The Governance Continuum

From the military and police forces, to utilities and railways, and specialty tribunals and watchdogs, organizations operating under different institutional arrangements have proliferated and grown to the point where there is almost a default assumption that a new program or policy mandate would be achieved more efficiently or effectively outside the core public service. [...] Finally, we propose a conceptual model that integrates the different dimensions of organizational independence and institutional control with the different types of functions that organizations perform in the public sector. [...] Complete autonomy jeopardizes the responsiveness of distributed governance organizations to the imperatives of policy alignment, democratic control and accountability to the public. [...] Furthermore, the powers to create and amend the mandates of DGOs and audit and scrutinize their performance are also used as institutional controls in DGOs in the public sector. [...] In theory, the conventions of ministerial responsibility, in which ministers are held to have the same degree of control over DGOs as they do over a government department, would result in the minister being accountable to the legislature for DGOs in the same manner as for the department.