224 9: Th eories of Governance
Th is expansion of public administration’s scholarly arena is refl ected in an
increasing interest in the concept of governance, both as an idea and as a gen-
eral description of what public administration scholars study. Indeed, the term
“governance” is increasingly a surrogate or proxy for “public administration” or
“public management” in the discipline’s leading literature (Kettl 2000; Salamon
1989; Garvey 1997; Peters and Pierre 1998). Th e linguistic morphing of public
administration into the study of governance acknowledges the new realities of the
administrative state and is argued by some to herald a new and theoretical orien-
tation for the discipline. Gerald Garvey (1997), for example, uses governance as
a way to distinguish between the public administration orthodoxy built upon the
principles of politics-administration dichotomy (defi ned as expertise, merit selec-
tion, specialization, institution building, and a science of management) and a new
theory of public administration based on understanding the diff use networks in-
creasingly responsible for providing public service. Such concepts of governance
expand and complicate the challenge of developing public administration theory.
Th ey are also argued to be a more empirically valid way of understanding how
government programs actually operate; of providing a more realistic way to teach
those preparing for careers in the public sector; and of off ering more useful con-
struction materials for theory-building than the worn and increasingly irrelevant
planks of orthodoxy.
Although the need for public administration theory to account for the changes
in the role and practices of government during the last few decades is widely rec-
ognized, it is not clear that a theory of governance exists to meet this challenge.
Th e Weberian model of bureaucracy and management is undoubtedly less rel-
evant to public administration than it once was, yet it remains a sharper set of
intellectual tools than the still-fuzzy concept of governance. While governance
is now virtually a synonym for public administration, much of the literature pu-
tatively about “governance” does not even bother to defi ne the term, apparently
on the assumption that it is understood naturally and intuitively (Osborne and
Gaebler 1992). As a substitute for theory, intuition is unlikely to provide much
lasting use for the discipline.
Lacking a universal defi nition, governance is currently more an acknowledge-
ment of the empirical reality of changing times than it is a body of coherent theory.
According to H. George Frederickson (2005), the inchoate state of governance
theory can be traced to how it is currently operationalized among public admin-
istration scholars. Frederickson argues there are fi ve main problems with the state
of the governance framework. First, it is fashionable; governance has become a
catchall phrase. Second, as we discuss later, governance, in its current form, is
imprecise. Th ird, governance is “freighted with values” (289). Th ose employing
the term governance tend to have preexisting negative views of government in-
stitutions and orthodox bureaucratic structures. Fourth, “governance is primarily
about change” (290). Governance does not have to be a prescriptive framework,
emphasizing reform and the restructuring of institutions. “Governance” can also