The Art of Governance: Analyzing Management and Administration

Extract

The Art of Governance: Analyzing Management and Administration, Patricia W. Ingraham and Laurence E. Lynn, Jr., eds., Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2004, pp. 238.

What is “governance”? Despite a huge literature, a major journal, and numerous teaching programmes and courses ostensibly dealing with the subject, it is a concept that still inspires much confusion. Many students of political science, among others, see the term as being simply a synonym of “governing,” used to describe what governments actually “do,” or as just a new name for the traditional subject matter of established fields such as public administration and public management, offering little in the way of value-added to those more traditional terms and academic fields. Others, of course, argue that “governance” represents a fundamental new way of “governing,” specifically a much less top-down and hierarchical form than is traditionally associated with studies of public administration, and hence a subject worthy of additional attention and the coinage of neologisms.