Inviting book proposals for Successful Public Governance book series
Societies thrive when they are governed through public institutions that are trustworthy, reliable, impartial, and competent. Yet in the first decades of the 21st century, governments and public institutions worldwide face many challenges. Deep and fast changes in operating environments prompted by globalization, technological innovation, and geostrategic turbulence constrain their capacity to govern. Economic recessions, fiscal crises, and the pervasiveness of ‘wicked problems,’ destabilize public trust and undermine their social license to operate. Together, these and so many other issues are provoking both retrenchment and evolution. There is therefore an urgent need for concepts, designs, and practices for successful public governance.
Our hope is that the new book series Successful Public Governance at Edward Elgar publishers, which we co-edit, will begin to fill that need. The mission of this academic book series is to inject a self-conscious, systematic, and reflective focus on when, how and why governments and their partners in policymaking, service delivery, and collaboration actually manage to succeed in creating value for the public. We seek to provide a platform for efforts to develop and apply a toolkit for what might be called ‘positive public administration’ – a field of study devoted to analyzing the conditions under which institutions and arrangements of public governance thrive. For more information on the series, see: https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/books?book_series=Successful%20Public%20Governance%20series
Are you a scholar and do you want to contribute a book to the series? We welcome:
- Conceptualizations and critiques of the notion and ideal of ‘success’ in public sector and political settings.
- Methodological strategies for designing and conducting ‘positive’ (not to be confused with ‘positivist’) evaluations of public policies, organisations, networks, initiatives, and other forms of public governance.
- Empirical studies that identify, describe, explain, and/or interpret highly effective, highly democratic, highly reputed, highly resilient public governance institutions and practices.
- Pleas, proposals, and designs giving ideational accounts of ‘what should and might be’ when it comes to successful public governance.
Contributions could tackle a wide range of phenomena, including formal and informal institutions and practices, and could occur at any level of governance and in governmental and/or non-governmental settings. Moreover, contributions may come from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives and use any methodological approaches. The inaugural study to be published in the series is Martin Bartenberger and Chris Ansell, Pragmatism and Political Crisis Management: Principle and Practical Rationality During the Financial Crisis, out in late October 2019.
Please send expressions of interest to us editors: Paul ‘t Hart, Professor, Utrecht School of Governance, Utrecht University, the Netherlands ([email protected]) and Tina Nabatchi, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, USA ([email protected]).