The New Public Governance?, Emerging Perspectives on the Theory and Practice of Public Governance
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2010 Stephen P. Osborne. All rights reserved. Implementing public programs and delivering public services in the era of New Public Governance call for public managers to interact externally and often collaboratively with a range of stakeholders. Such relationships, it is often argued, build support for implementation, buffer programs from unexpected and negative shocks, and induce co-productive contributions from potential partners during execution. This chapter presents empirical evidence from hundreds of public organizations about how such networking behavior, which may constitute a form of organizational social capital, influences outcomes. At the same time, internal management within hierarchies also seems to matter for results. One of the key aspects of the research agenda on the New Public Governance is to sort through these relationships for their performance-relevant implications. The era of the New Public Governance signals considerable promise as well as substantial challenges. The latticing of horizontal linkages across actors and institutions, overlaying and potentially complicating the more familiar vertical ones, requires careful analysis. Networks of policy-involved actors often work in complex ways to shape policy choice and action (Bardach 1998; Huxham 2000; Stoker 2004; Bingham and O'Leary 2008). In some nations, corporatist arrangements and assumptions bind disparate "social partners" in processes of decision-making. Even in much less corporatist and considerably more pluralist systems, arrangements like Public-Private Partnerships and government contracting - relational and otherwise - are now commonplace. The increasing attention directed to many countries' commitment to sustainable development induces ever more intricate interweaving of policy sectors and social actors to address the cross-cutting governance needs impelled by this daunting policy agenda (Lafferty 2004). For reasons having to do with political motives, technical requirements for successful implementation, and the increasingly ambitious policy agendas of governments, webs of intertwined organizations and other institutions routinely co-produce outputs and outcomes. Successfully achieving policy results in such governance contexts requires that these complicated multi-actor institutional settings be managed effectively. This chapter overviews the challenge of policy implementation in complex governance settings involving networks of interdependent actors. We first frame the implementation theme and establish the importance of its multi-actor, networked character in contemporary governance. We then review briefly some of what is known about the determinants of implementation success or failure. We concentrate in particular on one key driver of implementation performance - the actions of public managers, particularly as they interact in and with the set of interdependent actors in other organizations. In this regard we distill some of the recent research findings that bear on public management and policy implementation in complex settings, and sketch some related questions deserving of further research attention.
