When do Studies of Networks in Public Management Begin? The European Roots of Network Studies in Public Administration and its Application to Network Governance

By the late 1970’s and early 1980’s democratic governments in Europe and the United States had created programs and policies that made the policy world increasingly dense. Existing theories and approaches in public... [ view full abstract ]

By the late 1970’s and early 1980’s democratic governments in Europe and the United States had created programs and policies that made the policy world increasingly dense. Existing theories and approaches in public administration and political science had difficulty making sense out of cross sector and cross level policy implementation.  There was increasing need to conduct studies to understand the issues and develop theories to provide guidance on how to design, manage, and evaluate these types of “network problems.”  By the late 1970’s only two dissertations had been written on policy networks in the U.S.  Very few scholars in public administration or the newly emerging field of public policy studies had heard of networks or network analysis. Things were brighter in Europe where Fritz Scharpf had assembled a program on “Interorganizational Policy Making” at the International Institute of Management in Berlin (WZB).  Working papers and an edited book[i] with Ken Hanf laid their claim to leadership in this emerging field that focused on the governance of networks in policy fields and addressed questions of corporatist governance of networks across the whole of government.  Scharpf assembled a strong team of researchers from a number of countries - Hanf, Benny Hjern, Chris Hull and David Porter.  Scharpf’s group came together with Elinor and Vincent Ostrom in 1982 and the Workshop for Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University brought European and U.S. scholars together at a workshop at Indiana University in Bloomington.  Over five summers Scharpf, the Ostroms, Mancur Olson, Paul Sabatier, Richard Elmore, Benny Hjern, Gary Wamsley, Peter Bogason, Theo Toonen, Larry O’Toole, and Brint Milward, among others began a writing program that centered on meetings in Bloomington, Berlin, Rotterdam, Umea and Dubrovnik.  This paper contends that this collaboration began network scholarship in public administration and produced numerous articles, several books, and many successful approaches to networks.  One of these approaches won the Nobel Prize for Economics and others (Advocacy Coalitions, Interorganizational Network Governance, and Managerial Networking) are very much alive and well today with second and third generations of scholars following in their paths.  While contestable, this paper makes the claim that this scholarship and scholars laid the foundation for separate work on networks in public management, public policy, and political science as it relates to network management, governance, and performance.  

[i] Kenneth Hanf and Fritz W. Scharpf (eds.) Interorganizational Policy Making: Limits to Coordination and Central Control.  Sage Modern Politics Series Vol. 1 sponsored by the European Consortium for Political Research. London: Sage Publications, 1978.