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The Palgrave Handbook of Public Administration and Management in Europe pp 517–533Cite as

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Policy-Making and Public Management

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Abstract

The conventional division of labor between policy-making and public management has been challenged, more or less explicitly, by scholars working on parallel research trajectories. This chapter attempts a stock-taking exercise by, first, identifying the boundaries between policy-making and public management, and then arguing why these boundaries are and should be blurred both for pragmatic and for theoretical reasons. After problematizing the so-called stagist approach, the chapter reviews the mainstream theories of policy-making by looking at the role they have attributed to public management. It then presents the intellectual foundations of institutional processualism, an event-centric method to explain policy choice, discussing how this approach helps situating the role of public management in the policy process—namely, one that especially relates the function of public management to social mechanisms.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. SOAS University of London, London, UK

    Alberto Asquer

  2. Department of Policy Analysis and Public Management, Bocconi University, Milan, Italy

    Valentina Mele

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  1. Alberto Asquer
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  2. Valentina Mele
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Correspondence to Alberto Asquer .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department for Public Leadership and Social Enterprise—PulSE Faculty of Business and Law , The Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom

    Edoardo Ongaro

  2. Institute for Management Research, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Sandra Van Thiel

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Asquer, A., Mele, V. (2018). Policy-Making and Public Management. In: Ongaro, E., Van Thiel, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Public Administration and Management in Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55269-3_27

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