The Latest Developments In The Theory And Application Of Digital Era Governance And The Inspirations

Theories of Public Management keep developing. With the decay of New Public Management (NPM), no theory has achieved dominance. Among the few popular quasi-paradigms, Digital Era Governance (DEG) of Patrick Dunleavy manages to summarize the changes in public management in the digital era and to address the major problems arising from NPM such as fragmentation, with its focus on the influences of ICT.Professor Zhu Qianwei of Fudan University and some other scholars have introduced the basics of DEG to China. However, nothing much could be found about its development since 2006 in Chinese text. As DEG is in the process of maturing, Dunleavy and his collaborators have put forward quite many new ideas scattered in a number of papers. Hence gathering these ideas and presenting them in a systematic way, together with their application in the public sector of U.K, to Chinese scholars is a meaningful task.This paper starts with the introduction to DEG done by Professor Zhu and the others to China. While the main part of the paper is about the latest developments in DEG on three aspects, i.e. DEG and public management, the second wave of DEG, and DEG and public sector productivity. The first one includes the characteristics of digital era and the transition it brought to public management, the second the trends in integration, holism, etc. after the arrival of second wave DEG,and the third the correlation between some changes of digital era and public sector productivity.These theoretic innovations originate largely from Dunleavy’s participation in the public management reform of U.K. He has contributed directly to some important public sector digitalization and reform. And his ideas, in return, have affected the policies of the government as traces of DEG could be found there.The paper claims that our research and practice in public management could benefit from the knowledge on the role public management reform in Britain played in the development of DEG and the application of it in British public policies.The potential innovations in this paper are:Firstly, this paper is the first to give a systematic introduction in Chinese to the development and application since 2006 of DEG.Secondly, this paper takes a few ideas, including the state as a multi-system, possible steps of joined-up services, and dialectical implications on public management of ICT, as the major developments during this period.Thirdly, this paper explores the inspiration these development and application might have on the corresponding areas in China.