Suchergebnisse

The chapters in this book have all in some way focused on new steering instruments in the public sector, or on how governments, often in collaboration with other actors, attempt to achieve integrated results and broad social outcomes. The trend away from the traditional and NPM-style prescriptions, the latter of which often resulted in a certain degree of fragmentation and a loss of steering capacity (Terry, 2005), is visible in a wide range of areas, both on the delivery level, and on the more strategic level. This has put the need to coordinate the public sector and to find new ways of steering firmly on the agenda (Bouckaert et al., 2010; Braun, 2008).

In this paper, we argue that representative bureaucracy is a changing concept, and that in the academic and policy debate on representative bureaucracy in fact three different debates are intermingled. While the debate on representative bureaucracy in Public Administration is generally situated within wider debates about tensions between bureaucracy and democracy, this is only part of the story. We argue that discussions and scholarship on representative bureaucracy in fact employ three different concepts of representative bureaucracy. The reasons for making the bureaucracy representative in these three rival concepts are quite divergent, and even the conception of what representativity means is totally different. These rival concepts reflect a particular view on the role of the state and the relation between states and citizens.

This chapter looks at the views public officials have of citizens, in particular their level of trust toward citizens' ability, integrity and benevolence, when engaging in administrative interactions. Public officials' trust is essential, in interactive governance, because it may stimulate the compliance and trust of citizens toward public administration. In turn, this may increase the effectiveness of public service delivery. Public officials' trust builds over time when they have interactions with trustworthy citizens. Hence, trust between public officials and citizens is at the same time an essential requirement for interactive governance and an outcome of such interactions. Extensive research thus far has not yet revealed many individual factors of officials' trust toward citizens nor their perceptions of citizens' trustworthiness. In addition, few studies have been conducted on the institutional and organizational factors of trust and trustworthiness. We discuss this research before suggesting avenues for future studies.

Sustainable procurement is often used to reduce negative environmental impacts related to production and consumption. Several studies in the sustainable procurement literature have identified potential drivers of and barriers to sustainable procurement, which are often organisational in nature. Using an organisational perspective, this paper examines if and how three organisational factors – top management support, expertise and commitment – influence the degree of sustainable procurement in procurement projects in the Dutch national government. The article concludes that both organizational factors (especially commitment) and the actions of individual actors are important.