.This kind of “community-building” can't be done by big policy shops in monolithic departments. It requires the full participation of businesses, NGOs, communities and even citizens, all of whom need to be able to make long-term plans of their own. Having a more stable, cohesive policy environment in which to do so is in everyone's interest. The only way to create this is to do it together.In sum, Brooks is very right that the Ebola crisis underlines the loss of our capacity for real policy dialogue. This view is surfacing in many quarters. Brooks mentions recent books by Francis Fukuyama and Philip Howard.But if there is agreement on the problem, a debate may be brewing over the right means to solve it: Should governments follow Brooks and rebuild the kind of big policy machines they had in the 1970s or should they recognize that policy capacity is really a collective asset and skill that belongs to the policy community as a whole, rather than just governments?You choose.Dr. Don Lenihan is an internationally recognized expert on democracy, public engagement, accountability and service delivery. Since 2009, he has been Senior Associate at Canada's Public Policy Forum in Ottawa. From October 2013 to April 2014, Don served as Chair of the Ontario Open Government Engagement Team. The views expressed here are those of the columnist alone. Don can be reached at: [email protected] or follow him on Twitter at: @DonLenihan