232 9: Th eories of Governance
traditional models of public administration, they are oriented toward the con-
trol of outputs rather than inputs. Th e focus is on producing what will increase
effi ciency and satisfy the customer rather than on the resources available to a
public agency.
Finally, both governance and NPM embrace the concept of steering. David
Osborne and Ted Gaebler (1992) are generally credited with coining the phase
that governments should “steer rather than row,” where “steering” means setting
broad policy objectives and “rowing” means actually taking the actions that fulfi ll
those objectives. Like others who make little distinction between NPM and gov-
ernance, Osborne and Gaebler argue that rowing is best left to entrepreneurial
activity in relevant policy networks rather than to direct, centrally micromanaged
government action. In the abstract, this retains for elected offi cials and their bu-
reaucratic agents a strong role in policymaking, but in practice it aggravates the
accountability problems inherent in NPM and creates a new set of management
problems for government. If, as NPM advocates Osborne and Gaebler suggest,
governments did a poor job of steering when they had central control over policy
and public service provision, how are they going to do a better job of steering
when much of their power has been diff used into amorphous policy networks?
Peters and Pierre (1998) suggest that this question is critically important to the
governance debate and that NPM has not thus far provided a satisfactory answer.
Th e list of similarities may show a good deal of overlap in the conceptual ar-
guments supporting NPM and governance, but this does not mean the former
is a synonym for the latter. Peters and Pierre (1998) argue that, although these
diff erences constitute more than a set of questions raised in governance debates
to which NPM has no universal answer, they are fundamental enough to treat
governance and NPM as distinct and separate intellectual frameworks. First, gov-
ernance represents a concept—a relationship between government and the rest of
society—that has always been part and parcel of a democratic polity. Western de-
mocracies, for example, have always engaged in partnerships with the private sec-
tor. NPM, in contrast, is more ideological; it constitutes a specifi c normative view
of how that relationship should be structured. At its core, NPM is an attempt to
inject corporate values into the public sector. It sees no sacrosanct cultural or
societal role for the public sector, and separates it from the private sector only by
the type of product being produced. In contrast, most visions of governance rec-
ognize that the public sector serves a unique role in securing and promoting the
commonweal of a democratic polity. Accordingly, most visions of government
recognize the fundamental diff erence between the public and private sectors and
that corporatizing the latter has broad implications for the underpinnings of a
democratic polity.
Second, the substantive focus of the two models is diff erent: Governance is
about process, whereas NPM is about outcomes. Governance is concerned with
understanding the process by which public policy is created, implemented,
and managed. Its explanatory goal is to identify the actors and their role in this