Explaining governance with depth: Critical realism and the morphogenetic turn in public administration research

Public Administration (PA) research remains divided between positivist approaches that privilege regularities and interpretive approaches that prioritize meaning, often at the expense of causal depth. This paper argues that Critical Realism (CR) offers a viable alternative by integrating explanation and interpretation within a stratified ontology. Building on Bhaskar's philosophy and Archer's Morphogenetic Approach (MA), the paper develops a programmatic explanatory framework for PA research that explains how structures, cultures, and agency interact over time in open systems. It shows how retroduction, analytical dualism, and morphogenetic sequencing can be operationalized to analyze reform trajectories, accountability regimes, street-level discretion, informal governance, and public value creation. The paper contributes by consolidating CR–MA across these domains and clarifying how qualitative and mixed-method research can move from empirical observations to generative mechanisms while remaining attentive to context, interpretation, and power. In doing so, it advances an explanatory turn in PA research capable of accounting for variation, change, and legitimacy in complex governance contexts.