ABSTRACT
The authors of previous chapters in this book provide two core assumptions about new public governance (NPG) that heighten the significance of liberal arts education as the best foundational preparation for “good citizenship”—especially for the kind of citizenship needed to operate responsibly within the world of NPG (Banyan, chap. 8; Bohn, chap. 11; Robinson and Morgan, chap. 12; Whitall et al., chap. 13; and Halimi and Shinn, chap. 14). The two assumptions, on which our chapter about educating for NPG is premised, 1 are:
NPG requires citizens to understand the way in which various kinds of civic organizations work separately and together to produce the public good. In the NPG world, much of the policy organizing and implementation gets done through the less formal social network processes, and therefore, citizenship is not reducible to responsible participation in the formal political process.
Under NPG, the distinction between what is public, what is private, and what belongs to the nonprofit, civic, and for-profit sectors of society is not simple and clear-cut. It requires a deeper understanding of the political economy of the public good that has been the case with the New Public Management. While the public good has never been simply the product of individual action, it has become even less so in the world of NPG, where the emphasis is more on collective action in the form of organizations, groups, and networks of participants.
