Public sectors throughout the world are facing unprecedented yet similar challenges. On the one hand civil servants have to confront and present solutions to problems as diverse as unsustainable resource consumption and global environmental concerns to the polarization of politics, rapid advances in technology and rising levels of income inequality. On the other, the public sector has to address these problems with fewer resources as governments around the world race to slash funding to the public sector in the wake of the financial crisis. This thought-provoking volume assesses the nature of public administration in the 21st Century and explores the way in which public sectors have adapted in order to confront the daunting challenges faced by governments around the world. Looking at the different levels of public administration from the local to the supranational level, individual chapters consider the civil service in different countries and explore how the public sector facilitates representation and participation and protects the state from crises ranging from terrorist attacks to economic crashes. The picture that develops is that civil services throughout the world, far from being hollowed out as many observers suggest, are responding to their new mandate by becoming an even larger and even more important part government.

Table of Contents:
Introduction; Eberhard Bohne, John D. Graham and Jos C.N. Raadschelders PART I: NORMATIVE PERSPECTIVES ON THE STATE 1. Attending to Mission Extrinsic Public Values in Performance Oriented Administrative Management: A View from the United States; David Rosenbloom 2. Europe and the USA: The Uphill Quest for Regulatory Cooperation; John D. Graham 3. What We Seem to Forget in Modern Public Administration; Arthur Ringeling PART II: PROTECTING STATE 4. Reconciling Inconsistencies in Regulation Throughout the European Union for a Risk-based Approach Towards Industry Governance: A Closer Look at Germany; Sweta Chakraborty and Naomi Creutzfeldt 5. State Intervention in Times of the Global Economic Crisis; Michael M. Franke 6. The Sources of Security Regulation Convergence; Jesse Paul Lehrke and Rahel Schomaker PART III: PARTICIPATORY STATE 7. User and Community Co-production of Public Services: What Influences Citizens to Co-produce?; Tony Bovaird, Elke Loeffler, Gregg van Ryzin and Salvador Parrado 8. Overlooking an International Movement in Volunteerism? Understanding Citizen Involvement in Volunteer Centers; Jeffrey L. Brudney and Dayoung An Woodworth 9. Participatory Administrative Procedures: the USA vs. Germany, Austria and Slovenia; Polonca Kovac and Tina Sever PART IV: TRANSPARENT STATE 10. Erecting the Public Sector Information Exchange; Alon Peled 11. Open Government, Behavior Control, and the Privacy Risk of Digital Government; Alessandro Spina 12. Collaborative Governance and Collaborating Online: The Open Government Initiative in the United States; Lisa Blomgren Amsler and Susanna Foxworthy PART V: MULTI-LEVEL STATE 13. Reforming Public Administration in Multi-Level-Systems: An Evaluation of Performance Changes in European Local Governments; Sabine Kuhlmann, Stephan Grohs and Jorg Bogumil 14. Endogenous Transformations in European Public Administration: Soft-law, Transnationally-networked Governance as a Self-reinforcing Trend; Joseph Corkin and Nina Boeger 15. Regio-Crats Policy Participation Demands in the EU Multilevel System; Michael W. Bauer and Philipp Studinger Conclusion: The State is here to stay: We cannot Live with it, we cannot Live without it; Eberhard Bohne, John Graham and Jos C.N. Raadschelders