Governance Without Government? Rethinking Public Administration

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)