New Public Governance, the Third Sector, and Co-Production

14  Co-Producing Safety orParticipative Window Dressing?

Regulation Partnerships in GermanLocal Governance Arrangements

Matthias Freise

INTRODUCTION

Since the early 1990s, municipalities and counties in all German states (Länder) have been implementing a new wave of administrative reforms, partly in response to a budgetary squeeze, but also to make local governance more accessible to citizens (Wollmannn, 2000). In the words of Scharpf (1993), local governance reforms in Germany aim to realize the ambitious intention of increasing both input and output legitimacy at the same time and against a backdrop of financial and economic turbulence.¹

These activities are in line with the new public management (NPM) debate, which has been dominating international ...