What is it about?
The emergence of governance as a key concept in the public domain is relatively recent, although the concerns which it embraces are age-old. This article traces the evolution of the concept and maps the contours of its current position in public administration. It suggests that ‘governance’ as a set of balancing mechanisms in a network society is still a contested concept, both in theory and in practice, but that there are already many attempts to delineate its dimensions more clearly and to assess how well it is being achieved in different contexts. Public governance principles are also being incorporated within legislation but there is a need for proportionality — such principles need to be weighed against cost-effectiveness considerations. It is still unclear whether we are moving to a future in which government remains the key player in public governance or whether we might move through ‘governance in the shadow of government’ to self-organizing policy and service delivery systems — ‘governance without government’.
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Why is it important?
How are the trade-offs between public governance principles and efficiency to be effected? Part of the answer lies in differences between political cultures. In Rechtstaat countries, public governance principles may only have force where they are enshrined in law — and then there is little room for trade-off. In countries with a more pragmatic tradition, the mere fact that principles such as ‘transparency’ and ‘sustainability’ are mandatory does not mean that they drive public sector behaviour in practice — so mechanisms other than legislation have to be found to give public governance principles more weight. The right of stakeholders to negotiate different weights for different public governance principles has to be seen to be an important public governance principle in itself, so that the search for absolute and inviolable principles in public governance is not only likely to be illusory but fundamentally counter-productive.
Perspectives
In the future agenda for issues of public governance within the field of public administration, one trend is clear. Where controversy reigns, evaluation is sure to follow - it seems likely that attempts to delineate its dimensions more clearly and to compare its achievement across agencies will become increasingly common. Moreover, it is also likely that more attempts will be made to incorporate public governance principles within legislation. This has already been seen with the enactment of legislation on transparency, freedom of information, anti-corruption. measures and the equalities agenda. It seems likely that it will extend eventually to legislation on stakeholder engagement and on sustainability. Nevertheless, the potential effectiveness of legislation is clearly limited. Other mechanisms for embedding public governance in public administration practice will often appear more attractive. This is likely to entail experimenting with the introduction of more checks and balances into public administrative systems — indeed, this is one of the greatest attractions of stakeholder engagement approaches. At the same time, the need for proportionality will remain — if public governance principles are allowed entirely to override considerations of value for money, a dysfunctional public sector will result. The main prerequisite for avoiding such outcomes will be trust between the various actors in the public domain. Consequently, the building (or rebuilding) of such trust is now a critical task for public administration. Some of this practice agenda is shared on the research front — for example, the relationship between governance and trust is being widely researched. Some other major research programmes are exploring the extent to which different governance arrangements impact upon organizational performance. There are also significant strands of governance research looking at how the roles of different stakeholders are changing — particularly in relation to co-production by service users and communities.
Professor Tony Bovaird
University of Birmingham
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This page is a summary of: Public governance: balancing stakeholder power in a network society, International Review of Administrative Sciences, June 2005, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0020852305053881.
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