Governance traditions and narratives of public sector reform in contemporary France

This article explores the basic traditions of governance in contemporary France and the narratives of public sector reform associated with them. It should be stressed right from the outset that this article does not aim to describe the set of public sector reforms that have been implemented in France in the last ten years or so. Instead, the aim is to demonstrate the similarities and differences between the narratives of the left and the right with regard to these reforms and to show how these narratives help to explain the types of reform that have been enacted. The basic argument is that there is a certain commonality to both the left and the right with regard to their narratives of public sector reform. At the same time, though, there are differences of emphasis both within each tradition and between the two main traditions themselves. Except where indicated, all translations are the author's own.     

The view from below: Local government and Putin's reforms

Local government reforms in contemporary Russia are placed in the broader contexts of political reform under Putin and the historical relationship between local administration and the state. Reforms of local government thus help illuminate the architecture of contemporary state building in Russia and the degree to which contemporary Russia perpetuates political traditions. This study reviews the antecedent action in local government prior to the Putin era. It then examines the Kozak Commission and the new law on local government, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of these reforms. Finally, this study examines the challenges of implementing the reforms and what these challenges tell us about devolution and centralisation under Putin.     

Radical Reform in New Zealand: Crisis,Windows of Opportunity,and Rational Actors

This article uses three perspectives to explain the radical economic and state sector reforms undertaken in New Zealand starting in 1984. We interpret the reforms using a rational‐comprehensive perspective, a garbage can perspective and a modified garbage can perspective identified in the work of John Kingdon. With New Zealand as an illustrative case, we explore the conditions under which radical reform is possible, the factors governing the adoption of reforms, and the impact on the reform process of a country's historical and cultural traditions. Our analysis emphasizes the import of a package of ready‐made solutions, strong advocates (particularly a well‐placed policy entrepreneur) who attach the solutions to a problem, and the existence of a ‘window of opportunity’ for adoption of the reforms. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of adopting reforms that run counter to a nation's long‐established traditions.     

Radical Reform in New Zealand: Crisis, Windows of Opportunity, and Rational Actors

This article uses three perspectives to explain the radical economic and state sector reforms undertaken in New Zealand starting in 1984. We interpret the reforms using a rational-comprehensive perspective, a garbage can perspective and a modified garbage can perspective identified in the work of John Kingdon. With New Zealand as an illustrative case, we explore the conditions under which radical reform is possible, the factors governing the adoption of reforms, and the impact on the reform process of a country's historical and cultural traditions. Our analysis emphasizes the import of a package of ready-made solutions, strong advocates (particularly a well-placed policy entrepreneur) who attach the solutions to a problem, and the existence of a 'window of opportunity' for adoption of the reforms. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of adopting reforms that run counter to a nation's long-established traditions.     

Searching for civil society: changing patterns of governance in Britain

To understand governance, we ask who is telling the story from within which tradition. We argue there is no essentialist notion of governance but at least four conceptions each rooted in a distinctive tradition. The first section of the paper describes the relevant traditions: Tory, Liberal, Whig and Socialist. The second section describes the different notions of governance associated with each tradition; intermediate institutions, marketizing public services, reinventing the constitution and trust and negotiation. We explain these distinct conceptions of governance as responses to the dilemmas of inflation and state overload. In the conclusion, we summarize how and why traditions change, concluding, there is no such thing as governance, but only the differing constructions of the several traditions.     

Citizens versus Parties: Explaining Institutional Change in German Local Government, 1989–2008

Abstract

From 1989 to 2008, local governments in Germany have experienced ‘massive’ institutional change. Local constitutions have been altered in all German states giving citizens more say in local politics, while at the same time reducing local parties' influence. The paper first describes the changes according to two analytical models of local democracy. It then tries to explain the institutional change as a process of diffusion in a federal state. Three questions are answered in the explanatory part: Why did some forerunner states start with the reforms at the beginning of the 1990s and not earlier? Why did the reforms continue in other states although there was no general pressure from above? And why did some states continue with the reforms while others did not? In the first part of the paper the changes are described quantitatively while a qualitative approach is used in the explanatory part. The analyses show that the beginning of the reforms is related to ‘massive political failure’ while further reforms are a result of rational learning by different actors (large parties, small parties, non-governmental actors) depending on different means of reform. Based on these results we forecast a continuation of the reforms in the next years leading to a convergence of citizen-oriented local government all over Germany.     

Traditions of Australian governance

Australia's traditions of governance tend to be pragmatic and to blend different ideologies. Its traditions are less dependent on political party ideologies, and more on competing conceptions of the significant problems and the way that they should be addressed. In this article we identify five principal traditions, namely: settler–state developmentalism; civilizing capitalism; the development of a social–liberal constitutional tradition; traditions of federalism; and the exclusiveness/ inclusiveness of the state and society. These traditions have been robust and have developed over time. We show how political actors operating from within this plurality of traditions have understood the public sector and how their understandings have led to changes in the way the public sector is structured.     

'Public Service', 'Public Management' and the 'Modernization' of French Public Administration

Since the mid-1980s, successive French governments have attempted to 'modernize' the structures and methods of public administration. Although this vocabulary of 'modernization' is distinctly French, many of the actual reforms appear, at first sight, to be based on imported 'new public management' doctrines. In this article, we analyse the recent French reforms and the ideas underpinning them and we attempt to locate these reforms in their comparative context, employing data from a wide range of official reports and secondary sources and from a series of semi-structured interviews with senior officials. We build on the analyses of Hood (1991 and 1995) and Wright (1994) that if many governments are dealing with similar problems by adopting similar approaches to reforms based on private sector man-agement methods, the actual nature of the reforms in any individual state depends on the national context, or 'initial endowment'. In France, the importance of administrative law, the successful experience of nationalized, monopoly, public-service providers in the post-war period, the political weight and established rights of civil servants, and the idea of the 'general interest', represented at the local level by the prefect, explain many of the distinctive features of the hybrid modernization reforms. In short, an analysis of the policy of modernization and its origin leads to conclusions which are highly consistent with new institutional explanations of policy making (Hall 1987)     

Reshaping Public Administration: The Spanish Experience Compared to the UK

This paper analyses the nature and extent of the policies of modernizing Spanish public administration. Successive Spanish governments have been involved in modernizing public administration with the stress on customer focus, improving service delivery and implementing quality awards, service charts and information technologies.
As a basis for assessing the reforms, we compare Spanish New Public Management (NPM) developments with the initiatives undertaken in the UK. The paper evaluates the usage of NPM concepts in the Spanish and UK experiences and cultural differences based on public and common law traditions respectively, locating these reforms in a comparative context. We focus on why similar concepts and initiatives could provide such different results in each country and how the cultural and institutional features produce differences in the way that NPM postulates are defined, implemented, monitored and evaluated. The answer is probably rooted in the context in which the initiatives have been developing.     

State, administration and governance in Germany: competing traditions and dominant narratives

The article explores the evolution of competing views on state, administration and governance in Germany from an historical perspective, with an emphasis on the last five decades. To understand the governance discourse in Germany one has to start from different notions of the state. The first part therefore offers a brief, somewhat polemic, overview about different state traditions in Germany in the twentieth and twenty–first centuries. The second part looks at how discourses about the proper role, the appropriate structures and processes of the public sector and its interactions with its environment have changed during the history of the Federal Republic. The analytic focus is on the different narratives about administrative policies, understood as the various scenarios, assumptions and arguments on which competing policy–suggestions for the public sector have been based. The article argues that it is not sufficient to interpret the ups and downs of different discourses and Leitbilder as more or less erratic, post–modern fashions and fads. Instead, the line up of the central catch–phrases, from democratic via active and lean to the activating state, reflect learning processes, driven above all by the political competition creating a continuous demand for 'better', more appropriate narratives to guide and explain current policies.     

Making sense of communitarianism: the Bolivian experience

In Bolivia, the state and society is undergoing radical transformations. The indigenous movements have revitalised traditions such as communitarianism, and ‘communitarian development’ has come to the forefront of Bolivian politics. The aim of this article is to identify what communitarian development means in the Bolivian context; how it is conceived and how it is practiced. I examine how communitarian development is conceptualised in the Aymara indigenous movement and in policy documents, and analyse what communitarianism might mean to people who uphold such values. I identify and discuss five different but intertwined significations; communitarian economy, communitarian work, communitarian management, communitarian law and communitarian values. I show that Bolivian communitarianism contains conceptualisations of cultural phenomena, which emerge at the nexus of experiences and expectations for the future, and argue that, despite tensions and pitfalls, communitarian development has the potential to increase indigenous wellbeing and agency and to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of what communitarianism is, or could be.     

Inside chinese bureaucracy: Civil service reform in the ministry of light industry

Since 1987, mainland Chinese ministries have been experimenting with a western style civil service system. The provisional guidelines published in that year called for the creation of a professional administrative class to be hired by open recruitment at the central and provisional levels of leading state ministries. The article is a micro-analysis of civil service reform in the Ministry of Light Industry and evaluates the first two years of reform in this ministry, which is responsible for supervising roughly twenty percent of China's production of durable consumer goods. The reform process has been gradual and incremental. The reforms were stimulated by the need to modernize China's state-run ministries in order to make them economically competitive with the mainland's growing private market sector. However, the article concludes that the reforms are too limited to make a substantial contribution to this goal.     

Managerialism Meets Regime: A Distinctively Singaporean Marriage?

Managerial reforms were once assumed to be apolitical, and hence universally applied to various political settings. This assumption has been widely contested; some argue that managerial reforms are not applicable to countries outside what are termed Western liberal democracies, due to differing political contexts. The case of Singapore offers a counter-argument to these claims—managerial reforms were well-received in the state and its bureaucracy; both of which were vastly different from those of liberal democracies. The article further argues that this was not a coincidence; there seem to be salient reasons why managerial reforms were able to ‘marry’ Singapore's regime. This case study offers insights vis-à-vis a broader question: whether and how managerial reforms can be justified within and received in differing political contexts. It seems imperative to address this question, given the implications for future scholarship and how managerialism is a significant matter of concern to many governments worldwide.     

Patronage,District Creation,and Reform in Uganda

The effects of economic and political reforms on patronage in Africa remains unclear. In particular, there is much disagreement about whether structural adjustment programs and democratization have helped to make patronage less pervasive in African politics. Here, I examine the case study of Uganda, which has received much praise for its large-scale economic and political reforms since the late 1980s. However, at the same time, Uganda has also experienced a near-explosion in the number of districts (the highest level of local government), going from 39 to 80 in less than a decade. I examine a variety of potential reasons why these districts might have been created and argue, through the use of both qualitative and quantitative analysis, that district creation has functioned as a source of patronage. Specifically, I show that President Museveni’s government has created new districts as a means to compensate for other patronage resources lost through reforms and that new districts have helped him to continue to win elections. This paper thus constitutes the first rigorous demonstration that the creation of new sub-national political units can constitute a form of patronage and suggests that similar processes may be currently taking place across Africa.     

The politics of market reforms: Korea's path from Chaebol Republic to market democracy and back

This paper studies the politics of market-oriented reforms in Korea since the 1997/98 financial crisis. It focuses on the capacity of the state to implement these reforms, and challenges the view that successfully implemented market reforms follow a technocratic ‘best practice’ approach. On the contrary, this paper argues that reforms in Korea were relatively successful because they were political projects that went beyond ownership concepts of the IMF and World Bank. The temporary weakness of big business (chaebol) and the formation of reform coalitions by the government created a balance of power between societal interest groups that opened a political space for the government. The state regained some of the autonomy it had lost during the ‘Chaebol Republic’ from 1987 to 1997 and was able to implement reforms in a temporary corporatist framework. However, the chaebol adapted to the new situation and used the market-friendly reforms in their favour. The re-emergence of the chaebol undermined state autonomy and with the inauguration of the new President and former chaebol CEO Lee Myung Bak in 2008, Korea is arguably entering the second Chaebol Republic.     

Legitimacy dilemmas: the IMF's pursuit of country ownership

There can be little doubt that the International Monetary Fund is currently facing a serious challenge to its legitimacy. Such criticisms echo similar debates that have surrounded other international organisations, including the World Bank, the United Nations and the World Trade Organization. As these different institutions seek to respond to this challenge, the Fund's efforts to respond to its critics provide a number of interesting lessons and warnings. In this article I examine the Fund's response to challenges to its legitimacy by focusing on one of the often overlooked aspects the institution's recent reforms: the IMF's efforts to change its relationship with borrowing countries by revising its conditionality guidelines and pursuing greater domestic ‘ownership’ over the reforms that it requires. While this response helps to resolve a number of legitimacy gaps that have emerged in the past decades, this strategy has also produced a number of new legitimacy dilemmas that raise questions about the sustainability of the IMF's current reform efforts. Chief among them is the limit to the Fund's ability to obtain the deeper political legitimacy that it seeks by using the same narrowly technical economic strategies that it has relied on in the past.     

Post-Soviet Developmentalism and the Political Economy of Russia’s Electricity Sector Liberalization

Observers of Russian state market relations typically consider the state as an entity engaged in creating rent-seeking opportunities for bureaucrats or powerful economic interests. The trajectory and outcomes of electricity sector reforms demonstrate the limits of this perspective and serve to highlight a developmental strand in Russian economic policy, which I call post-Soviet developmentalism. I found that post-Soviet developmentalism is key to understanding the patterns of market institutions that have emerged in the newly liberalized electricity sector and that they cannot be adequately explained if the state is largely seen as a predator or as captured by oligarchic interests. A close analysis of the institutional underpinnings of new electricity markets suggests that they were shaped in political bargains, in which the government sought to enlist Russia’s oligarchic conglomerates for its modernization agenda and developmental priorities. The paper links this discussion to three sets of theoretical literatures: It speaks to the debates on the post-Soviet transition, more broadly to the political economy of market reform, and finally, it addresses the developmental state literature.     

NEW MODES OF GOVERNANCE IN ITALY AND THE NETHERLANDS: THE CASE OF ACTIVATION POLICIES

This article discusses the growing importance of operational reforms in the context of welfare state transformation processes, and the role that principles of new governance play in shaping these reforms. It focuses specifically on one social policy area considered crucial in reforming welfare states: the provision of activation services that aim at increasing the employability and labour‐market participation of people dependent on benefits or social assistance. The article argues that besides the reforms of the programmatic aspects of social policies and social services (formal policy reforms), reforms of the way in which policies and services are organized, administered and delivered (operational policy reforms) have received increasing attention as a ’second strand’ of welfare state reforms. It illustrates this by analysing and comparing reforms of the provision of activation services in two European countries: Italy and The Netherlands. The article not only reveals the growing emphasis in both countries on operational policy reforms which are to an important degree inspired by principles of new governance, but also shows significant similarities and differences in their concrete manifestations, which could be interpreted as pointing out processes of ‘path‐dependent convergence’.     

Strengthening local political leadership through institutional design: how and why

ABSTRACT

Over recent decades, the institutions of political leadership have been criticised for being caught up in outdated designs that are not adapting to societal changes. In many western countries, this diagnosis has spurred design reforms aimed at strengthening political leadership at the local level. Based on a study of reforms in Norwegian and Danish municipalities, this article first develops a typology of reforms aimed at strengthening local political leadership. Leadership reforms are categorised into four types aimed at strengthening Executive, Collective, Collaborative, or Distributive political leadership. The typology is used to map the prevalence of the different types of reforms in the two countries. The results show that design reforms as such are more widespread in Danish than in Norwegian municipalities. In particular, reforms aimed at strengthening Distributive political leadership are used more extensively in Denmark than in Norway. The article discusses the contextual differences that may explain this variation.     

The river of inter-civilisational relations: the ebb and flow of peoples,ideas and innovations

As a tool for understanding the world in which we live the study of the history of political thought is stunted because of a preoccupation with the Western canon as the history of political thought to the exclusion of other histories and traditions. This ongoing exclusion is itself facilitated by a deeply entrenched select reading of the Western canon; a reading that overlooks a tendency within the canon to not just ignore but suppress and dismiss the value of other accounts of history and traditions of thought. An opening of the Western mind to these assumed to be alien traditions of social, legal and political thought reveals that, in the global market place of ideas, these purportedly competing and non-compatible traditions of thought might in fact have considerably more in common than what sets them apart: thus opening the way for an authentic inter-civilisational dialogue that focuses more on co-operation and less on clashes.