Public Management and Public Security Policy: An Integrated Conceptual Governance Framework with a Mexican Documentary Illustration

Public-security policy is commonly assessed through operational outputs and crime-related indicators, yet policy performance also depends on the administrative and governance arrangements through which priorities are diagnosed, coordinated, implemented, evaluated, corrected, and subjected to public accountability. This conceptual study develops an integrated governance framework for evidence-informed public-security policy through a theory-driven synthesis of public management, policy capacity, collaborative governance, whole-of-government coordination, evidence-informed policymaking, performance management, organizational learning, public value, police legitimacy, accountability, and security-governance scholarship. The synthesis distinguishes five management functions—strategic diagnosis, policy design, collaborative governance, implementation capability, and evaluation and organizational learning—and connects them to a multilevel capability-to-legitimacy architecture. The framework’s incremental contribution lies not in introducing these constructs individually, but in specifying the interfaces through which mandates, resources, evidence, coordination arrangements, implementation capabilities, performance information, accountability mechanisms, and legitimacy conditions interact across the public-security policy process. Particular attention is given to construct boundaries, level-of-analysis distinctions, feedback mechanisms, and conditions under which otherwise desirable management arrangements may fail or produce trade-offs. Mexico is included as an illustrative documentary vignette rather than as an empirical validation case, using current federal planning and public-security instruments to demonstrate how the proposed analytical categories can be operationalized. The framework is presented as a candidate integrative heuristic whose propositions, measurement structure, and cross-level relationships require future empirical testing.