Th eories of Governance 265
administration scholars have begun using behavioral economics, social psychol-
ogy, and cognitive science to increase the explanatory and descriptive capacities
of existing frameworks). Th e direction and pace at which this transition occurs,
however, are up to practicing scholars.
Th eories of Governance
During the past three or four decades, governments in industrialized democ-
racies have subjected themselves to a rigorous and sometimes painful self-
examination by questioning their purposes and the methods used to achieve
them. Governments have become less hierarchical, less centralized, and more
willing to delegate considerable grants of policymaking power to the private
sector (Kettl 2000). Th ese changes have forced public administration to rethink
and begin repositioning its intellectual foundations. In a disarticulated state
where public service provision is increasingly carried out by networks with lit-
tle central direction, the intellectual planks the discipline traditionally relies
upon—especially Weberian-based models of bureaucracy and management—
lose much of their ability to help public administration scholars build a co-
herent explanatory picture of the world they study. Th e rise of the hollow or
fragmented state has created a need for new intellectual tools in public admin-
istration. Governance has stealthily crept into the discipline’s language and
established itself as a virtual synonym for public administration. Faced with a
new reality of government, where cooperative networks and competitive market
forces are as likely to describe the means of public service provision as bureau-
cracy and hierarchy, public administration seems to be evolving into the study
of governance. Governance, however, implies a diff erent defi nition of public ad-
ministration than its customary understanding, one that incorporates a variety
of nontraditional policy processes and actors. Currently, “governance” is more
a term describing a changing public administration than it is a coherent theory
itself. Faced with signifi cant change in the focus of its study, public adminis-
tration needs to create new intellectual frameworks to explain and understand
this change and to help assess how these changes aff ect public service provi-
sion. “Governance” is the label used to comprehend these changes and describe
nascent theoretical frameworks.
Th e clear need for theories of governance has prompted at least three iden-
tifi able responses. Th e fi rst of these is to treat governance as a project to corral
a broad multidisciplinary literature on government activity into a coherent in-
tellectual whole (Lynn, Heinrich, and Hill 1999, 2000, 2001). Here governance is
a proxy for a public administration of expanded scope, a study of public service
operations that include public, private, and nonprofi t sectors. Th e attempt to im-
pose a core set of goals and intellectual consistency on such a pluralistic enterprise
raises questions about the ability of this approach to generate a useful theory. It is
exceedingly diffi cult to extract a parsimonious and universally applicable logic of