What is “governance”? Despite a huge literature, a major journal, and numerous teaching programmes and courses ostensibly dealing with the subject, it is a concept that still inspires much confusion. Many students of political science, among others, see the term as being simply a synonym of “governing,” used to describe what governments actually “do,” or as just a new name for the traditional subject matter of established fields such as public administration and public management, offering little in the way of value-added to those more traditional terms and academic fields. Others, of course, argue that “governance” represents a fundamental new way of “governing,” specifically a much less top-down and hierarchical form than is traditionally associated with studies of public administration, and hence a subject worthy of additional attention and the coinage of neologisms.

This book falls into the second category, but does so only after careful examination by the editors of the need for new terms and concepts. More importantly, they insist on the need to situate the “new” governance within the context of the “old” administrative reality. Writing from an initially sceptical position, Heinrich, Hill and Lynn note that “the intellectual movement towards governance as an organizing concept is associated with the widespread belief that the focus of administrative practice has been shifting from the bureaucratic state and direct government to the ‘hollow state’ and ‘third-party government’” (3). However, they remain unconvinced that the transition has been as dramatic or as widespread as suggested by many authors. Rather, they note that public governance remains very much embedded in traditional constitutional and institutional rules for decision making, fiscal appropriations and accountability, which mute the extent to which “horizontal” governance can predominate over more traditional “vertical” forms. Whatever moves exist towards horizontality and network management in modern programme design and delivery, they argue, have taken place within the existing arrangements of elections, courts, legislatures, politics and the rule of law. The tension between the vertical and horizontal aspects of contemporary public governance has generally not been adequately explored in the governance literature. In the case of the United States, they argue, “[i]n general … scholars that emphasize the ascendant role that networked relations play in governance tend to downplay, diagnose as a problem, or fail to acknowledge the realities of hierarchical government in a federal, constitution-based system” (10).

The Art of Governance, a collection of ten articles by leading figures in the American public administration field, is intended to illuminate this shadowy area of governance studies and shed light on the management challenges of governance and administration caused by the attempt to develop new management techniques within the confines of old institutions and rules.

The book is divided into four parts: “Choosing a Conceptual Lens”; “Social Program Service Delivery”; “Government Organizations”; and “The Map for Future Analysis.”

Along with the introductory chapter by the editors, the first section contains a chapter by Hal G. Rainey and Jay Eungha Ryu on “Framing High Performance and Innovativeness in Government,” which suggests that much of the existing governance literature rests on unsystematic anecdotal evidence and lacks scientific status. Part II contains a chapter on “Alternative Governance Structures for Welfare Provider Networks” by Jo Ann G. Ewalt, one on “Governance, Evidence-Based Practice and Performance in Substance Abuse Treatment Programs” by Carolyn J. Heinrich, and on “Can Casework Design Choices Improve Outcomes for Clients Who Are Difficult to Employ?” by Carolyn J. Hill. All three chapters explore the design and outcomes of high-profile contemporary programme initiatives at the state and federal levels in the US. Part III has a chapter by Amy Donohue et al. on “Management and Performance Outcomes in State Government” and one by Patricia W. Ingraham and her colleagues on “Linking Dimensions of Public Sector Leadership to Performance,” both of which address the management challenges linked with the administration of complex network-based programme initiatives. Part IV features a selection by Edward T. Jennings Jr. and Meg Patrick Haist on “Putting Performance Measurement in Context”; one by Kenneth J. Meier and Laurence J. O'Toole on “Conceptual Issues in Modeling and Measuring Management and Its Impacts on Performance” and, finally, a concluding series of reflections on the collection by Patricia W. Ingraham entitled “Analyzing Structure and Systems in a Governance Framework.”

The essays are of uniformly high quality, although the authors tend to bounce between the highly specific and very general in terms of subject matter and approach. More significantly, however, the essays also vary greatly in terms of how much they contribute to the overall problematic driving the collection, as it is set out by the editors in the introduction. That is, some chapters, like those found in Part II, do not directly address the issue of horizontality vs. verticalness in programme design and delivery, but are mainly descriptive in nature. Others, however, such as those found in Part III, are much more successful in describing the management challenges facing contemporary administrators, and in linking them to the difficulties and problems encountered by managers in attempting to reconcile increased public responsiveness with traditional top-down financial, administrative and electoral lines of responsibility and accountability.

Overall, this pattern results in only a partially successful effort to grapple with the key concepts and issues that motivated the volume, as the editors themselves attest. While The Art of Governance places great emphasis on the overlooked significance of management performance and behaviour, Ingraham concludes in her final reflections that “the organizations and the settings described in the research in this book [are] … mess[y]. The research describes open organizations interacting fully with their environment, having—intentionally or not—an influence on policy at multiple points. Perhaps what [the research does] not describe fully is the reality of these networked organizations coexisting with the traditional hierarchies that are larger government funding sources or decision-makers. That remains a challenge for future work” (229).