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The purpose of this paper is to discuss the relationships between governance and a variety of approaches to public administration, especially New Public Management.

The study provides a conceptual review of the various approaches to public management and governance.

Many approaches to public administration, especially New Public Management, place excessive emphasis on quotidian management issues and insufficient attention to broader issues of governance.

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Performance measurements have become a prominent part of government steering of public agencies. At the same time, they are increasingly criticized for creating heavy administrative burdens. The purpose of this paper is to argue that consent on part of the heads of agencies is vital for making performance measurement an efficient tool for not only control but also organizational learning.

The paper reports a survey with a nearly total sample of Swedish Director Generals.

Findings suggest that Director Generals who feel that they are able to influence the goals and indicators of their agencies are significantly more willing to consent to the government’s reporting requirements.

The paper suggests that a more encompassing, interactive and participatory process might increase agency consent with reporting requirements.

The purpose of this paper is to study the changing relationship between auditing and evaluation. Over the past several years, supreme auditing institutions (SAIs) in a number of advanced democracies have evolved from conventional auditing institutions to becoming increasingly concerned with assisting policy change and administrative reform in the public sector; tasks that are traditionally associated with evaluation. The paper discusses the potential consequences of this development for the SAIs themselves as well as for the audited and reforming institutions and for policy-making.

The paper uses qualitative method and draws on the extensive literature on auditing and evaluation. The analysis has also benefitted from the authors’ recent comparative research on SAIs.

The findings, summarized in six points, are that the growth of auditing in areas previously assigned to evaluators, has led to a shortened time perspective; stronger emphasis on the administration of policies; increased focus on efficiency of the audited entity; greater independence from the evaluated organizations; a shift in receiver of information toward the legislature and/or the public; and improved communication.

Evaluation as a professional and scholarly field has developed theories and advanced methods to assess the effectiveness of public programs. The growth of auditing may thus change the focus and quality of policy evaluation.

The paper speaks to both scholars and practitioners. To the best of the knowledge a similar analysis has not been done before.

This paper intends to provide a framework for understanding the concept of administrative tradition, and then applies it to Napoleonic administrative systems.

The analysis involves the creation of a number of dimensions that can be used to analyze traditions, and the paper demonstrates the range of application of the dimensions.

Provides findings from a number of studies of public administration.

This framework is applied primarily to industrialized democracies in this paper but can be used across the full range of administrative systems, and is a significant augmentation of existing frameworks for comparative analysis.

The goal of this study is to analyze the relationship between public governance and COVID-19 vaccinations during early 2021 to assess the preparedness of countries to timely policy responses to cope with pandemic crises.

This global study elaborates descriptive statistics, correlations, regression analyses and Independent Samples T-Test on 112 countries, comparing those with high/low level of governance, to determine whether statistical evidence supports the hypothesis that good governance can improve the timely administration of vaccines.

Bivariate correlation reveals that doses of vaccines administered × 100 inhabitants have a high positive association with the General Index of Governance (r = 0.58, p-value <0.01). The result is confirmed by partial correlation (controlling density of population per km²): r = 0.584, p-value <0.001. The coefficient of regression in the models also indicates that an increase in the General Index of Governance improves the expected administration of doses of COVID-19 vaccines (p-value <0.001).

Although this study has provided interesting results that are, of course, tentative, it has several limitations. First, a limitation is the lack of data in several countries. Second, not all the possible confounding factors that affect the vaccination against COVID-19 are investigated, such as country-specific health investments and expenditures, and these aspects should be examined in the future development of this research. A third limit is related to the measurement of governance through the World Governance Indicators, which are based only on perceptions and can be biased by different socio-economic factors.

The identification of factors determining the timely vaccinations may help to design best practices of health policy for improving the resilience of countries to face pandemic crises.

The improvement of preparedness of countries through good governance can foster a rapid rollout of vaccinations to cope with pandemic threats and the negative effects of their socio-economic impact.

This study presents a global analysis of the role of public governance for timely vaccinations to face pandemic crises in society.

Is there a specific way of thinking about organisational learning in Nordic countries? Are concepts such as organisational learning and learning organisations imported, or do they emerge with specific meanings from more local discourses? Beyond that, are they supported by specific learning theories? The purpose of this paper is to trace the way that the concepts of organisational learning and learning organisations appear in research and policy documents in Norway and to identify what sort of learning theories pertain to those concepts. The authors discuss whether Norway’s case exemplifies a Nordic way of thinking about learning in organisations.

Through an archaeological investigation into the concepts of organisational learning and learning organisations, the authors explore the theoretical and cultural framing of the concepts in research and policy. The authors limit our work to large industrial field experiments conducted in the 1960s and to large education reform in the 2000s.

During the industrial field experiments in the 1960s, the concept of organisational learning evolved to form participatory learning processes in non-hierarchical organisations able to contribute to democracy at work. Education policy in the 2000s, by contrast, imported the concept of the learning organisation that primarily viewed learning as an instrumental process of knowledge production. That strategy is incommensurable to what we define as a Nordic way, one in which learning is also understood as a cultural and social process advanced by democratic participation.

The authors add to organisational learning theories by demonstrating the importance of cultural context for theories and showing that the understanding of learning is historically and culturally embedded.

Interactive decision making has become a recurrent practice across countries, policy sectors and tiers of government. The purpose of this paper is to analyze how organizational arrangements, i.e. the way the interactive process is designed, influence its outcomes.

The research is carried out through a multiple case study. Four cases of interactive decision making are analyzed using a qualitative framework.

Findings can contribute to shed light on the organizational underpinnings of the outcomes of interactive decision making. Accessibility, in particular meant as process openness, i.e. the intensity of the decision-making powers that are devolved to the public, seems to represent the key factor in producing positive outcomes, especially if associated to less-formalized arrangements.

On the practice oriented side, findings provide decision makers with insights about how to design interactive mechanisms to improve the chances they would “work.” Specifically, finding suggest to launch interactive initiatives only when the public’s expectations in terms of process openness can be satisfied.

The way organizational arrangements influence outcomes is likely to be affected by context-specific factors interacting with the formers in generating the latters. Therefore, in order to reach meaningful research results it might be necessary to systematically factor context-specific features in the analysis. Here lies the relative novelty of the paper: although the relation between arrangements and outcomes of interactive decision making has been already investigated by other contributions, the present analysis purposefully focusses on cases occurred in the same policy sector, in one homogeneous geographical location and characterized by the same administrative tradition in order to discount the influence of these factors.

This study aims to find out whether strategic plans contribute to change by exploring to what extent environmental (external and internal) perceptions of the public institutions changed in consecutive plans.

The research is an explorative case study of three metropolitan municipalities in Turkey: Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir, which represent about one-third of population of the country. In this context, three consecutive strategic plans of metropolitan municipalities in question were examined based on a content analysis using a guideline developed by the author.

The findings reveal that the use of strategic plans as a guide is indispensable. The study argues that consecutive strategic plans of metropolitan municipalities are both conducive to change and are useful tools for the effectiveness of the strategy.

While this study analyses the strategic plans regardless of considering the extent to which the institutions have achieved their desired goals, it recommends that the “strategic plans” should not only be used as rituals but also as a guide to change.

The study emphasizes the fact that strategic plans provide managers with the necessary tools to perform an analysis that gives insight into the extent to which they are able to manage the change when they compare their strategic plans and put them into practice in the consecutive periods.

This study contributes to the field by questioning the basis of criticisms of strategic planning in the context of public sector and shows how strategic plans play a role in tracing the change in institutions.

The purpose of this paper is to address the process of organizational governance of IT resources, called IT governance (ITG), especially its behavioral approach. The organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) concept was used to understand the relationship between the behavioral dimensions and the perception of ITG effectiveness. The objective of this research is to identify if individuals’ behavior contributes to a greater perception of ITG effectiveness in public organizations. This is an exploratory and descriptive research with a quantitative approach.

This was an exploratory and descriptive research with a quantitative approach. A survey with IT teams of public organizations in a Brazilian state was performed, and data were analyzed through partial least squares. A positive and significant relationship between the variables Spirit of Initiative (R²=0.2926) and Identification with the Organization (R²=0.1276), and the perception of ITG effectiveness was found.

Results showed that when OCB levels are higher, ITG is more easily perceived as effective. This occurs because the predisposition to adopt ITG mechanisms increases the changes in the governance process, which are understood as significant by the organization. In addition, it is important to consider the impact of change on individuals, due to ITG adoption. This reinforces that ITG is not just about the IT department, but also refers to its adoption and use throughout the organization as a key resource for the implementation of public policies and for following governmental strategies.

The predictive capacity of the proposed relationship model requires a larger number of confirmatory studies. Its application is suggested in other federative units or in private organizations.

OCB increases the predisposition to adopt ITG mechanisms, provided they understand that changes in the governance process are important to the organization. The change impact on individuals due to ITG adoption is also relevant, which shows that ITG is not only about the IT department, but also about IT adoption and its use throughout the organization.

The paper helps understanding the behavioral effects on the effectiveness of the GTI, since the simple adoption of GTI mechanisms does not guarantee that they are effective in achieving its objective of responding to governmental demands.

This article aims to empirically investigate the influence of socio-cultural and political factors and actors on the perceived autonomy and control of state agencies in Pakistan. Taking an institutional perspective, which envisages a diverse course of agency reforms, owed to varied national cultures, historical paths and traditional mindsets, the authors argue that the institutional theory provides an explanation to the autonomy and control status of the agencies.

Data were collected from 39 senior public officials and governing board members in federal agencies by conducting in-depth semi-structured interviews. Thematic analysis was performed using NVivo-12 for data analysis.

The results disclose that the agencies operate within an overriding politico-administrative culture of intervention and supremacy of the central government. There is a close relationship between the political actors and actors' implementing agents, the bureaucrats. Although the disaggregated public agencies are created under the agency model, a culture of political influence and control still prevails within them. Among the socio-cultural factors, corruption is reported as a critical influencing factor for agency autonomy.

The study emphasizes the need to adapt and modify agencification practices in developing countries based on the political, socio-cultural and administrative contextual factors and actors and the varying degrees of influence the practices exercise over the Government machinery.

This study unveils the implications of the new public management (NPM)-led agency model in Pakistan, which was primarily adopted as a part of the structural adjustment program (SAP) under loan conditionality from international donor agencies and explores the indigenous doctrines that govern agencies functioning under ministries.