Governance And Public Management

A comprehensive, in depth and accessible resource for students of public sector management and administration: with an international authorship, this is more comprehensive, cohesive and international than any other textbook in the area.

This textbook examines what it means to have efficient management and good quality services in the public sector and how public sector performance can be improved.

Public Management and Governance examines the factors which make government critically important and the barriers which often stop it being effective. It questions what it means to have effective policies, efficient management and good quality public services, and it explores how the process of governing could be improved. Key themes include: the challenges and pressures facing governments around the world; the changing role of the public sector in a ‘mixed economy’ of provision; governance issues such as ethics, equalities, transparency and citizen engagement. This revised and updated third edition includes eight new chapters which provide in-depth coverage of key new aspects of public management and governance. It also features a wide selection of international case studies and illuminating examples of how public policy, management and governance can be improved – and what happens when they fail. Each chapter is supplemented with discussion questions, group and individual exercises, case studies and recommendations on further reading. Public Management and Governance is one of the leading student textbooks in its field, featuring contributions from top international authors and covering a wide range of key topics in depth. It is an essential resource for all students on undergraduate and postgraduate courses in public management, public administration, government and public policy.

Numerous administrative reforms during the past several decades, referred to as the "New Public Management," have altered government in a number of fundamental ways. These changes have, in turn, produced the need for even greater change if the public sector is to be capable of governing efficiently and responsibly. The challenges now facing government are numerous, including the need to recruit capable and committed young public servants, adapt to new information technology, manage changing intergovernmental relations, and, perhaps most important, hold the reformed administrative structures accountable to both political demands and legal standards. Some countries have already initiated new rounds of reform while others are still attempting to understand and absorb the consequences of changes motivated by new public management ideas. In Governance in the twenty-first century international experts recognise both the difficulty of making predictions and the need to consider the future in order to prepare the public sector for new challenges. The authors' predictions and recommendations are anchored in a thorough understanding of contemporary public administration. They point out that not only have previous reforms made yet more change necessary and inevitable but that the purpose of these reforms is to attempt to return government to the position of respect and competence it enjoyed in the past. B. Guy Peters is Maurice Falk Professor of American Government, Department of Political Science, University of Pittsburgh. Donald J. Savoie holds the Clément-Cormier Chair in Economic Development at the Université de Moncton, where he also teaches public administration.

Ethics and accountability have become important themes for modern government, as in most of the countries there is a severe crisis of legitimacy. Increasingly there is a feeling that performance management alone will not solve this crisis. Citizens also expect from politicians and public servants ethical responsible conduct. As to the ethics, however, there is a problem. Governance and new public management have raised new problems which cannot be solved by referring to the traditional bureaucratic ethics. Devolution and decentralisation processes have enhanced the responsibility of public servants. The increase of transparency and openness and the service orientation of public organisations have challenged the traditional values of discretion and equality before the rule. The growing interaction between the public and the private sector have raised the question of integrity. In light of these developments, it is important to update the ethical system, or reversibly, the traditional values of the public service can question some actual evolutions in government.

How effective are public managers as they seek to influence how public organizations deliver policy results? How, and how much, is management related to the performance of public programs? What aspects of management can be distinguished? Can their separable contributions to performance be estimated? The fate of public policies in today's world lies in the hands of public organizations, which in turn are often intertwined with others in latticed patterns of governance. Collectively, these organizations are expected to generate performance in terms of policy outputs and outcomes. In this book, two award-winning researchers investigate the effectiveness of management in the public sector. Firstly, they develop a systematic theory on how effective public managers are in shaping policy results. The rest of the book then tests this theory against a wide range of evidence, including a data set of 1,000 public organizations.

Swiss citizens approve of their government and the way democracy is practiced; they trust the authorities and are satisfied with the range of services Swiss governments provide. This is quite unusual when compared to other countries. This open access book provides insight into the organization and the functioning of the Swiss state. It claims that, beyond politics, institutions and public administration, there are other factors which make a country successful. The authors argue that Switzerland is an interesting case, from a theoretical, scientific and a more practice-oriented perspective. While confronted with the same challenges as other countries, Switzerland offers different solutions, some of which work astonishingly well.

This global encyclopedic work serves as a comprehensive collection of global scholarship regarding the vast fields of public administration, public policy, governance, and management. Written and edited by leading international scholars and practitioners, this exhaustive resource covers all areas of the above fields and their numerous subfields of study. In keeping with the multidisciplinary spirit of these fields and subfields, the entries make use of various theoretical, empirical, analytical, practical, and methodological bases of knowledge. Expanded and updated, the second edition includes over a thousand of new entries representing the most current research in public administration, public policy, governance, nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations, and management covering such important sub-areas as: 1. organization theory, behavior, change and development; 2. administrative theory and practice; 3. Bureaucracy; 4. public budgeting and financial management; 5. public economy and public management 6. public personnel administration and labor-management relations; 7. crisis and emergency management; 8. institutional theory and public administration; 9. law and regulations; 10. ethics and accountability; 11. public governance and private governance; 12. Nonprofit management and nongovernmental organizations; 13. Social, health, and environmental policy areas; 14. pandemic and crisis management; 15. administrative and governance reforms; 16. comparative public administration and governance; 17. globalization and international issues; 18. performance management; 19. geographical areas of the world with country-focused entries like Japan, China, Latin America, Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Russia and Eastern Europe, North America; and 20. a lot more. Relevant to professionals, experts, scholars, general readers, researchers, policy makers and manger, and students worldwide, this work will serve as the most viable global reference source for those looking for an introduction and advance knowledge to the field.