Big Questions in Contemporary Public Management : What Can We Learn from Public Budgeting and Financial Management?

Questions of how public organizations control and manage resources have been relegated to an insular subfield of contemporary public management. This is both unfortunate and unnatural because insights from the study of budgeting and financial management have traditionally been a driving force of public management's conceptual and empirical development. In this paper we seek to address this problem by reconnecting contemporary findings from the budgeting and financial management subfield to broader concerns in public management. We focus our discussion on the centrality of management technique in contemporary public management, and we argue that research in select areas of contemporary public budgeting and financial management has and will continue to illuminate the implications of reform and innovation in management technique, particularly in our current environment of amorphous institutional arrangements and diffuse, shared power