№ 4 - 2003
Smorgunov L.V.
Comparative Analysis of Politico-Administrative Reforms: from New State Management to the “Governance” Conception 50

The author stresses that specialists in the field of new state management, recently, adopted a collective decision to give up the term “new state management”, arguing that it is necessary to concentrate on the normative sources of public administrative practice. In the studies of managerial processes, significance of political science approach has risen. It turned out that separation of management from politics, on which the new state management had insisted, had no prospects. In fact, transition from the “new state management” conception to the description of managerial policy in terms of “governance”, means change of methodological foundations of administrative reforms theory and practice and, consequently, of comparative political science. The “governance” conception embraces the mechanisms, processes and institutions through which citizens and groups express their interests, realize their legitimate rights, fulfill their duties and are balancing between differences. The general sense of the conception consists in that the state management becomes less rigid, less detailed, and less regulated; it turns out to be based rather on horizontal, than on vertical links between state organs, associations of civil society, and business.