Governance in Public Administration and Political Science

Abstract

The emergence of governance theory from the early 1990s onwards has been one of the core developments in public administration and more broadly, for that part of political science orientated towards the study of policy-making. By 1999 George Fredrickson was able to make the bold claim that: Public administration is steadily moving … toward theories of cooperation, networking, governance, and institution building and maintenance. Public administration, both in practice and in theory, is repositioning itself to deal with the daunting problems associated with the disarticulation of the state. In short, a repositioned public administration is the political science of making the fragmented and disarticulated state work (Fredrickson, 1999:702). Not all governance scholars from public administration, let alone political science, would be willing to accept the idea that their goal was, or should be, to make a disjointed state work, as Fredrickson suggests, but most would go along with the claim that new thinking about governance has been introduced into the discipline because of shifts in the context for governing. The way of thinking about public administration and politics has changed in recognition of the changed conditions and practices of governing.