Public Administration

The term public administration encompasses a vast range of issues and activities. One way of grasping this diversity is to distinguish between two sets of questions: How public authorities are organized and how they seek to act within societies through making and implementing public policy. In short, public administration is about the state “in action” and “in interaction.” Traditionally the organization and the action of the state have generally been seen as coterminous with the concept of government. Over the last thirty years, however, an increasing number of academics, experts, and practitioners have begun to differentiate between public administration that is government and that which they label governance. According to this view, (Western) societies and economies have been transformed to such an extent that public authorities have been obliged to change both their internal modes of functioning and the way they engage with nonstate actors. More precisely, proponents of the concept of governance consider that it not only encapsulates changes in public administration itself but acts as a catalyst to the transformation of state-society relations.

These contentions about the relationship between public administration and governance will be examined in two parts. The first sets out to discover how and why governance has so frequently come to be used as a narrative with which to describe, and often rationalize, a range of “new” public policies and statesociety relations. The second part of this article looks more closely at how, more recently, governance has been used as a means of explicitly inciting policy and political change. In both parts, the interplay between academic and practitioner usages of governance is highly important. Indeed, in introducing a range of issues that are dealt with in more detail elsewhere in this volume, the principal claim made here is that avoiding confusion between “governance as narrative” and “governance as an agenda” constitutes a central challenge for both public administration as an activity and public administration as an academic discipline.