ABSTRACT
Introduction In the late 1990s, the academic debate on Public Administration Management began to question the validity or completeness of the paradigms of Public Administration (Beetham 1987) and New Public Management (Hood 1991). There was a need to nd theories capable of moving beyond the sterile dichotomy of “administration versus management” (Osborne 2006), in favor of theories able to include (and exclude) issues related to the governance of policy processes (Klijn and Koppenjan 2000) or, more generally, to the governance of the public realm (Stoker 2006). According to these perspectives, policy processes are increasingly taking place on horizontal, vertical and network levels (OECD 2009). In these contexts, management develops dierently compared to traditional hierarchical practices (O’Toole and Laurence 1997; Klijn and Koppenjan 2000). While, on the one hand, most of the literature agrees that public sector management is an issue of coordination and integration among dierent levels and actors, on the other hand, the way in which these processes happen in practice and the reasons for their success or failure require a deeper analysis (see Chapter 13 in this volume).
