ABSTRACT
The concept of governance is critical to the study and practice of public administration and even more central to the specific opportunities and challenges that affect public sector leadership. Scholars have defined governance in a multitude of ways and in a plethora of different contexts. The public administration community relies on the term frequently, but a single, agreed-on definition does not exist. This, as a result, leads to a great deal of confusion when scholars and practitioners emphasize the term “governance” as a means of comparing or critiquing different theoretical approaches to public administration, such as those associated with New Public Management (NPM) or New Democratic Governance (NDG).
