Transformations towards New Public Governance: Can the New Paradigm Handle Complexity?

Intro
New public governance (NPM) has been proclaimed as an alternative governance paradigm, with some suggesting that it replaces classical public administration (CPA) and new public management (NPM). The CPA and NPM approaches are said to be unable to deal with the growing complexities facing a globalizing, networked society (e.g., Osborne 2006, 2010). It is now widely recognized that public policy making and public service delivery develop increasingly within multilevel, cross-border settings, in which former demarcations of policy fields become blurred, with a high level of individualization, pluriformity of values, information density and dynamics, and mediatization (Castells 1996; Bauman 2005, Hjarvard 2008, Sørenson and Torfing 2007). These trends lead to the proliferation of nonlinear dynamics, strategic surprises, and emergent vulnerabilities and risks (Beck, 1992; Taleb, 2006; Longstaff 2005). As a result, society is increasingly dealing with wicked problems that require the expansion of knowledge and a problemsolving capacity that cannot be provided by any single entity operating alone (Rittel and Webber, 1976; Head 2008). Pollitt et al. (2004), and Bouckaert et al. (2010) further argue that during the last decades, classical public administration and new public management have contributed to fragmentation of governance capacity, while greater coordination and collaboration seem to be required.