Abstract
The end of the 1970's then marked the advance of a new paradigm favouring the models from private sector as examples for a reform of processes in both decision-making and administrative practice in the public sector. As a result, the diffusion of government and private in countries inspired by the New Public Management ideas reached unprecedented levels. (Osborne 2010) (Pollitt, Bouckaert 2011) The era of extensive privatization of large parts of the public sector of 1980s' and 1990s' may indeed have left an impression that the significance of the 'public' understood as the broad mass of citizens, is not growing, but diminishing.
Even with the emergence of Public-Private Partnerships, where 'the public' seemingly appears in a prominent position, the citizenry has not really risen to the role of an equal partner and remained to a large extent in the mode of passive consumers. (Hayllar 2010) The really important decisions still seemed to be taken on the government-business basis. Nevertheless, with the wave of criticism of the New Public Management regime and radical emancipation of the civic sector, enabled partly by the spread of modern technologies over the last couple of years, may signal another shift in the balance of power and boundaries between the state, business and civil society.
The models like Public-Private Citizen Collaboration (Hayllar, Hui 2010) or network governance (Rhodes 1997) are coming to the spotlight. In this panel, we are thus interested in countries' experience with finding a balance between the influence and interests of the main regulators and groups of actors.
We welcome papers dealing with tensions or synergies between the public and private across different areas, as well as papers focused on specific strategies and methods individual public or private actors use to advance their interests, and on the ways public interest is secured in different countries' contexts.