Holistic Governance: Integration of Value and Instrumental Rationalities

At the end of the twentieth century, the drawbacks in the New Public Management became increasingly obvious and were mainly displayed in the segmentation of public services and the deficiency in public values. At that time, Public Administration scholars began to reflect systematically on New Public Management and actively pursue and build new Public Administration theories. In the United States, Robert Denhardt and Janet Denhardt advocated to replace the entrepreneurial government theory with the New Public Service theory (which will later be discussed in detail). In the UK, Perri 6 1 put forward the Holistic Governance theory based on a long observation of the administrative reforms in the UK. This theory not only became an important theoretical basis for the reforms launched by the Labour Party led by Tony Blair but also aroused great repercussions and heated debates in the academic circles. Some scholars even deemed it as “the third paradigm of administration” (Peng J. 2005:73). This trend is not only quite evident in such Anglo-Saxon countries as the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, which are known as vanguards in New Public Management, but it is also emerging in other countries that are not committed to New Public Management reforms (Christensen and Lægreid 2006: 83). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.