Conclusions 247
abandoned altogether, questions naturally arise about the purposes of govern-
ment and the methods used to accomplish those purposes. It is diffi cult, however,
to see how a specifi c management reform approach—even one with as many vari-
ations as NPM—can position itself as a comprehensive answer to those questions.
Th is seems to entail a drift from theory-building into something approaching
ideological advocacy: governance as the embrace of corporate values and prac-
tices by the public sector. Whatever its original motivations, Kettl points out that
the global management reform movement has advanced only where it served the
ends of political expediency: “Few if any government leaders launched manage-
ment reforms to improve administration and service delivery” (2000, 51). Lynn et
al.’s concept may be too intellectually broad, but the NPM conception of gover-
nance may be too politically narrow. As Peters and Pierre argue, NPM and gov-
ernance overlap, but this does not mean they are the same thing. Th e work of Hill
and Lynn and the work of Koliba, Mills, and Zia demonstrate that the assump-
tions of NPM regarding government structure and service delivery are lacking in
empirical support.
Th is leaves governance as the attempt to comprehend the lateral and insti-
tutional relations in administration in the context of the disarticulated state.
Like the other approaches, this is an explicit attempt to put the facts of the frag-
mented state into a coherent explanatory picture. Its strength is its empirical
basis—governance is largely predicated on trying to identify systematic pat-
terns in observations of what administrators are actually doing. Th is contrasts
with the search for the unifying thread in what strikes some as a research liter-
ature characterized by theoretical pluralism (Lynn et al.) or the imposition of
what strikes others as an ideological framework on the public sector (NPM).
Although progress is increasing on this front, this approach to governance re-
mains underdeveloped. In times of fi scal stress, governments are increasingly
likely to look to cost-saving alternatives for public service delivery. Bringing
in nonpublic actors, whether privately owned enterprises or nonprofi t organi-
zations, is a viable alternative and increasingly being used in the United States
and Europe (Skelcher 2005).
As we have discussed throughout the chapter, however, even though this third
approach is changing the face of governance, the basic structure, as advocated
in the Weberian model, remains the same. Public institutions in public-private
partnerships, or the networks in governance systems, are likely to have some hi-
erarchical component. (See Wachhaus [2014, 2012] for a counterargument, one
that begins with the notion of an active role for citizens in the governing process.)
Privatization and the shadow bureaucracy will remain constants in the years to
come, but the size and shape of the shadow are expanding and changing rapidly.
It is, as Wachhaus puts it, “governance beyond government” (2014). Th e theories
of administration conjunction, regime theory of governance, global governance,
and collaborative governance show the possibilities for building theories indige-
nous to public administration that tackle the important questions of governance.