PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION THEORIES

Public Administration Theories

Public Administration Theories

Q: Do contemporary theories of public administration promote participation by ordinary bureaucrats in the decision-making process of government organizations, or do they simply rationalize authoritarian control by management?

Ans: Over the past ten to fifteen years, governance has increasingly been used by a variety of public bodies as a central part of an agenda for the reform of public administration. By making public decision making more open and accountable, good governance has been used as a synonym for both greater democracy and greater efficiency (Smith, 2006). Chronologically, this trend stems from analysis of government and governability failure, which began in the 1970s.

Following an initial period of diagnosis, governance then came to be seen as an antidote by international organizations such as the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). It subsequently began to be used in the domestic politics of several nation states (e.g., British local government reform in the late 1990s) before becoming the watchword of the European Commission. Rather than simply list the definitions of governance that have emerged in these different contexts, this section analyzes a number of common themes that fall under two headings: the way public administration should formulate public policy and the way it is managed in order to implement such goals (Dryzek, 2007). As shall be underlined in the following sections, changing the way public officials think about themselves, their respective organizations, and the way they relate to civil society has been striven for not only by spreading a discourse about governance, but also by modifying laws and longstanding organizational practices.

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 the same administration. In terms of analysis, this trend can be seen as public authority coming to terms with one of the basic claims of organizational theory: Administrations are differentiated units of collective action that possess bounded rationality, have limits upon their legitimate authority but also contain actors who often contest these limits (Rhodes, 2007).

In other words, any public administration is fragmented in ways that can hamper its overall coherence and effectiveness. As we shall explore later in this text, over the last three decades, most national governments have tried to mitigate such effects by promoting a variety of new coordination mechanisms. In this respect, as Rhodes has repeatedly underlined using British examples, it is important to focus upon how the discourse of governance has been used to justify reforms made in the name of new public management or “joined-up government.” In other words, governance has become a relatively standardized account and even explanation of networking and socialization within individual units of public administration (Hooghe, 2008).

If governance has thus been used to understand intra-administrative segmentation and encourage quests for greater cohesion, it has simultaneously been employed in order to encourage more effective coordination between public ...