Good governance is a contested concept in public administration theory and practice. This concluding article builds on the presented contributions as well as on additional research. First, we summarize the diversity, leading to a sketch of two basic approaches towards good governance (organizational and value oriented). Additionally questions concerning the normativity, the pluralism of values and the object of good governance (process or policy) are addressed. Second, attention is paid to strategies to cope with values in governance, acknowledging the tensions between those values. Basic strategies aim at ‘choosing’ between values, ‘accommodating’ (in time, project, context) and ‘connecting’ values (through institutions or hybridization).

In the past decades, employment and incomes were on the rise, social spending remained high while passive welfare states were progressively transformed into so-called ‘investment states’. Despite these favourable conditions, however, contemporary welfare states did not succeed in reducing poverty and inequality. What lies beneath the disquieting poverty standstill and how did welfare states miss this ‘window of opportunity’? In this article, we aim to shed more light on this question. We identify three structural trends behind the poverty standstill: rising employment has benefited workless households only partially; income protection for the working-age population out of work has become less adequate; social policies and, more generally, social redistribution have become less pro-poor. In other words, the reorientation of social expenditures to the employed occurred at the expense of those at risk in the labour market. The success of future poverty-reducing strategies will depend on the way policies aimed at labour market inclusion will be implemented and the emphasis on redistributive policies.