Governance without government? Rethinking public administration

The concept of governance has come to be used more commonly in the discussion of public administration, but the meaning of the term is not always clear. There is a growing body of European literature that can be characterized as "governance without government, " stressing as it does the importance of networks, partnerships, and markets (especially international markets). This body of literature can be related to the new public management; yet it has a number of distinctive elements. This article discusses the strengths and weaknesses of this literature and its applicability to public administration in the United States. The traditional conceptualization of the public sector has come under increasing strain during the past several decades. The idea that national governments are the major actors in public policy and that they are able to influence the economy and society through their actions now appears to be in doubt. Some of the strain on national governments has been the result of the increased importance of the international environment and of an arguably diminished capacity of those governments to insulate their economies and societies from the global pressures. Those pressures on national governments come about through international capital markets (Strange 1996; but see Hirst and Thompson 1996; Peters 1998) as well as through supranational organizations such as the European Union (Scharpf 1997). Another strain on the traditional conception of governing arises from changes in the relationship between government and the private sector. At the extreme it is argued that "governance without government" is becoming the dominant pattern of management for advanced industrial democracies (Rhodes 1997). Other characterizations include "hollow" states and governments 223/Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory J-PART 8(1998):2:223-243 This content downloaded from 157.55. 39.163 on Wed, 23 Nov 2016 04:26:57 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor. org/terms Rethinking Public Administration (Peters 1993; Rhodes 1994) and "negotiated" states and economies (Nielsen and Pedersen 1990). In all these depictions of changing patterns of government, it is argued that societal actors have become influential over policy and administration and have done so in ways that were unimaginable in earlier times. Government is seen as weakened and as incapable of "steering" as it had in the past. The traditional concept of government as a controlling and regulating organization for society is argued to be outmoded (Bekke, Kickert, and Kooiman 1995). The discussion of governance without government has been largely European and has concentrated primarily in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. The European roots of this debate appear to be in part a function of the preeminent role of government in the welfare state in Europe and of the strength and established position of interest groups in these societies (Kooiman 1993; Schmitter and Lembruch 1979). In essence government has much more power to lose, more areas of policy involvement, and a network structure already in place that can replace or supplement the power of government. In the United Kingdom the emergence of this pattern of governing is a direct challenge to the Whitehall model of strong, centralized government. Although the governance debate has been largely European, it is beginning to diffuse to the United States. There is some objective evidence that the same changes-such as contracting, public-private partnerships, and a variety of other interactions with the private sector-move government away from its role as the central source of the "authoritative allocation of values" for the society. Also, in the United States there is the beginning of a body of literature that relates these changes in the relationship with society to broader questions of managing the State (O'Toole 1997; Thomas 1997). The objectives and concrete design of administrative reform mirror the historical, political, and societal roles of public administration as well as its internal culture. Such reforms are path-dependent, probably to a much greater extent than we generally realize. Path-dependency refers to the range of policy choice available for administrative reformers; reform strategies are embedded in systems of norms and administrative practices and therefore reform strategies are shaped more by what already exists than by the desired model of public administration. In this article we will examine the emerging governance debate in Europe and the United States and will describe both the dimensions of the debate over the capacity of the state to continue to govern as it has in the past and the development of 224/J-PART, April 1998 This content downloaded from 157.55. 39.163 on Wed, 23 Nov 2016 04:26:57 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor. org/terms Rethinking Public Administration alternative mechanisms for exerting control over society. We will also address the question of whether this is purely an academic debate, the product of developing a theoretical language suitable for the analysis, or whether a real change is occurring in the nature of government. WHAT IS THE GOVERNANCE DEBATE? The conception of governance as it has developed over the past several years in the European debate has several constituent elements. As we indicated above, however, taken together these elements would amount to a prescription for steering society through less direct means and weakening the power of the State to control policy. These changes would, in turn, have implications for the meaning of democracy in the contemporary political system. We will not evaluate these arguments here; rather we will save that for the discussion of how the governance arguments fit within the context of both European and American public administration. The Importance of Networks Perhaps the dominant feature of the governance model is the argument that networks have come to dominate public policy. The assertion is that these amorphous collections of actors-not formal policy-making institutions in government-control policy. State agencies may place some imprimatur on the policy, so the argument goes, but the real action occurs within the private sector. Further, in the more extreme versions of the argument, if governments attempt to impose control over policy, these networks have sufficient resiliency and capacity for self-organization1 (Kooiman 1993; Marsh and Rhodes 1992; de Bruijn and ten Heuvelhof 1997) to evade the control of govermment. It long has been argued that the private sector has real influence over public policy through structures with varying degrees of formality, but this conception carries the argument to that of dominance. This dominance is possible partly because the State has become delegitimated. The loss of legitimacy is in part because state actors are excessively clumsy, bureaucratic, and path dependent and in part because of the control of information and implementation structures by private actors. It appears that whatever the State does it does poorly, while the private sector (for profit and not for profit) is more effective. 225/J-PART, April 1998 'Especially within the Dutch and Germnan literature the term autopoesis is used to describe this self-organizing nature of