Dissatisfaction with conventional regulatory approaches has led to an
emerging new governance paradigm (NGP) in environmental and natural resources (ENR)
management. This NGP is premised on a need to reconceptualize ENR management regimes,
reconnect with stakeholders, and redefine what constitutes administrative rationality in
the public and private sectors. The ultimate fate of the NGP is in doubt, however. This
essay argues that the NGP is best appreciated as an effort to graft managerial
flexibility onto an otherwise inflexible regulatory regime—an effort that has left a
halfway, halting, and patchworked regulatory regime in its wake. Applying John Gaus’s
notion of the ecology of public administration as an analytical framework, the essay
addresses three questions: (a) What were the sociopolitical, technological, and economic
factors propelling and delimiting theNGPover the last quarter of the 20th century; (b)
how likely are they to endure; and (c) with what consequences for ENR managers,
regulators, and regulatees in the 21st century?
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