‘Effective governance’ through complexity thinking and management science

Recently, many claims have been made that new models of organization are emerging in the public and voluntary sector. These are partnerships, alliances, fora and consortia, to mention but a few, and they encompass both active participation of their members and/or users and the governance of their activities. The patterns of governance emerging, in my view, offer a different set of problems for the management sciences. Policy, strategy and accountability are now being developed within a complex network of different organizations drawn from the public and voluntary sector, aiming to govern or regulate the public sphere. This paper will explore how management scientists can address these patterns of governance. It will be argued that, if governance has supplanted management as an issue for the management sciences in this context, a new or different language is needed to ‘re‐present’ the problems. In particular, it will be shown that management science can be employed to find a clear balance between good governance and effective management. This paper will also propose a framework that may be used to help the new organizational arrangements achieve effective governance.