DILEMMAS OF CONTEMPORARY PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

Dilemmas of Contemporary Public Administration

Dilemmas of Contemporary Public Administration

Over the last thirty years, however, an increasing number of academics, experts, and practitioners have begun to differentiate between public administration that is government and that which they label governance. According to this view, (Western) societies and economies have been transformed to such an extent that public authorities have been obliged to change both their internal modes of functioning and the way they engage with nonstarter actors. More precisely, proponents of the concept of governance consider that it not only encapsulates changes in public administration itself but acts as a catalyst to the transformation of state-society relations.

These contentions about the relationship between public administration and governance will be examined in two parts. The first sets out to discover how and why governance has so frequently come to be used as a narrative with which to describe, and often rationalize, a range of “new” public policies and state society relations. The second part of this article looks more closely at how, more recently, governance has been used as a means of explicitly inciting policy and political change. In both parts, the interplay between academic and practitioner usages of governance is highly important. Indeed, in introducing a range of issues that are dealt with in more detail elsewhere in this volume, the principal claim made here is that avoiding confusion between “governance as narrative” and “governance as an agenda” constitutes a central challenge for both public administration as an activity and public administration as an academic discipline.

An initial use of the term governance concerns a perceived need for greater intra- and interorganizational coordination.

Within individual public administrations, governance is frequently used by practitioners to describe situations where they are increasingly obliged to inform, consult, and negotiate with representatives of other parts of ...