The volume aims to understand the concept of governance in its most complex manifestation and to identify its theoretical roots in the 'neo-liberal' mode of thinking cutting across different sub-disciplines in social sciences. It fills gaps in the available literature that tend to reduce governance to just another mode of public administration undermining the ideological challenges in the era of globalization. The volume has two interconnected parts: the first deals with the conceptual articulation of governance while the second is devoted to study the phenomenon empirically. The essays together with the introduction provide a critical analysis of the governance paradigm, which is concerned not only with the reform in public administration but also identifies new areas of research of a multi-disciplinary nature. By drawing attention to the changes in the theoretical domain of public administration-the study is both a comprehensive review of the available literature and also a quest for 'new' directions in the discipline.