This article considers the democratic implications of the shift toward policy making and implementation through networks, integrating articles presented at a 2003 conference on democratic network governance. The authors argue that the effect of increased cross-sectoral and civil society involvement in governing has been to stretch liberal democratic processes to comprise greater numbers of actors involved in lateral network relationships. Although network governance has the potential to promote deliberation and to improve flexibility and responsiveness in service provision, it also raises serious issues regarding equity, accountability, and democratic legitimacy. There is a need to improve political coherence through, for example, steering or metagovernance of governance activities. Important questions for future research involve the character of actors who will take responsibility for metagovernance (e.g., politicians or public administrators) and the approaches they will use to steer governance processes.
In the introductory article to the special issue on Comparing Networks, the editors discuss the meaning of the concept of networks in relation to other recent conceptual developments in public administration such as (neo)institutional and (neo)managerial analysis. They trace the broadly understood historical development of network analysis back to the late 1960s and early 1970s and highlight some important factors in its development up to the present-day demands placed on public administration by both globalization and decentralization. The result is organizational fragmentation. Network analysis makes it clear that people working in government and administration will have to learn to think of organization as an external, not internal activity. The prospect is that hierarchical control will be replaced by continuing processes of bargaining among interested parties within most fields of public administration.
The 1990s debate on postmodernism as a metatheoretical basis for American public administration is reviewed based on its progress over time. Important themes in the debates are social constructivism and anti-foundationalism; deconstruction and narrative and linguistic analysis; pragmatism; and quantum theory. Considerable differences exist between the participants, and strictly speaking, there are rather few true postmodernists, but there is a large group of theorists who share a strong skepticism for the generalizing type of theory and instead recommend more situational analysis. Most of these theorists are pragmatists with a strong interest in public administration as an instrument to achieve a better society on the basis of democratic participation.
Scandinavian local government is increasingly changing its organizational pattern away from the principles of local centralized bureaucratic control that were held sacred after the reforms of the 1960s and 1970s ‐ reforms that made local government the building block for the welfare ‘state’. Organizational fragmentation is taking place, making room for both new managerial styles similar to those of the New Public Management, featuring contracting out and similar market‐like arrangements, and for democratic initiatives which place service users in command of service institutions. Such developments call for new approaches to the study of local government, approaches that take interorganizational relations more directly into account. Suggestions about such an approach are made, based on studies of intergovernmental relations. Distinctions are made between intergovernmental politics which is concerned with symbolic values linked to the status of an organization, and intergovernmental management where processes of making do are seen as most important. In spite of the managerial fashion for strategic goal‐setting, it is expected that the new political actors are more interested in day‐to‐day results and thus challenge politicians, moving them away from the abstract goals in favour of advancing and monitoring actual accomplishments. This increases the need to understand network relations and, in turn, may yield better understanding on the part of citizens of how local politics and management works.
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