30 YEARS OF PUBLIC MANAGEMENT REFORMS: HAS THERE BEEN A PATTERN?
CHRISTOPHER POLLITT
A BACKGROUND PAPER FOR THE WORLD BANK CONSULTATION EXERCISE
Institutional details
Christopher Pollitt
BOF/ZAP Research Professor of Public Management
Public Management Institute
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Parkstraat 45 (bus 3609)
B-3000 Leuven
Belgium
30 YEARS OF PUBLIC MANAGEMENT REFORMS: HAS THERE BEEN A PATTERN?
Introduction
Let me immediately confess that this paper was written for another purpose. It is very much an academic overview, not written with any prescriptive or advisory intent. What is more, it is focused on the developed world, not at all on developing countries. However, when Nick Manning invited us to participate in the World Bank’s consultation exercise it did occur to me that this might nevertheless make useful background reading. Some of the observations apply even more to many developing countries than to the developed world. There is also perhaps some corrective value in remembering that, far from public management reform having been routinely successful in the developed world but being beset with difficulties in the developing world, it appears frequently to have been problematic in both. Humility is undersung as a management reform virtue.
I have added, at the end, a few possible ‘lessons’ that might be drawn from this analysis.
Has there been a pattern?
The answer is - yes, there has been a discernable pattern to the public management reforms which have swept over so many of the European, North American and Australasian countries (not to speak of elsewhere) in the three decades since 1980. Six prominent elements of this pattern are set out below.
First, public management reform itself (hereafter PMR) has become a more prominent political topic. It has emerged from the dusty backrooms of administrative change to feature, sometimes at least, as a major agenda item in party manifestos and government programmes (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011, chapter 1). It has acquired its own national and international networks and communities, which embrace not only public servants themselves, academics and a few politicians, but also, with increasing voice and influence, management consultants (National Audit Office, 2006; Sahlin-Andersson and Engwall, 2002; Saint-Martin, 2005).
Second, the New Public Management (NPM) ideology of treating government as if it were a business has informed many changes in many countries (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011, passim). More recently NPM has been partly diluted and partly merged with other streams of reform ideas. It is not, as some have alleged, ‘dead’ (Dunleavy et al, 2006), but it has evolved (Hood and Peters, 2004). We will come to all that later.
Third, the widespread popularity of NPM ideas does not mean that the developed world has converged on the NPM paradigm. In fact the impact of NPM ideas has been highly variable, for reasons that we will enumerate. And other, rival models have gradually become discernable, although each seems as slippery and potentially inconsistent as NPM itself (Goldfinch and Wallas, 2010; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011, chapter 1).
Fourth, we should note one very common element. It is that reform talk is often much more ambitious than the formal decisions that eventually get taken, and that there is then frequently a substantial implementation gap between what was decided and what finally gets put into operational practice. This is captured in the now widely-used stages model of talk, decisions, practice and results (Pollitt, 2002; 2007a; Goldfinch and Wallis, 2010). This feature carries the strong implication that in our assessments we need to be careful to treat like with like: to compare talk with talk and practices with practices, and not confuse the different stages. The pattern of talk may well be a poor guide to the pattern of practice.
Fifth, evaluations of PMR have been ambiguous or unconvincing in many cases where they have been attempted. In even more cases - in fact probably in most cases - no credible evaluation (and certainly no independent, scientifically-designed evaluation) has been carried out (Pollitt, 1995; Pollitt, 2009; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011, Appendix B). PMR has frequently been more an act of faith than a piece of evidence-based policymaking. The recent explosion of international comparative indicators of good governance (and the like) has not fundamentally changed this state of affairs.
Sixth, instances of cycling or alternation in PMR are not uncommon (Pollitt, 2008, pp51-59). Decentralising measures are followed, after an interval, by centralizing measures. Intensive and detailed performance measurement is succeeded by a phase during which reformers say that measurement and audit must be lightened, and operational management freed from the unreasonable burden of monitoring. This is certainly not a universal pattern, but it occurs fairly frequently (and has recently been sanctified in management-speak as ‘re-balancing’). It appears to be connected with the long ago-observed fact that public administration faces a number of inherently difficult trade-offs, where opting for one direction brings benefits but also, inevitably penalties, so that, after a while, the penalties seem to loom large while the benefits become too familiar and taken for granted, so that a new generation of reformers turn back to the opposite direction (Hood, 1976; Hood and Jackson 1991; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011, chapter 7; Simon, 1946)
Deepening the answer – 1 – the growth of PMR
Why has PMR become such a prominent topic? Few writers have focused on this question, but we may hazard a few suggestions.
Almost every party with a hope of power that contests elections in Western European and North American states now feels obliged to say something about PMR. Each has to aspire to ‘run things better’. Historically speaking that is a recent development. In the 1950s and 50s party manifestos were not full of PMR, they were full of promises of substantive new programmes and polices. Management reforms (or ‘machinery of government’ changes as they were sometimes called) were usually regarded as rather dry, technical issues – not something either headline writers or most politicians needed to take much interest in. However, as a number of political scientists and sociologists have noted, since the 1970s politics in the West have become less ideological and substantive but more ‘technical’ and ‘presentational’. The welfare state has been built, and now the job is restraining its unaffordable further growth, or even managing a gentle decline. Public management has become not simply an adjunct to other policies, but a policy in itself (Barzelay, 2001). How things are to be organized becomes almost as important as what things are to be done. And how things are to be presented is also crucial – policies can no longer be expected to speak for themselves, they must be designed and presented so as to catch the current public mood, as revealed by professional polling and focus groups, and channeled and amplified by the mass media:
‘One of the key implications of this emphasis on government as technique is to contest those models of government that wish to view it solely – or even mainly – as a manifestation of values, ideologies, worldviews, etc.’ (Dean, 1999, p31)
Management, of course, is identified with both dimensions of technique – first, with how to squeeze every last drop of output from every dollar spent and, second, with how to market policy ideas and decisions in ways that will maximize acquiescence and minimize opposition.
In addition, power is draining away from the nation state – upwards, to international networks, and in some cases downwards, to regional or local bodies (though this should be understood in a nuanced way, not as a zero sum game – e.g. Held, 2004). So for national politicians ‘technical politics’ means projecting the idea that you can do more with less; that you can cut out waste and increase efficiency. Hence, during the 1980s, the huge explosion, on both sides of the Atlantic, of concern with ‘management’ in general, and ‘efficiency’ in particular (Pollitt, 1990). In a book which celebrates the coming of age of public management as a policy question, Barzelay wrote that:
‘beginning in the 1970s, the potential for policy change in the area of public management increased, as economies suffered stagflation and public perceptions of bureaucracy became more negative’ (Barzelay, 2001, p1)
Since that time we have seen a new community – one might almost say industry – come into being. It is a cross-sectoral, international network of public management ‘experts’, people based in governments or agencies or consultancies or occasionally in academia, and who more and more frequently move between these different roles. They swap ideas, compete for contracts and attend conferences together. They draw on an extensively common and rapidly changing stock of generic management ideas (Sahlin-Andersson and Engwall, 2002). They feed on a continuous flow of lucrative contracts from governments (National Audit Office, 2006). More and more governments have set up one or more specialist management reform units, such as the Prime Minister’s Public Service Delivery Unit (UK), the Public Management Department of the Finnish Ministry of Finance, the French Directorate General for State Modernization, the Norwegian Ministry of Government Administration and Reform, and so on. Members of these organizations may themselves have consultancy experience or they may become consultants afterwards, trading on their experience gained near the heart of government reforms (for multiple examples of this interpenetration, see Barber, 2007). More profoundly, these units and departments help to institutionalize ‘modernization’ and ‘reform’, continuously putting forward programmes and targets, drawing attention to new management ideas and techniques and generally keeping the rest of central government ‘on its toes’ (for a vivid account of how intrusive this can become, see again Barber, 2007). Such international networks are, of course, immeasurably facilitated by the advent of the Internet. Nothing like this existed in the 1950s or even ‘60s.
All this has constituted a kind of ‘multiplier’ effect. A community has grown up in whose interests it is to create new ideas and techniques, and therefore further reform. There is nothing necessarily sinister about this, even if it can often be construed as a form of self-interest. It is simply that more and more people take up public sector roles after some training in ‘management’, and more and more consultancies depend on winning and subsequently sustaining contracts to facilitate reform (Saint Martin, 2005). For example, the UK public sector spent approximately ₤2.8 billion on consultants in 2005-6, a 33% increase on what the level had been only two years previously – in fact central government spent more on consultants per employee than did comparator private sector firms! (National Audit Office, 2006, pp5 and 15).
Deepening the answer – 2 – the business of government
The language of public administration has changed enormously over the past three decades. One main trend – at least in Anglophone countries – has been towards the widespread adoption of titles, terms and concepts from the world of private sector business. Thus departments and agencies which wish to do something now have to present a ‘business case’ for it; numerous senior public service positions are now designated as ‘chief executive’; organizations are expected to ‘benchmark’ and ‘business process re-engineer’; civil service training curricula are saturated with sessions on ‘leadership’ and ‘innovation’ (Pollitt and Op de Beeck, 2010). One peak in this trend came in 1997, when the then US Vice President, charged with a major reform of the federal civil service, published a glossy, cartoon-festooned booklet entitled Businesslike government: lessons learned from America’s best companies (Gore, 1997). It is easy to forget how foreign this kind of terminology would have sounded 40 years ago, when the public service had its own terms for most of these roles and activities. ‘Citizens and businesses expect the same levels of access and personalization from public services as they receive from leading private sector organizations such as Amazon and Tesco. They expect to be able to access information from multiple locations and in ways that suit them rather than the providers’ (H.M.Government, 2010, p9).
This love affair with a ‘businesslike approach’ may, or may not, have come to an end with the business-induced global financial crisis of 2008-9 (it is too early to be sure – and we should note that the UK government’s praise for supermarket management - above - post dates the crisis). Yet even if it has been badly dented, this way of thinking has now penetrated so many public sector organizations, and has been promoted to an entire generation of public service managers, so its effects will surely not disappear overnight. Furthermore, it is not only that business thinking has been ingrained in minds, business practices have also been embedded in standard operating procedures, including budgeting and accountancy rules (Newberry and Pallot, 2005) and personnel regulations:
‘In almost all [EU] Member States the differences between civil servants and other public employees and civil servants and private sector employees have become fewer. Still, a few member states stick to the traditional patterns and maintain at least some traditional features. Other Member States have almost entirely aligned the working conditions within the public service and between the public- and private sector’ (Demmke and Moilanen, 2010, p139)
Another development that has gathered pace over the past quarter century has been the evolution of critical, large-scale public IT systems which are essentially supplied, maintained and run by for-profit transnational corporations: