The Need of a XXI Century Governance Paradigm for Public Administration: The Specific Case of Portugal

In recent decades, New Public Management became the hegemonic doctrine and public administration reforms strongly incorporated its ideals and premises. Currently, in the context of the global crisis, arises the question if this public administration paradigm is the one that better fits the governance challenges of the new century. Taking this context in mind, this paper looks at how the Portuguese managerial reform takes into consideration the new governance paradigm and analyses the possibility of combining the managerial reforms approach and the new governance paradigm. We conclude that it is possible to successfully make this combination. However, taking into consideration the specific context that characterises our citizenship, more developments have to be done in order to improve citizens’ behaviours regarding active citizenship.