Governing Through Partnerships and Networks

Governing through Partnerships and Networks:

Engaging Public Enterprise Organizations

(Revised draft 4/25/12)

Introduction

Today’s 21st Century public leaders and managers are involved in a transformation of governance as important as the one that occurred during 20th Century. In the late 19th and early 20th Century, the United States evolved from a nation of small governments, largely managed through patronage, to a large public sector, run by professional civil servants. This professionalization led to the development of schools of public administration and public policy, the creation of the senior executive service (SES) at the Federal level of government, and the development of a bureaucratic model of management and accountability that until recently has gone unchallenged. A similar public sector development also occurred internationally, especially in Western nations.

Beginning in the 1980s, however, the traditional orthodoxy was challenged in the United States and abroad. The challenge came from a mix of political and academic actors who felt that the public sector in the 1980s was inefficient and unresponsive. They argued for more private sector involvement and innovation in the delivery of public goods and services and the freeing up of the public sector bureaucracy to become more flexible and innovative. The debate over the wisdom of this movement, often labeled the “New Public Management” (NPM), continues. The reality, however, is that the public enterprise today increasingly relies on third parties (states, private and nonprofit organizations) to deliver services to the American public (Salamon 2002).

The Changing Nature of the Public Enterprise

The nature of this broader governmental environment, what we label the “public enterprise,” has fundamentally changed since our nation’s founding. While government remains at the center of the public enterprise, today it also encompasses a variety of private and nonprofit actors that are engaged...