An Organizational Approach to Public Governance

Morten Egeberg, Professor of Public Policy and Administration in the Department of Political Science and in the ARENA Centre for European Studies at the University of Oslo. His publications include Multilevel Union Administration: The Transformation of Executive Politics in Europe (Palgrave 2006) and Towards a New Executive Order in Europe? (edited with D. Curtin, Routledge 2009). His main areas of academic interest include the role of organizational factors in political systems - such as the relationship between organizational and institutional forms on the one hand and decision-making processes on the other hand - but also changes in organizational and institutional forms. The research focuses especially on the European Commission, EU agencies, national executives, and the relationship between the EU level and the national level.

Jarle Trondal is Professor of Political Science and Management at the University of Agder and a Professor in the ARENA Centre for European Studies at the University of Oslo. His publications include An Emergent European Executive Order (OUP, 2010) and Governance in Turbulent Times (edited with K Ansell and M Øgård, OUP, 2016). His main academic interests include public administration and public governance, the EU as a political system, European integration and transformation, and the study of international public administration.

Climate change, economic crises, migration, and terrorism are among the many problems that challenge public governance in modern societies. Many of these problems are spanning political and administrative units; horizontally, vertically, and both. This makes public governance particularly challenging and turbulent. Since public governance mainly takes place through public organizations, like international organizations, ministries, and regulatory agencies, this book examines what difference organizational factors make in the governance process.

The volume launches a general organizational approach to public governance. It outlines key theoretical dimensions that cut across governance structures and processes horizontally as well as vertically, thus paving the way for integrating separate empirical analyses into a coherent theoretical whole. Moreover, the organizational (independent) variables outlined in this book represent classical dimensions in the organization literature that are generic in character. This allows for generalizations across time and space. The volume also examines (organizational) design implications: By building systematic knowledge on how organizational factors shape governance processes on the one hand, and how organizational factors themselves might be deliberately changed on the other, the book offers a knowledge base for organizational design.

This book provides an original and new organizational and theoretical approach to public governance.