Governance Without Government?

Rethinking Public Administration

B. Guy Peters
University of Pittsburgh

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John Pierre
University of Strathdyde, Scotland

ABSTRACT

The concept of governance has come to be used more com-

monly in the discussion of public administration, but the meaning
of the term is not always clear. There is a growing body of Euro-
pean 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 applic-
ability 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 interna-
tional capital markets (Strange 19%; 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 man-
agement for advanced industrial democracies (Rhodes 1997).
J-PART 8(1998):2:223-243 Other characterizations include "hollow" states and governments

223/Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory

Rethinking Public Administration

(Peters 1993; Rhodes 1994) and "negotiated" states and econo-

mies (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. Govern-
ment is seen as weakened and as incapable of "steering" as it had
in the past. The traditional concept of government as a control-
ling and regulating organization for society is argued to be

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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 govern-
ment 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 supple-
ment the power of government. In the United Kingdom the emerg-
ence 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 gen-
erally 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 con-
tinue to govern as it has in the past and the development of

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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?

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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 implica-
tions 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 argu-
ments 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 net-
works have sufficient resiliency and capacity for self-organiza-
tion1 (Kooiman 1993; Marsh and Rhodes 1992; de Bruijn and ten
Heuvelhof 1997) to evade the control of government.

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
'Especially within the Dutch and German
literature the term autopoesis is used to
and implementation structures by private actors. It appears that
describe this self-organizing nature of whatever the State does it does poorly, while the private sector
networks. (for profit and not for profit) is more effective.

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Rethinking Public Administration

From Control to Influence

In the governance arguments the State does not become

totally impotent; rather, it loses the capacity for direct control
and replaces that faculty with a capacity for influence. Govern-
ment actors are conceptualized as in a continual process of bar-
gaining with the members of their relevant networks. What has
changed, however, is that these government actors now bargain

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as relative equals rather than as with the capacity to resort always
to power if the decision that is made is not what they want.

Government organizations remain a part of the networks in

these emerging models of governance, but they are conceptual-
ized as dependent on the other actors to the same extent that
those actors are dependent on government. This mutual resource
dependency (Rhodes 1988) at first characterized the relationship
between central governments and subnational government, but the
argument has been extended to cover the gamut of relationships
between central government organizations and the other organi-
zations with which they interact.

Blending Public and Private Resources

The use of networks mentioned above easily leads to a

blending of public-sector and private-sector resources. These
resources may blend in a variety of ways, one of the most
common being the creation of more or less formal partnerships
between actors in government and actors in the private sector.
These partnerships permit each side to use resources that would
not be at its disposal were it to remain on its own side of the
(presumed) divide between the two sectors (Peters 1998). For
example, government may be able to evade some procedural
requirements that might restrict its operations, while the private
sector may gain public approval and funds for projects that might
be difficult to bring to fruition without those resources.

In some instances the public and private sectors may be

blended within a single organization. An increasing number of
nongovernmental organizations, quangos, and a host of other
hybrid organizational formats appear to have materialized as
components of the governance framework. These formats permit
the mutual leveraging of resources and the blending of public and
private attributes in ways that might not be possible in more
conventional structural arrangements.

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Rethinking Public Administration

Use of Multiple Instruments

The utilization of public-private partnerships for policy

indicates the willingness of a government operating within the
governance framework to develop alternative means of mating
and implementing policy. This willingness to innovate in the
selection of policy instruments can be seen as more general, with
governance implying the use of a wider repertoire of instruments

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than might be used by a more traditional public sector.

Governments do have a number of instruments at their

disposal, but they tend to focus only on a few familiar ones that
involve direct intervention. The adoption of the governance
perspective on their roles and their opportunities enables govern-
ments to see that they can use a number of less direct forms of
intervention as the means to achieve their ends. These instru-
ments may appear in the first instance as less certain than the
older instruments, but in a networked version of the public sector
with more powerful private-sector actors they may be more effec-
tive.

GOVERNANCE VS. NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT:

SHOULD THEY BE SEPARATED?

The debate about these emerging forms of governance

occurred at nearly the same time as the diffusion of the new
public management (NPM) in many western democracies, prin-
cipally the United Kingdom and the Antipodes (Aucoin 1996).
For some scholars, the governance debate was triggered in part
by the management philosophy advanced by the NPM experts
(see, e.g., Rhodes 1997). Certainly, there are many similarities
between the mainstream debate on the emerging forms of govern-
ance and the overarching philosophy behind the NPM (Hood
1991).

Developing New Instruments of Control and Accountability

A common feature of governance and NPM is a changing

view of the role of elected officials. Both governance and NPM
downplay the role and significance of elected officials. In the
governance debate, political leadership is tied less to formal
elected office and more to matters of political entrepreneurship.
Political leaders, in this perspective, have a key responsibility in
the development of networks and the pooling of public and pri-
vate resources. The only traditional role remaining for elected
officials is that of setting goals and priorities. In the NPM vision
of the public sector, the role of political leaders is even less
clear. Here, elected officials have a role in defining the long-term

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goals of the public sector, but apart from that they should offer
considerable discretion to the operative agencies and institutions.

In both perspectives, however, accountability remains an

unresolved issue. Governance theorists argue that traditional
channels of accountability have been replaced by several different
processes of electoral control such as "stakeholderism" and con-
sumer choice. That having been said, it seems clear that account-

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ability remains a weak spot in the governance literature. In the
NPM school of thought there is little concern about these issues,
since accountability is seen as one of the strongest points of the
model. By relating public services more directly to market
demand instead of to political decisions about quality and quan-
tity, service providers receive immediate information about their
performance. Customers are thus given an opportunity to influ-
ence service producers directly without having to operate through
their elected representatives.

The basic problem in both theories is that the linkage

between control and accountability—the heart of democratic
theory and a democratic system of government—has been con-
fused. Both models of public administration seek to replace
political power derived from legal mandates or elected office
with an entrepreneurial style of leadership or—with the NPM—a
remote and indirect model of leadership. This creates two differ-
ent problems, derived from different perspectives on governance
and citizenship. First, if elected political leaders have such
limited control over the public administration, is it reasonable to
hold them accountable for the decisions and actions of the public
service, and if elected officials should not be held accountable,
who then is accountable?

The second problem occurs when we accept the notion of

consumer choice and stakeholderism as channels of account-
ability. Obviously, consumer choice and stakeholderism as
instruments of voice and accountability are available only to
stakeholders and consumers. But if services are financed by
collective resources then any model of democratic government
requires that instruments are also available to those who are not
presently consumers or stakeholders of a particular public serv-
ice. Further, it is often difficult to identify the appropriate
customers of service—prisons, customs and immigration, and
perhaps even education are clear examples.

Downplaying the Public-Private Dichotomy

In theories of governance and also of NPM there are strong

notions that public administration—and generally, me state—has

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become isolated from and out of touch with the rest of society.
While corporate actors, under severe pressure from market
competition, have developed sophisticated models of management
and resource allocation, the public bureaucracy has long
remained insulated from economic pressures. The result, accord-
ing to the critics of the public service, has been organizational
slack; widespread inefficiency; economic complacency; an obses-
sion with due process; indifference to clients' needs; and

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organizational autopoesis.

The governance debate takes a more positive view of the

public service. Here the perspective is not so much that the
public service is forced to adapt to public-sector philosophies and
ideals; the prevailing view is rather that public institutions—as
expressions of the public interest—can and should play a leading
role in cross-sectoral resource mobilization and concerted ven-
tures. The role of political institutions in different models of
governance may vary considerably, but as long as there is some
significant political involvement in governance there are also
collective objectives present in the process.

Both governance theories and NPM thus see the public-

private dichotomy as essentially obsolete, albeit for different
reasons. The general argument is that just as the public-private
border has protected the public bureaucracy from extraorganiza-
tional pressures to modernize and increase efficiency it has now
become an obstacle to public-sector reform. Such reforms, NPM
advocates insist, must focus on bringing in private-sector mana-
gerial strategies and objectives. NPM is essentially a philosophy
of generic management because it argues that all management has
similar challenges and hence should be resolved in similar ways
in public- and private-sector organizations (Peters 1996).

Increasing Emphasis on Competition

The idea of competition as a means to increase public-

service efficiency and sensitivity to its clients—or customers-
is obviously a good example of corporate ideals penetrating the
public sector. Introducing competition, furthermore, has far-
reaching organizational consequences. Most importantly, it
requires extensive relaxation of political control over the public
service and substantive discretion for managers at lower levels of
the organization.

Competition within the public sector has many obvious

advantages. By creating internal markets, for instance, each unit
in the public organization can assess its actual costs more
accurately than traditional organizational models allow.

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Furthermore, introducing competition also provides benchmarks

and other meaningful bases for comparison. Competition between
service suppliers forces organizations to increase contacts with
their customers. None of these consequences of introducing inter-
nal markets should encounter opposition from even the fiercest
critics of contemporary administrative reform.

Bringing competition into the public service is at the heart

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of NPM. Without competition there is little point to changing the
managerial styles in the public sector. The current style of gov-
ernance, however, is less dependent on the introduction of com-
petition, at least within government. Governance is generally
more concerned with blending public and private resources than
with competition in the public sector. That said, governance
represents an alternative way to produce and deliver services, and
therefore it welcomes competition among public and private
initiatives.

However, markets are themselves institutions that constrain

our range of choice (Whitley and Kristensen 1997; March and
Olsen 1989). Creating internal markets alters intraorganizational
behavior into new practices that can develop new potential
sources of resource waste at the same time they eliminate other
problems. Some internal markets induce organizations to over-
supply services, since demand is defined not by the customer but
by the supplier. The medical care sector in several western Euro-
pean countries is a good example of these problems.

One substantive problem that arises when competitive

dimensions are introduced in the area of public services is that
public-sector organizations were never designed with that objec-
tive, but rather to ensure legality and equality. Although
structural organizational changes—such as decentralization and
moving decision making on operative issues downward in the
organization—are very common today, the problems associated
with changing the culture of the organization are often much
more difficult than are the structural changes.

Increasing Emphasis on Output Control

Rather Than on Input Control

Both NPM and governance have a primary interest in

results. Input control, the preferred control mechanism in the
traditional public administration, is argued to be inadequate
because it conceals organizational slack and inefficiency and does
not relate performance to demand and customer satisfaction. Out-
put control can manifest itself either through customer satis-
faction and other performance indicators essential to the NPM

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school of thought or through generating compliance and cus-

tomer-attuning of public services by bringing private and volun-
tary sector actors and interests into public service production and
delivery. It also can be assessed more broadly by organizational
accomplishments relative to its objectives.

Devising New Instruments and Techniques for Steering

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In both NPM and governance, steering is a key concept
(Rhodes 1997, 49). Osborne and Gaebler (1992) coined the
seductive slogan that governments should focus more on steering
and less on rowing, and this managerial perspective plays a
prominent role in both governance and NPM. Much of this steer-
ing refers to organizations cutting back while they simultaneously
face increasing expectations on diversified and customer-driven
services. Governance, to a much greater extent than NPM, is
concerned with enhancing government's capacity to act by forg-
ing strategic interorganizational coalitions with actors in the
external environment. Steering, in this perspective, is largely
about setting priorities and defining goals. In the NPM, steering
is primarily an intraorganizational strategy aimed at unleashing
productive elements of the public service.

The question is why we should expect arms-length models

of steering leaner organizations to work any better than the
Weberian, hierarchical steering of traditional, comparatively
resourceful public organizations. Is it realistic to believe that you
can steer the modern diversified and transparent public organi-
zations more effectively with more subtle methods than those that
were available to the managers who steered hierarchically inte-
grated bureaucracies? If the previous model of steering failed,
why should we expect the new ones to be any more effective?

As these few examples show, emerging forms of governance

share many features of the NPM philosophy. However, several
significant differences also exist between governance and NPM.
Indeed, these differences are so fundamental that the two models
of public service should be separated. The similarities seem to be
primarily at the operative level of administrative reform, whereas
the differences are located at a theoretical level.

First, governance always has been a central element of a

democratic polity; indeed governance, albeit in a wide range of
manifestations, is as old as government. The emerging forms of
governance in western Europe—networks, partnerships, public-
private joint ventures, the inclusion of the voluntary sector in
service delivery, and so on—should be assessed in relation to
traditional models of governance such as hierarchies as well as

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state strategies to compensate for diminishing external control

resulting from decreasing resources and less reliance on legal
control. The NPM campaign, on the other hand, is more ideolog-
ically driven; it denies any political or cultural specificity of the
public service and argues mat by emulating corporate organiza-
tions many problems of the public service—inefficiency, indiffer-
ence toward the needs of its clients, and so forth—should be
ameliorated. While new forms of governance ultimately maintain

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some degree of political control over the public service since it is
seen as an extension of the public interest, NPM seeks to trans-
form the public bureaucracy to a set of organizations whose only
difference from private, for-profit organizations is the nature of
the product that is delivered.

Second, governance is about process, NPM is primarily

about outcomes. Understanding governance—its direction, prac-
tices, and outcomes—is largely a matter of observing and inter-
preting the process through which it evolves and what is the
relative clout of the actors involved therein. NPM says very little
about the process; it is focused almost exclusively on developing
infra organisational management techniques that ensure customer
satisfaction and efficiency. This difference is all the more impor-
tant since public administration to a significant extent is centered
around procedural rules and regulations. Traditional models of
public administration provide detailed rules concerning the delib-
eration process, partly because regulating the process is the
Weberian method of output control; a legally correct deliberation
process was believed to imply a correct outcome. A related prob-
lem is that NPM says very little about those aspects of the public
sector that are not involved directly in production of goods or
services, and its application of those sectors of the public
bureaucracy remains uncertain.

Third, NPM is an intraorganizational program of administra-

tive reform whereas governance is interorganizational in perspec-
tive (Rhodes 1997, 55). Furthermore, the emerging forms of
governance we see in several of the advanced western democ-
racies should be conceived of as alternative models of the pursuit
of collective interests (Peters 1996). Thus governance is essen-
tially a political theory—insofar as it describes a certain type of
exchange between the state and the society—whereas NPM is an
organizational theory.

Fourth, governance is about maintaining public-sector

resources under some degree of political control and developing
strategies to sustain the government's capacity to act; NPM is
essentially about transforming the public sector. Governance
refers to something that deliberately transcends the borders of

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government and where governmental structures coordinate and

give direction to collaborative, public-private efforts (Kooiman
1993; Rhodes 1997). The perspective of the NPM strategy is
more introverted and aims at altering state-society relationships
only insofar as public-sector management models might replace
traditional models of organizational management in the public
administration and in the exchange between service providers and
public-sector customers.

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Finally, governance does not come with the same ideological
luggage or distinctive ideals as the NPM does. The introduction
of new forms of governance can be implemented without pro-
found culture shifts in the public service; such changes, however,
are at the heart of NPM. Indeed, as we have pointed out, many
of the most important features of the governance model have
been in place for years; some of the discussion of their impor-
tance is that they are now being implemented in Westminster
systems with a tradition of stronger, more centralized, govern-
ment.

Differences between governance and NPM become more

apparent when we look at a few cases where both of these philos-
ophies have caught hold, or one of them, or none of them. The
diffusion of NPM seems in some ways to be related to state
strength. Strong states historically have not had to rely on the
inclusion of private- or third-sector actors in the political process
in order to increase their capacity to impose their will on civil
society. The institutional capacity of strong states coupled with a
strong legalistic tradition has guaranteed the state's ability to
accomplish its intentions and goals. For weaker states (or cities),
joining forces with private-sector actors has been an established
strategy to increase their governing capacity (Stone 1989).

The obvious exception to this pattern is Britain. Mrs.

Thatcher introduced an NPM style in both central and sub-
national governments, using the full thrust of a strong, central-
ized government. Indeed, the transformation of the British civil
service was part and parcel of the grand Thatcherite project to
allow market forces to penetrate the public service, which was
seen as an obstacle to economic growth. The fact that the Anglo-
Saxon countries were among the first to embrace the NPM ideals
might also be explained on cultural grounds and the inclination to
herald free enterprise in these countries (Peters 19%).

Governance, as are all models of public service, is derived

from the political culture within which it is embedded. The
emergence of governance therefore will appear in different insti-
tutional forms in different national contexts. NPM is much less

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contextual and less sensitive toward differences between juris-

dictions; it is more generic and more directed at changing public-
sector values and practices. Since governance is a blending of
private and public values and NPM can be described as a uni-
lateral infusion of corporate-sector values and objectives into the
public sector and public-service production and delivery, there is
not very much interdependence between governance and the
NPM. Some states have embraced one philosophy, but not both.

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This brief discussion about NPM and emerging models of
governance ultimately begs the normative issue about the speci-
ficity of the public service and the political process. This issue
relates to our perception of the public interest and what structures
in society sustain and defend that interest. If we maintain that the
public sector has a high degree of specificity, then that should
lead us to acknowledge that efficiency in the public service needs
to be assessed by different standards than those of the corporate
sector. To assess processes guided by primary reference to legal-
ity, equality, and legal security in terms of their organizational
efficiency is to some extent to underestimate the consequences of
the political and societal specificity of the public service.

GOVERNANCE AND PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

TRADITIONS IN EUROPE

The emergence of governance in the west European context

must be viewed against the historical nature of the public admin-
istration and state-society relationships there. While it is
obviously far beyond the scope of this article to offer a full
account of these developments and how governance fits into these
traditions, we will focus on two aspects of the issue. One
important dimension of the issue of how governance fits Euro-
pean public administration is the historical patterns of state-
society exchanges. Another crucial aspect of this problem is the

Exhibit
The Emergence of Governance and
New Public Management: Four Cases

Governance
Limited Extensive
Limited Japan Sweden
NPM Intermediate United States The Nemerlands
Extensive New Zealand Britain

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significance of legality, hierarchy, and political control in the

west European public administration tradition.

State-Society Relationships and Public Administration

In several west European states, but most predominantly in

smaller industrialized democracies such as Austria, Belgium, the
Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries, state-society rela-

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tionships historically have been shaped by a variety of corporatist
arrangements. Organized interests, labor market organizations,
and voluntary organizations mediated the state-society distinction
by exercising considerable political clout and influence at all
stages of the policy-making process (Katzenstein 1984 and 1985;
Schmitter and Lehmbruch 1979). Similar—if less pronounced—
patterns of organizational involvement in the political process are
also present in Germany and France.

In addition to their corporatist-style of policy making and

implementation, these countries also built comprehensive and
universal welfare states during the postwar period (Esping-
Andersen 1990). These were distinctly political projects that
encountered fierce political opposition as they evolved and were
tolerated by the middle class due to the universal nature of their
programs.

Thus public administration has been challenged throughout

most of this century on two fronts. One has been the inclusion of
organized interests in the implementation of public policy, which
confronted the public bureaucracy with powerful societal actors
within their organizational domain. Managing the built-in clash
between the public interest as it is embodied in the due process
of the public bureaucracy on the one hand and more narrowly
defined societal interests on the other has required considerable
negotiating skills and mutual respect.

The other challenge has been the blending of public adminis-

tration ideals of impartiality and legality with the implementation
of welfare state programs. Here, the problem has been not so
much that the welfare state programs presuppose compromises on
those core public administrative values and norms but rather the
task of mustering bureaucratic enthusiasm—or at least passive
support or tolerance—for the welfare state (Rothstein 1996).

Mainly as a result of the exacerbated fiscal crisis of the west

European democracies, market-driven administrative reforms
have reshaped many of the traditional features of public bureau-
cracies (Cassese 1995; Derlien 1993; Pierre 1993; Rouban 1993;
Petersson and SSderlind 1994). Thus there has been an

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introduction of internal markets, diversified salary schemes,

customer choice, performance indicators, and so on. However,
most of the west European states—with Britain the significant
exception—have not embraced NPM wholeheartedly. The
increased emphasis on efficiency, and reforms implemented to
that effect, has not changed the overall structure of the public
service or its management style but rather has been largely
implemented within the existing organizational frameworks.

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Instead, several states have shown a growing interest in
exploring new models of cooperation between the state and
organized interests. The Scandinavian countries have had increas-
ing cooperation at the local level between authorities and volun-
tary associations in public service delivery. The long tradition of
corporatist involvement in policy implementation probably has
helped pave the way for emerging forms of governance. Such
exchange has meant giving these new networks new objectives
and roles rather than developing new networks across the public-
private border.

France appears to be an important exception to the pattern

of governance in west Europe we have described above. The
more technocratic, top-down style of policy making in France
implies that the emerging governance format might not be com-
patible (Hayward 1983; Cohen 19%). There is a strong element
of networking within government itself, and that can link various
elements of state and society but certainly not with the society as
a dominant element. The long-standing debate over the existence
of corporatism in France is one indication of the questionable
compatibility of governance models in this setting.

The Rechtstaat Model of Public Administration

and Governance

If the corporatist political culture has been an important

foundation on which governance has been built during the 1990s,
the strong tradition of legality and deliberation in west European
public administration has been an obstacle to administrative
reform along similar lines. Rechtstaat ideals of a highly regulated
process, a vertically integrated organization, extensive delibera-
tion, and fair and equal treatment are not amenable to generating
economies of scale or increasing efficiency.

More than anything else, the trade-off between legality and

legal security on the one hand and efficiency on the other has
been a complex issue. What most governments seem to have
done is, interestingly, to simply ignore the trade-off, or alter-
natively to displace it from the policy making to the bureaucratic

236/J-PART, April 1998

Rethinking Public Administration

sphere of government. Thus most of western Europe has seen

relaxation of budgetary (input) control, growing political empha-
sis on efficiency in the public service, decentralization from the
state to subnational government (with Germany as a slight excep-
tion), and strong political pressures on the bureaucracy to provide
more choice in their service. Very few of these policies have
explicitly addressed the issue, To what extent should these
reforms be accompanied by a relaxation of traditional Rechtstaat

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standards?

Competition strictu sensu is alien to the traditional European

model of public administration, both within the public service
and between public- and private-service providers. Allowing for
such competition therefore has caused considerable organizational
problems. In most jurisdictions, the outcome has been that the
state has retained a fairly rigorous quality control over services
that have been contracted out; such control has been believed to
be the most important safeguard against declining service stan-
dards.

As we have noted, NPM has been introduced most exten-

sively in Britain. However, almost all countries have at least
considered some modifications in the same direction. The pattern
of reform often has been similar to that of allowing governance
to replace tight government control; changes have been more
de facto operative changes than changes in the normative and
legal framework of the public administration.

The history of public administration in western Europe to a

large extent has been shaped by tensions between politicization
and Rechtstaat ideals and between universalism and corporatism.
Unleashing local governments in order to provide the discretion
necessary for them to engage in partnerships, networks, and joint
ventures with key societal actors has been an important element
of governance. Here, public bureaucracies in the European wel-
fare states can draw on considerable expertise and organizational
memory; most of these states have seen the vast majority of
welfare state programs implemented more by local and regional
governments than by the state (Pierre 1994; Sharpe 1988).

HOW DOES THE GOVERNANCE DEBATE FIT WITH

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION IN THE UNITED STATES?

The concept of governance without government may appear

to fit well with the traditions of American public administration.
The United States has been described as a stateless society, lack-
ing in any of the traditions of European states. In this typification
of the United States its government is more political than it is a

23VJ-PART, April 1998

Rethinking Public Administration

manifestation of a virtually metaphysical State entity. In that view

of American government the movement from a state-centric con-
ception of government to a more societal centered view should be
an easy shift of emphasis.

In addition to the apparent weakness of American govern-

ment, the tradition of a strong civil society bears some of the
brunt of governing. Even before it became fashionable, govern-

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ment in the United States utilized the private sector (both for-
profit and not-for-profit elements) to help make and implement
policy (Salamon 1981; Kettl 1987). The private sector may have
become somewhat more prominent in recent years, but the shift
has been less startling than in Europe. Indeed, the history of
resistance to and skepticism of government in the United States
makes the concept of governance without government sound per-
fectly normal in the United States.

On the other hand, there is a good deal of evidence that

public administration in the United States has changed less than it
has in many other systems (Peters 1998). The NPM philosophy
has been adopted to a lesser extent than in Europe or the Antipo-
des. This is especially true of the competitive dimension of
NPM. Any modification of administration has been in the direc-
tion of enhanced participation (especially for members within
government organizations) and internal deregulation (Dilulio
1994). The National Performance Review emphasized the need to
reduce the degree of hierarchy within federal organizations and to
"let the managers manage."

The very absence of a strong state tradition in the United

States appears to make moving to the fully networked model of
governance less likely. The general denigration of government,
especially the bureaucracy, makes it less likely that the bureau-
cracy will be given the latitude to negotiate so freely with the
private sector. There are some contrary examples, such as the
use of negotiated rule making, but the general practice is for
Congress and the presidency to exercise substantial oversight of
the bureaucracy.

The American State (yes, there is one) is somewhat para-

doxical in the continued emphasis on the separation of state and
society. The private sector is extolled as the model of efficiency
and good management. The recent emphasis on the private sector
in welfare reform is an indication of the homage paid to that
sector. Government appears quite willing and often anxious to
divest itself of functions whenever possible and to permit the
private sector to do what it can do better—almost everything in
this view. The difference from much of Europe is that there are

23WJ-PART, April 1998

Rethinking Public Administration

many more things that Americans consider appropriate for the

private sector.

Despite the emphasis on the virtue of private-sector manage-

ment there is more politicized control and more legalistic control
over the bureaucracy than currently is found in other Anglo-
American democracies. Organizations are not permitted to go
into competition for themselves; instead, they remain under polit-

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ical control. The assumption appears to be that bureaucracies are
not to be trusted, and any arrangements they might make for
governance are not to be trusted either. Political control is espe-
cially important for Congress, given that it depends on constitu-
ency service and particularistic control over bureaucracy for
much of its political appeal. The one major exception to this
generalization is the Government Performance and Results Act of
1994, which is beginning to implement results-based management
at the federal level.

Although the U.S. federal government does not appear com-

patible with the governance model, American local government
has adopted many of its concepts. For example, the use of
public-private partnerships has been well established at this level
of government (Beauregard 1998), and there are well-developed
networks with greater influence over—and even in control of—
policy than is encountered at the national level. There is also a
sense that American local government has been more creative in
the selection and implementation of policy instruments than is
true at the national level.

State and local government also has been more likely to

adopt the ideas of the NPM. Indeed, Osborne and Gaebler (1992)
developed their ideas about reinventing government primarily
from the experience of California local government. Many
market-based ideas associated with NPM have been eschewed at
the national level but are already in place at the local level, and
subnational government in the United States is the more modern
of the two levels of government. The federal government has to
some extent enabled the reform of state and local government
with the use of block grants that provided them with resources
and the latitude to develop more creative means to provide serv-
ices to the public.

Why are local and state governments in the United States

capable of greater latitude in governing and management than is
the national government? One answer is that local government is
less delegitimated than national government; most surveys demon-
strate that local government is more trusted than is the federal
government. The public is therefore likely to concede to this

239/J-PART, April 1998

Rethinking Public Administration

level of government the latitude needed to manage and implement

effective partnerships. Further, local government is likely to have
close and continuing interactions with the private sector in its
own area, so that these relationships may emerge naturally. Local
government in the United States is therefore often a more
powerful actor than is the federal government, given that it is
able to govern both through traditional command and control
techniques and through the less conventional formats associated

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with governance.

CONCLUSIONS: BREAKING THE PATH?

The debate over governance may simply be the academic

community catching up with the reality of the public sector in the
contemporary world. Just as there may be for institutions, there
may be a path dependency in academia. We are often so locked
into our theoretical and empirical paths that it is difficult for us
to recognize the subtle changes that occur over time. The archi-
tects of reform have been forced to address these changes more
carefully and more directly.

Architects of administrative reform have faced a complex

dilemma concerning the degree of change they can achieve on the
one hand and the likelihood of successful reform on the other.
Reforms that aim at altering the normative framework and modus
operandi of public administration, and thus profoundly challenge
established norms and practices, may at best accomplish minor
changes and at worst bring to the public service confusion, con-
flict, and discrepancies between organizational culture and
external role expectations, thus causing stalemate. More moderate
reforms—for example, a sequence of incremental but consistent
changes—are likely to bring about less dramatic change but with-
out major dysfunctional consequences.

Most importantly, reformers encounter the path dependency

of administrative systems that we noted earlier. For example, the
emergence of governance in western Europe is to some extent
embedded in the corporatist tradition of this political culture.
Similarly, the hesitancy towards NPM in most of western Europe
is explained by the strong legalistic tradition of the public
administration there. Such control always has been extensive in
the United States, and yet market-based administrative reform has
encountered much less opposition here, at least in state and local
governments. Much of this strategy of administrative reform has
been the subject of intense debate at the federal level. Mean-
while, local governments are seemingly less bothered by the
ideological dimension of principles as they forge public-private
coalitions in different areas of public-service delivery. Local

24QIJ-PART, April 1998

 Rethinking Public Administration

governments always have been more results oriented in their

modus operandi than have state or federal institutions.

Strong states seem to be much less inclined to compromise

the Rechtstaat model of public administration and seem to have
many fewer problems participating in governance than do weaker
states such as the United States. That being said, there is much in
the governance debate in Europe that speaks to the current debate

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about administrative reform in the United States. One such theme
is the growing importance of networks, which assume a powerful
position in public policy making and implementation. For Euro-
peans with their stronger Statist tradition, states can enter such
coalitions without having to fear that they will have to com-
promise core political and administrative values. In the United
States, on the other hand, weak federal or local institutions run a
much bigger risk of cooptation or marginalization by private-
sector actors and interests.

Thus, governance and the NPM have encountered opposition

in both Europe and the United States, although for different
reasons. In neither case are these reforms fully compatible with
the administrative traditions of the countries that are advised to
implement these reforms. Even within the two areas there are
marked differences in the compatibility of the reforms. In the
United States the changes tend to be more compatible with the
ethos found in local governments than with that of the federal
government. In Europe, the Scandinavian countries and the low
countries have had many of the ideas of governance in operation
for decades, while the larger European countries have had some-
what more difficulty absorbing these ideas and concepts. Thus we
can see again that no reform is likely to be universal; instead
reform must be matched carefully with the needs and the tradi-
tions of the larger political system.

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