Network Governance and the New Constitutionalism

We in public administration and the interdisciplinary spaces where public administration theory is increasingly relevant are seemingly engaged in an academic discourse about alternative constitutions of state administration, a fact that may be reason for optimism. Yet this is a fabricated discourse to the extent that there is very little discussion about how the state and its associated literary practices are constitutive and therefore whether or not this discourse represents genuinely liberating alternatives to the often undemocratic past. The lack of public debate and critical thinking about the concept of governance raises the question of whether or not governance can be considered a "democratic" development and whether or not it represents a break with previous conceptions and forms of the state. What has changed is not the ontology of the state, but the constitutive logic of the late capitalist state. In this brief discussion I re(ad)dress network governance and the ontology of the liberal constitutional state. Subsequently, I explore the question of whether or not governance represents a break with the ontology of liberal constitutionalism. Finally, I will propose that in their constituitiveness theories of the governance network represent a new constitutional theory of the state.