Public Governance and Public Management

Abstract

The concept of governance has been used to frame codes of conduct among CEO’s, boards and boards of executives in both the public and the private sector. To a large extent public governance codes were inspired by the prior formulation of private sector codes, and they were pointing at more or less generic qualifications that were situated in the public sector context of politically lead organizations. Increasingly, however, the concept of public governance has been theoretically institutionalized and almost patented by the proponents of the New Public Governance paradigm. The co-existence of competing governance paradigms constitutes an institutional frame for public sector management saturated with dilemmas that have to be handled.