Theorising Governance Transitions

Abstract

The governance changes that are the focus of our study are exemplars of a wider range of transitions taking place to varying degrees across European cities, as the dominant model of representative democracy served by a public bureaucracy adapts to new ideas and circumstances. Typically, the literature on new public management, network governance, participative/deliberative democracy and urban politics frames the transition in the following way: from big city government in which elected politicians derive input legitimacy from the electoral process and exercise authority through a professionalised public bureaucracy to one in which questions of throughput and output legitimacy (Scharpf 1999) increase in salience as policy networks draw civic and business actors more fully into the governance process and as policy formulation and realisation require coordination and cooperation across a fragmented organisational landscape of quasi-autonomous organisations (Stoker 1998;Koppenjan and Klijn 2004).