Taking Stock: Assessing Public Sector Reforms [1 ed.] 9780773567283, 9780773517424

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Canadian Centre for Management Development S E R I E S ON G O V E R N A N C E AND PUBLIC MANAGEMENT

This series will offer both practical and theoretical perspectives on governance and public management. It will marry the insights of practitioners and researchers, providing a window on practical developments and initiatives as well as leading-edge thinking throughout the world. Topics to be covered in this series may include: measuring the achievements of public sector reform, the organization and structure of government, the legislative-executive-public service relationship, the role of central agencies, horizontal coordination for greater policy coherence, accountability, organizational effectiveness in the public sector, service standards and quality, leadership in the public sector, and the ethics and values of public service. The Canadian Centre for Management Development is an agency of the Government of Canada established to provide executive development and to "study and conduct research into the theory and practice of public management," as well as to "encourage a greater awareness in Canada of issues related to public sector management and the role and functions of government." This new publication series is part of a wider research and publication program, including a range of activities such as case studies, fellowships, action research programs, a management resource centre, and the CCMD International Governance Network.

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Taking Stock Assessing Public Sector Reforms Edited by B. Guy Peters and Donald J. Savoie

Canadian Centre for Management Development Centre canadien de gestion McGill-Queen's University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Buffalo

© Canadian Centre for Management Development/ Centre canadien de gestion 1998 ISBN 0-7735-1742-! (cloth)

ISBN 0-7735-1743-x (paper) Legal deposit second quarter 1998 Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper McGill-Queen's University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for its publishing program.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Main entry under title: Taking stock: assessing public sector reforms (Canadian Centre for Management Development series on governance and public management, ISSN 1201-2637; 2) Co-published by Canadian Centre for Management Development. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-7735-1742-1 (bound) - ISBN o-7735-i743-x (pbk.) i. Civil service reform - Evaluation. 2. Public administration - Evaluation. 3. Civil service - Personnel management - Evaluation. I. Peters, B. Guy. II. Savoie, Donald J., 1947- . in. Canadian Centre for Management Development, in. Series JF1351.T341998 351 098-900231-4

Contents

Preface vii Acknowledgments xi Introduction B. Guy Peters and Donald J. Savoie 3 The Changing Role of the State Bert A. Rockman 20 Managerialism Revisited Christopher Pollitt 45 What Works? The Antiphons of Administrative Reform B. Guy Peters 78 Public Sector Values and Administrative Reforms Nicole de Montricher

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Public Consultation and Citizen Participation: Dilemmas of Policy Advice Jon Pierre 137 Making Public Policy: The Changing Role of the Higher Civil Service Patricia W. Ingraham 164 Assessing Past and Current Personnel Reforms Hal G. Rainey 187 Innovation in Public Sector Management Michel Paquin 221 A New Generation of Budget Reform Naomi Caiden 252 Central Agencies and Departments: Empowerment and Coordination John Hart 285 Restructuring Government for the Management and Delivery of Public Services Peter Aucoin 310 The Changing Nature of Accountability Paul G. Thomas 348 fifteen Years of Reform: What Have We Learned? Donald J. Savoie 394

Preface

This volume, the second in the Canadian Centre for Management Development's series on Governance and Public Management, offers the reader an international perspective on some important public sector reforms that have occurred in a number of countries over the past fifteen years. Despite the difficulty of assessing the long-term impact of the civil service reform initiatives in the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, France, the United States, and other developed countries, the authors of the following chapters have richly documented some of the successes and failures of these various reform initiatives. Their individual contributions raise fundamental questions about the impact of the reform movement on the future role of the public service, on the administrative structures and policy-making capacity of governments, and on public sector values and accountability, among others. A concluding chapter draws out some of the lessons learned from the various reform efforts and makes some predictions about what we may expect from future reform initiatives. Both this volume and its predecessor, Governance in a Changing Environment, are the outcome of a pioneering approach at the Canadian Centre for Management Development that aims to bring together the insights of academic specialists and senior practitioners of public administration. Both projects involved intersecting networks of researchers and public service executives, and vii

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in each case the research agenda and topics for exploration were established by the executive network. Over the period from January 1995 to April 1996 the executives met monthly to explore each topic. They were assisted in their reflections through presentations from and dialogue with individual researchers. This dialogue also helped the researchers to deepen their own understanding of key issues in public administration. A roundtable in the spring of 1996 gave the international research team an opportunity to compare perspectives and approaches and to exchange views with leaders of the Canadian Public Service. Through such interactive approaches and other similar methods - such as study teams and action research networks - the Canadian Centre for Management Development seeks to involve practitioners directly in the research process, and to undertake research in a manner that is relevant to researchers and executives alike and that produces both knowledge and action outcomes. At CCMD we like to say that our objective is to undertake research not just for public service executives and leaders but with them. We believe that these approaches offer models that may well be of interest to other learning and research organizations in the public sector, and elsewhere too. The success of this process of reflection, dialogue and refinement is due in large measure to the leadership and guidance of the volume's co-editors, B. Guy Peters and Donald J. Savoie, both of them leading scholars of comparative public administration and Senior Fellows of CCMD. I am grateful to them for the knowledge, wise counsel and leadership they provided throughout the development of the program and in bringing the work to completion. I am also grateful to the senior public servants who participated in different ways as the program took shape and who offered many unique and valuable insights from the practitioner's perspective. Finally, I extend my warm thanks to the distinguished international team of research collaborators for their outstanding contributions to this second volume in our Governance and Public Management series. Taking Stock is the outcome of the second in a series of three research programs. The first looked at the changing environment

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for governance and public administration. Taking Stock looks back over a decade or more of public sector reform and attempts to draw lessons and insights from experience in many countries and jurisdictions. Its successor looks forward and explores the conditions and requirements for revitalizing public service in the decades to come. Like its predecessors, the next stage of the governance research program will involve an international network of distinguished researchers and a similar network of senior Canadian public service executives. The research will attempt to position the public service in the context of a changing public policy environment, rapid technological change, and a more involved and demanding public. We look forward to sharing the results of this research in a future volume in the Governance and Public Management series. RALPH HEINTZMAN

Vice-Principal, Research Canadian Centre for Management Development

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Acknowledgments

The production of a substantial volume such as this involves the skills and dedication of many different people, both at the research stage and during the publication process. I am grateful to all those at the Canadian Centre for Management Development who have devoted so much of their time to bringing this ambitious project, the second volume in our series on Governance and Public Management, to a successful conclusion. In particular, I would like to thank Ginette Turcot-Ladouceur for her invaluable assistance in managing the many arrangements associated with the research program, including the meetings of practitioners and the contributors to this volume. I also extend my warm thanks to Maurice Demers for his pivotal role in coordinating the activities of the international research team and for serving as liaison with the publisher, and to Heather Steele for her assistance in seeing the final texts through the publication process. Finally, I am grateful to Philip Cercone and his team at McGillQueen's University Press for their commitment to promoting and publishing CCMD'S Governance and Public Management series and the professionalism they have shown in bringing this second volume to completion. RALPH HEINTZMAN

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TAKING STOCK: ASSESSING PUBLIC SECTOR REFORMS

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Introduction B. GUY PETERS AND DONALD J. SAVOIE

The British civil service has been described recently as a "great rock on the tide-line." The point is that political and reform waves come and go but the rock remains virtually unchanged (Hennessy 1989:628). Peter Hennessy (1989), a keen observer of British politics, once wrote that "the history of Whitehall is a story of long periods of routine punctuated by occasional orgies of reform" (19). The same observations could be made about virtually all public services in the Western world. Senior public servants everywhere have been accused of invariably favouring the status quo and always being on the lookout to protect the interest of their own institution. Even when politicians insist on change, the thinking is that much more often than not senior officials may give the appearance of change, but on closer inspection they ensure that the status quo prevails. Many of them, we are told, have developed a well-honed capacity to give the appearance of change while in fact moving very slowly or even standing still. We suspect, however, that things have changed a great deal during the past fifteen years. We certainly have seen many measures designed to reform the civil service as an institution. Indeed, one is tempted to turn Peter Hennessy's observation around and argue that since the early 19805, we have seen everywhere, especially in Anglo-American democracies, orgies of reform rarely punctuated by brief periods of routine. What we do 3

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Introduction

not know is whether the "great rock on the tide-line" has remained unchanged or even unscathed. The purpose of this collection of essays is to answer the above question or at least to begin to answer the question. To that end, we assembled a team of distinguished international scholars of government and public administration to review the most important issues in public sector reform measures introduced since the early 19805. The idea that members of the academic community should "take stock" of the various reform measures and their impact on public administration was born in a meeting of senior Canadian government officials in the fall of 1994. They felt that important and possibly lasting changes were being introduced in various countries. They asked that we take stock of these measures and tease out lessons learned about their implementation and their impact. The practitioners' interest continued as we began work on the project. They attended monthly seminars where the project was discussed and where many of the authors presented a first draft of their chapters. The meetings were not only well attended but they also proved to be extremely valuable for the academics. The practitioners read the draft chapters and offered numerous insightful comments. They were also very candid in sharing experiences gained in their efforts to reform their institution. We certainly had a full menu of reform measures to review. Indeed, historians may well look back fifty years from now and declare that the 19803 and early 19905 constituted a watershed in public sector reforms, at least in several countries. It seems that governments introduced every conceivable measure possible to fix their operations. As is well known, Margaret Thatcher led the way in reforming government operations and the civil service. She saw many things which she felt needed fixing and, as has been widely reported, "she was not for turning." Senior officials, Thatcher believed, had their own policy agenda to pursue and politicians were being manipulated in supporting it. She was also convinced that government operations were bloated, inward looking and mismanaged. She introduced an ambitious reform agenda and she never let up. She brought in a

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senior private sector executive to review government activities, overhauled the government's financial management system, played an active role in the appointment of permanent secretaries, launched a privatization plan, established executive agencies, and substantially reduced the number of public servants (see, among others, Savoie 1994). Since Thatcher's accession to power in 1979, the number of public servants has fallen from 735,400 to 499,000 (see Savoie 1994). In addition, about two-thirds of those who are left now work in the Next Steps agencies which deliver programs and services at arm's length from government. As we already noted, Thatcher led the way in public sector reforms at least in Anglo-American democracies. Soon after she unveiled her first measures, other countries followed suit. This is not to suggest for a moment that Thatcher had a grand design to reform the public sector. She did not. She knew what was wrong with the institution but she did not take with her an all-encompassing strategy to fix it. Thatcher improvised from her very first days in office and continued to do so until her last. Again, other political leaders followed suit. Indeed, measures to reform the civil service in Canada, and to a lesser extent in New Zealand, Australia, and the United States, were continually imported from Britain, always with a time lag and not always so successfully introduced as they might have been in Britain. Thatcher's presence in public sector reform outside Britain is best summed up by a senior Canadian official: "Without doubt, the politician who had the most significant impact in shaping PS 2000 (a major government reform initiative in Canada) was Margaret Thatcher" (Savoie 1994:247). Though no grand design ever surfaced, it became clear that the measures had one thing in common - a strong reliance on the business management model. The essays in this collection and the concluding chapter report on the inherent difficulty in attempting to assess the success of the reform measures. Still, we have learned a thing or two about how to introduce reform measures and how to go about making them stick. First, champions are needed. Indeed the first lesson learned out of Britain during the Thatcher years was that a strong political

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champion was needed not only to promote government reform measures but also to ensure follow up and to push the "system" to implement change. Thatcher stayed the course and took a strong personal interest in the implementation of reform measures. She insisted on regular briefings and in many instances sought to master administrative details. From time to time she even transferred to her own office administrative-type decisions. If nothing else, this sent a strong signal to permanent officials that she meant business. There is no substitute for political will when tough decisions are needed to challenge long-established ways of doing things and to maintain the momentum of change. The point here is that "political will" works in trying to make government reform measures stick. Champions of change are also needed at the public service level. Senior government officials are obviously busy people, and the details of the day often serve to crowd out more important issues. However urgent the political and administrative crisis, senior officials need to keep their eyes on the "ball" of government reforms. Change can never take flight on its own merits, it has to be energized. Central agencies must also buy in. Given their strategic position, central agencies can often speak not only on behalf of the political leaders, but also on behalf of the institutional interest of the civil service. They have all the ingredients to be the true agents of change. In any event, given their position in the machinery of government, one can easily assume that without support from the central agencies, reform measures have little chance of success. There are other important ingredients needed to introduce reform measures successfully, and Guy Peters reports on them in detail in his chapter in this volume. The more difficult question to answer is what actually constitutes success in public sector reform. In fact if this project has taught us one lesson about public sector reform, it is that success or even failure is rarely clear cut. We soon realized that when we take stock of administrative reforms we are invariably confronted with a confusing and contradictory picture of change. On the one hand, we discover that a large number of changes have been adopted and implemented,

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and appear to have produced some benefits for people inside and outside government. Even when they are no longer in effect by name, reforms do appear to have produced lasting changes. These reforms have not eliminated all the problems found in the public sector in industrialized democracies, but neither have they been totally ineffective exercises at public relations; something has happened. On the other hand, we also discover that few, if any, of these reforms have been able to live up to the claims of their advocates. In some instances this is an unfair statement, given that their advocates often have argued that the full effects might not be felt for years or even decades. Even that claim, however, may not be acceptable in a political climate that demands immediate results and instant solutions. We quickly discover that we are left with a set of glasses that are both half full and half empty. The literature on public sector reforms has thus far largely been preoccupied with describing the new measures, comparing measures from various countries and assessing the impact on accountability (see, among others, OECD 1994). Perhaps because many of the measures are still in their early implementation stages, the literature has very little to report on how well the measures are working. Even governments have produced only a very limited number of evaluations of key aspects of the reforms. Christopher Pollitt made a telling observation in 1995 when he wrote: "There is a paradox here: while NPM doctrine insists that public services must invest much more heavily in the currency of measurable outputs, some fundamental aspects of NPM reforms themselves appear to have remained almost immune from such requirements" (Pollitt 1995:135). The chapters in this volume document some successes and some failures. What they have not done is to assess why some reforms are more successful than others, and why some countries have been more receptive than others to the changes. This is an inherently difficult task, given the diversity of countries and reforms. Still, there are three types of explanations that stand out: institutions, ideas, and individuals. We can provide an ad hoc explanation for each individual reform, and for the performance

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Introduction

of each political system, but these few ideas also provide a set of factors to consider when reading about the cases being described. First, the institutions of government in some political systems make implementing reform more difficult. This can be seen perhaps most easily in the United States where the combination of federalism and presidentialism makes attempting to push through any systemic reform nearly impossible, both practically and politically. Similarly, the federalism of Canada or Australia may make reform more difficult than in smaller, unitary regimes such as Britain or New Zealand. Institutionally the United Kingdom and New Zealand (then) had the advantage of single party governments, as contrasted with the coalitions found in most Continental European countries. Finally, countries that have a few powerful central agencies may be more successful than countries with more dispersed and less powerful central agencies. In short, the formal structures through which reform must go do play a crucial role in the success or failure of these efforts. Ideas also play an important role in explaining reform, both positively and negatively. Reforms that could appear to be backed by some clear idea - even ideas that appear relatively weak to critics, such as reinvention - are more likely to be successful than are other, more ad hoc reform efforts. The New Public Management has been capable of appearing to offer these solutions for many reformers. Also, countries in which the administrative system is organized around well-understood and accepted ideas, for example the legalism of German administrative culture, are more able to resist pressures to reform than are other systems. Administrative reforms do not occur in an ideological vacuum so that the capacity to use ideas to produce or to resist reforms is an important part of the explanation. Finally, individuals are crucial in any attempts to explain what has happened in the reform of the public sector. The most obvious example is Margaret Thatcher, but other individuals such as Al Gore and Roger Douglas also come readily to mind. The power of these individuals is enhanced when, as Mrs. Thatcher was, they are able to remain in office for extended periods of time. We should not, however, focus our attention entirely on political

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leaders because some senior public managers themselves have been central actors in the development and implementation of administrative reforms. Other senior administrators have been equally powerful forces of resistance to change. To be sure, evaluating the measures introduced during the past fifteen years to reform the public sector is no easy task. Pollitt has listed a series of "problems" and "difficulties" in evaluating the New Public Management. They include: 1 New Public Management reforms are usually multifaceted. When a particular effect or impact is identified how can the evaluator decide which reform facet or component produced it? 2 More often than not other changes in the political/administrative environment are going on at the same time as NPM reforms (for example, budget cuts at the same time as decentralization of managerial authority). How can the evaluator know whether a particular effect is generated by the NPM reform or the simultaneous shifts in other environmental variables? 3 Even when particular effects can confidently be attributed to this or that NPM reform, what is the appropriate comparator for the new state of affairs? The baseline performance of the organization before the NPM reform may not be appropriate because in some instances the organization's performance under the pre-NPM regime may have been changing anyway (for better or worse). 4 There is a need to theorize the politico-organizational contexts into which particular reform elements are being injected as well as analysing the characteristics of the reforms themselves. What works in one context may not work in another. 5 Defining and measuring the costs and benefits of NPM programs poses a number of difficulties. There is a need to identify and measure the transitional (one-off) costs (and benefits) of implementing the reforms. These could include the direct costs of investment in new IT, documentation, training, and informing the public of changes. There could also be "Haw-

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Introduction

thorne effect" benefits. More ambitiously, one might wish to estimate the opportunity costs (for example, staff time and attention diverted to learning about new practices, meaning that the quality of existing services declines for an interim period). Equally, if not more important, there is the question of continuing (recurrent) costs and benefits. 6 Most fundamentally, what criteria should be used to evaluate the reforms? The most common and in many ways easiest approach is to measure the identifiable effects of a particular reform against its stated objectives or goals. There are, however, at least two drawbacks. First, such an evaluation may miss unintended effects because it is not looking for them. Second, some of the "official" goals may be difficult to pin down (for example, to empower service users). (Pollitt 1995:139-40) Well aware of the inherent problems in evaluating the various government reform measures of the past fifteen years, we decided to make an attempt, however modest, to assess their success. The distinguished scholars assembled for this task are from six countries, some of which have witnessed nothing short of sweeping changes to government operations. We all became convinced that after "15 years of upheaval right across so many public sectors," there was a strong need to begin to assess the impact of the measures and the "upheaval" in our public service institutions. A PREVIEW Bert Rockman raises perhaps the most fundamental question when one sets out to take stock of public sector reform measures introduced during the past fifteen years. He asks, "to what extent has the role of the state actually changed?" He reports that "going public is out. Going private is in." To be sure, the rhetoric of government reform has outpaced action. Still, the policy state, at least as we have known it since the end of the Second World War, is finished. No one, Rockman explains, speaks any longer of new policy worlds for governments

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to conquer. This is not to suggest that the political leadership has been able to fundamentally reshape government programs and operations. Growth in government expenditure has slowed, he reports, but the proportion of GDP devoted to government expenditures has not declined. The reason - from the politician's point of view - is that only the dead bite bullets. Looking ahead, Rockman maintains that the civil service, regardless of the national setting it operates in, is unlikely to enjoy the deference it once held as a respected source of expertise and judgment. He argues that the traditional role of the civil servant will continue to undergo a shift from protector of the integrity and regularity of public transactions to that of management scientist, that we will continue to have a sizeable public sector but one that will have less government, and that we will have more markets and fewer public servants. Christopher Pollitt provides a comprehensive assessment of the impact of managerialism on the public services, especially in the Anglo-American democracies. Pollitt points out that managerialism can be seen as operating at three distinct levels, and must be evaluated at each of those three levels. The first level is as ideology, and indeed for the strong adherents to the New Public Management there is an ideology that states the nature of the problem and a solution to it, a solution justified by faith as much as by hard evidence. Managerialism can also be seen as an exercise in rhetoric and persuasion. One of the important features of managerialism is that it provides a mechanism for persuading governments and individual managers to amend their practices and to move forward into a new era for the public sector. Finally, Pollitt discusses managerialism as practice, and provides an evaluation of the practical successes and failures of this approach to reforming the public sector. Evaluation of managerialism is not an easy task. It is in part dependent upon the values and concerns of the evaluator. It is also dependent upon the particular part of the managerialist agenda being addressed, and the national or even organizational setting in which the evaluation is made. The simplest way in which to answer a question about the success of managerialism is to say, "It depends,"

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Introduction

and Pollitt's cogent and comprehensive chapter tells why and on what it depends. The prevalence of administrative reform efforts in the industrialized democracies has spawned an industry offering advice and making conclusions about the process of change. Guy Peters points out that much of the advice being offered can be interpreted as consisting of pairs of contradictory statements. For example, reformers are being told both that their reforms should be planned with clear deadlines to provoke action and also that to be truly effective reform must be a continuous process of change and reinvention. Some five decades ago Herbert Simon pointed out that the literature on public administration at that time came in conflicting pairs of statements, and little appears to have changed since Simon wrote his seminal work. The problem for reformers is that both elements of these pairs of apparently conflicting statements have some validity and some utility. Peters argues that the task for the reformer, therefore, becomes that of developing some mechanisms for choosing when one or the other statement is the more applicable. He offers some preliminary advice for making that selection within several of the pairs, but the necessary contingency statements about public organizations are not yet available for most pairs of choices. Administrative reform, therefore, has been and will continue to be more a matter of good judgment than of scientific certainties. The tasks of the practitioner of government, and of the academic in the field, in designing change remain formidable. The roles and values of the individual civil servant also have been forced to change as a result of the process of administrative reform. Nicole de Montricher argues that the civil servant especially in France and other Continental European countries has been transformed from that of servant of the state with a role defined by public law to servant of the public. Civil servants at all levels of government have surrendered much of their autonomy and also have become subject to a range of new normative demands. Further, some traditional normative standards of the civil service, such as an emphasis on merit recruitment, have been to some extent undermined by reform.

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These changing public values surrounding the civil service also influence values expressed in the delivery of public services. Most fundamentally, de Montricher argues that the civil service has gone from regulating society to serving society. For example, services are now potentially more subject to individual demands of clients rather than the requirements of equality across the society as a whole. These value changes may be subtle, but they do influence the way in which policies are put into effect, as well as the ways in which public servants think about themselves and about their jobs. If the civil service has seen its policy role devalued through the process of administrative reform, ordinary citizens have had their roles in government enhanced, at least by the rhetoric of reform. Jon Pierre argues that one of the most important roles now assigned to the public is as a significant source of policy advice. Policy advice was once a major function of the senior civil service, aided by political officials and their assistants. One goal of recent administrative reforms has been to enhance the role of public consultation in the design and execution of policy. Having a role for interest groups in making policy is hardly novel, but the idea of broad public involvement in the process is relatively new and requires some rethinking of the structures and processes of governing. Jon Pierre also provides a very interesting analysis of the various purposes of policy advice, and the differences between mass and elite versions of advice. The use of the public for advice requires large-scale consultation exercises that may be difficult to manage, but those exercises are extremely important for legitimating decisions. Wide-scale public involvement in policy also helps to provide a wide range of policy ideas, as opposed to the restricted range that might be available just from civil service sources. Further, given the cutbacks that the civil service has undergone, the use of alternative sources may be necessary for obtaining adequate advice. Again reform can be seen as altering the fundamental processes of governing, even in ways that were not intended. Another aspect of the changing role of the civil service after administrative reform is the transformation of its role in the

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Introduction

policy-making process. One of the fundamental changes has been that the management roles of civil servants have been emphasized, often at the expense of their role in making policy. Patricia Ingraham documents these changes for the civil service in a number of political systems. In particular, she points out that the role that the civil service has enjoyed in providing a vision for policy has been almost completely lost in many societies. Political responsiveness has become the dominant value for civil servants, while their discretion over policy decisions has been reduced drastically. As well as having their role definition changed, Ingraham argues that senior civil servants are under increasing scrutiny and have lost a great deal of freedom in how they perform their jobs. Further, in addition to being more responsible upward to their nominal political masters, civil servants are also expected to be increasingly responsive to the demands of the public. Civil servants have always been the middlemen in the political system but this role is now even more evident. Paradoxically, all these changes that denigrate the role of the civil service are occurring during an era presumably dedicated to ideas such as "letting the managers manage." It is very clear from Ingraham's arguments that the senior civil service is not the dominant actor in policy that both its critics and its supporters have long argued it to be. As well as addressing the ways in which services are rendered to the public, a major emphasis of public sector reform has been the internal management of government itself. Employees are a major resource of the public service, but they are also a continuing concern. How can the personnel of the public sector be managed in a way that produces maximum efficiency yet maintains morale and the involvement of public servants in their jobs? Further, can the management techniques used in the private sector be transported as easily to the public sector as some advocates of reform appear to believe, or are the public sector and its personnel unique? Hal Rainey addresses the issues of reforming public personnel management. He finds some cause for "cautious optimism" in developments concerning personnel policy, at least in the United

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States. He points to the widespread concern with the inflexibility of traditional personnel management through the civil service pay and grading system. Changes advocated by the Gore Commission, as well as other modifications of the personnel system, are helping to facilitate the recruitment and promotion decisions for agencies. There is also some movement on pay flexibility, although the evidence about this reform gives less reason for optimism. Like much else in the public sector, this round of reform has generated some change but has by no means solved all the problems that were initial targets of the reforms. Michel Paquin reports that we have seen a great many innovations in government operations in recent years. He adds that the public sector has more entrepreneurs than is generally assumed at both the political and public service levels. There is never a shortage of individuals in government willing to experiment and try new approaches. Paquin examines three innovations in public sector management which have received a great deal of attention in the public administration literature since the early 19805: strategic management or planning, the service quality movement, including Total Quality Management (TQM), and process reengineering. Strategic planning is now widely applied, but its success varies a great deal. In some countries, Paquin reports, strategic planning is simply a ritual carried out to satisfy the requirements of other organizations. In other instances, however, it has been and continues to be utilized successfully. This is particularly true when it is applied in a fairly stable public policy environment and when the models and techniques borrowed from elsewhere are modified to fit local circumstances. The great majority of OECD countries have launched efforts to strengthen service quality. The efforts range from high profile initiatives, such as citizen's or service charters in the case of Britain, Belgium, and France, or executive directives in the case of the United States. Here, too, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that countries borrowed new approaches and techniques from one another. Though it is clear that service quality and standards have improved, it is also clear that governments are confronting chal-

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Introduction

lenging problems. At the risk of stating the obvious, the public and private sectors are vastly different, and concepts like TQM, which may well be highly successful in the private sector, need to undergo fundamental adjustments for any chance of success. A more recent innovation in public sector management, again borrowed from the private sector, is process reengineering. The National Performance Review initiative in the United States and recent initiatives in the Treasury Board Secretariat in Canada, including the establishment of a chief informatics officer, both point to the introduction of reengineering measures. Paquin reports, however, that there are important factors inhibiting the application of reengineering exercises in government: the public sector is not risk oriented while reengineering is often a risky business, and reengineering requires a long-term commitment to ensure success while governments all too often require evidence of short-term success to continue with a new approach. Naomi Caiden reports that the budget reforms of the past fifteen years are different in nature than earlier reforms. The reforms of the 19605 and 19705 were essentially analytical and neutral in approach while the most recent varieties have clear political and ideological goals. Like Aucoin, Naomi Caiden reports that politicians feel the government decision-making process, in particular the budget process, was insufficiently responsive to their views and wishes. A key feature of budgetary reform has been the desire to introduce performance measurements in government operations and to make them stick. The objective here is all-encompassing: enhance transparency in government, improve budgetary decisions, encourage greater responsibility, be in a better position to determine what works and what does not, improve quality of services, determine better salary levels for senior officials, and assess how well outside contractors are doing. How then, Caiden asks, can governments assess the success of budget reform measures? She points out that regardless of the reform measure, budgets will always remain political documents and they will have to be evaluated as part of "the political

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architecture." But she also turns to the checklist, or set of standards, that Roy Meyers has put forward to describe a strong budget process: it should be comprehensive, honest, perceptive, constrained, judgmental, cooperative, timely, accessible, accountable, and responsive. Central agencies have often been the architects of government reform measures introduced during the past fifteen years. However, on the face of it, many of these reform measures fly in the face of what traditionally central agencies consider to be their rightful place in the machinery of government. If line departments and agencies, their managers, and front-line employees are truly empowered, central agencies have to adjust. Central agencies have been privileged in traditional administrative structures that depend more upon hierarchical, legal, and political control than anything else. John Hart considers the impact of the various reform measures on central agencies and their work. He reports that there is little evidence to suggest that the reform experience to date has led central agencies to downsize. Indeed, central agencies have taken on "new oversight responsibilities due to the new elements of managerialism, such as accountability, decentralized budget management, and performance appraisal which, by and large, require centrally established standards and central monitoring." Hart concludes, however, that "some central agencies have gained and some have lost." Central agencies responsible for the expenditure budget and management issues have gained while central agencies responsible for personnel issues have lost influence. In Britain, Thatcher took early aim at the Civil Service Department, while in Australia the Public Service Board was reformed out of existence in 1987. In the United States, the Office of Personnel Management saw a number of its activities either dropped or transferred to line departments and agencies. Looking to the future, Hart argues that the basic role of central agencies will be maintained by the political leadership. "Governments," he points out, "are hierarchical." "Prime ministers," he adds, "carry more influence than line ministers." The pecking

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Introduction

order in cabinets is such that senior politicians will invariably seek to exercise some oversight and coordination of line departments and they will need the helping hand of central agencies. Peter Aucoin writes that "organization matters." During the past fifteen years, a number of governments have restructured government operations to enable political leaders to assert more authority over their bureaucracies and to make the delivery of public services more responsive to the needs of citizens as clients, consumers, and customers of government operations. There is also no denying that important structural changes have been implemented in several countries. Aucoin is not certain that Western democratic governments have been truly reinvented, but he argues that it is clear that the old order has passed away in several important aspects and, further, that it is not expected to return. It is also clear that governments in different jurisdictions have sought to hear from one another on reform measures and a number of them have consciously adopted or adapted models or approaches from one or more jurisdictions. In addition, various attempts have been made to separate policy and operational responsibilities in the Westminster systems. The result is that ministers can now turn to two streams of policy advice - from those primarily responsible for policy and those primarily responsible for operations. There is evidence, particularly in Britain and New Zealand, that the likelihood of ministers being captured by their departmental bureaucracies has been diminished. There is some concern, however, that some policy advisors have become too far removed from operations and are thus less able to provide effective policy advice to ministers. Paul Thomas reports on probably the single most important issue in public service reform: accountability. As he puts it, "Accountability is at the heart of governance within the democratic societies." To be sure, accountability transcends the other issues and themes in this volume. Practitioners also invariably came back to the accountability issue time and again during our monthly seminars and many insisted that it had been all too frequently overlooked when designing new reform measures. One practitioner described it as "the hole in the doughnut" and argued

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that it was the one factor which could in turn compromise the success of even the most conceptually sound reform initiative. Thomas has identified a number of issues and changes taking shape on the accountability front as new reform measures are being introduced. For one thing, the anonymity of the public service within the cabinet-parliamentary systems is declining. For another, there is growing conviction that competition and market processes constitute the most efficient way to allocate resources and by ricochet to hold individuals accountable. They not only simplify management procedures, but also the size of the accountability problem. However, Thomas questions whether in fact market processes make accountability more straightforward. He argues that market processes involving private service delivery can complicate matters as new organizational capacity needs to be put in place to refine goals and negotiate and monitor contracts. He makes essentially the same point with respect to performance indicators and other results-based accountability techniques: that is, they complicate matters and require a new organizational capacity. Thomas also cautions those who tend to denigrate existing approaches to accountability, including some centrally prescribed controls and processes. Control, he insists, can serve a positive purpose, notably the goal of accountability. He also cautions those who are continually seeking to establish new accountability mechanisms and lists a number of new accountability mechanisms launched in Canada in recent years which have had limited impact. He reminds the reader that "error-free government is a Utopian ideal" and that what is required when mistakes are made is a greater degree of openness, frankness, and courage. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hennessy, Peter. 1989. Whitehall. London: Fontana Press. OECD. 1994. Public Management Development Survey. Paris: OECD. Pollitt, Christopher. Justification by works or by faith? Evaluating the new public management, Evaluation i, 2:135. Savoie, Donald J. 1994. Thatcher, Reagan, Mulroney: In Search of a New Bureaucracy. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

The Changing Role of the State BERT A. ROCKMAN

THE T W I L I G H T OF THE P O S I T I V E STATE?

Between the mid-1960s and the mid-1990s, a veritable revolution - or perhaps counter-revolution - has taken place in thinking about the role of the state. I choose the verb "thinking" advisedly because, as is typically the case, rhetoric both precedes and outpaces action. More is being talked about than is being done, though in fact much is being done. Rhetoric, nonetheless, is important because it circumscribes the range of plausible policies. No one speaks now, for example, of new policy worlds for governments to conquer. The dominant talk these days is about deficit reductions and shrinking the state or at least retooling it so as to be more efficient and, thus, presumably save money. To borrow a phrase, going public is out. Going private is in. We know, of course, that it is easier to talk about getting to the fitness room than it actually is to exercise, and we know it is easier to talk about going on diets than to follow through on them. The same principle applies to governments. They too find it easier to talk about slimming down than to do it. Still, the rhetoric about reshaping the state is not just idle talk. Much is happening, and a lot of it is occurring by design. As part of the retooling, a vague movement that falls under the rubric of New Public Management (NPM) has come into fashion 20

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(Aucoin 1996). While there is a will-o'-the-wisp quality to the New Public Management, its principal assumption is the exact opposite of that stipulated by Graham Allison (1979). Unlike Allison's dictum that public and private sector management are fundamentally dissimilar, NPM assumes that management of the public and private sectors is alike - or at least ought to be. The base assumption, of course, is that government can be operated more efficiently, be made more user friendly, and in the process save money. There is a pandemic character to NPM, at least judging by the country reports collected by OECD'S Public Management Service (OECD 1996). The most recent American contribution to this phenomenon is the National Performance Review (1993), which was launched with much fanfare by the u.s. vice president Al Gore. It featured as its main selling point that it would make government work better and cost the taxpayers less. While the latter was only a marginal feature in the report itself, the costs-less component was given star billing in the subtitle of the report and in its public presentation. It is hard to imagine that a set of management initiatives launched without the expectation of a bottom-line savings would inspire political sponsorship or enthusiasm. This chapter is about the changing role of the state. But the state is being reshaped in two ways. One is at the macro-level and is dictated by budgetary pressures, the inexorable nature of the demographics of affluent societies, exogenous forces influencing competitiveness, trade, and investment, and a brew of ideas providing a broad framework for response. The other way in which the state is being reshaped is at the micro-level and involves the management of the state. It is a reasonable inference that the administrative reshaping is, in fact, linked to the broader forces influencing macro-level changes. Both types of change have been spurred by the dominant motif of market solutions to public problems. The chapter concludes by noting that the two sets of changes, largely occurring in tandem, imply that a big public sector does not at all mean that there will be big government. In fact, government will likely be smaller despite the fact that aggregate public expenditures are unlikely to contract.

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The Changing Role of the State EXPLANATIONS FOR THE CHANGING ROLE OF THE STATE

Bankruptcy

The main impetus driving the changing role of the state is remarkably stark - it is the realization that prevailing inertia will likely bankrupt governments. This realization has governments grappling for ways out of the financial squeeze that their past commitments and rapidly aging populations have created. Most recently, in fact, the French government has announced that it is seeking ways to control health care costs by limiting access to medical specialists (Whitney 1996), while the German government has proposed deep cuts in various aspects of its welfare state (Cowell 1996). Shortly before, the Swedish government announced that its budgetary shortfall would require it to raise revenues and cut expenditures substantially. Contemporary welfare states are deeply mortgaged. Unless there is intervention, they either will run up deficits they cannot manage or set off an inflationary spiral they cannot control. Without some intervention to stem the rising tide of expenditure commitments and the declining base of payroll revenues, social insurance funds will be at risk. Supplementing broad-based payroll taxes with higher marginal income tax rates, however, could stifle economic growth and investment and send capital fleeing to safer havens. Moreover, the welfare state momentum is apt to set off an intergenerational conflict in which older people press for greater governmental spending and taxing from which they disproportionately benefit, while younger people demand reduced taxes and spending because they disproportionately foot the bill and can expect a negative return on their social insurance investment (MacManus 1995). Under these hard-scrabble circumstances, what can governments do? It stands to reason that the first (but not necessarily the only) thing they will do is reach for the easy if momentary solution. One thing governments, especially neo-liberal ones, are likely to do, is target those populations that are on the dole, receiving earmarked non-universalized benefits (Pierson 1994). Such pro-

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grams of assistance are typically earmarked for the able-bodied poor and present inviting targets for governments of the right. This is especially true where benefits and racial hostilities are comingled, as is the case in the u.s. of both general assistance programs for poor adults and the Assistance to Dependent Children (ADC) program stemming from the social security legislation of the 19305. General assistance programs already have been phased out in many states, and the ADC program was eliminated when the welfare reform legislation of 1996 was signed by Bill Clinton. In the case of ADC, the mothers were the targets despite the fact that the assistance was supposed to be for the children. Financially, however, cuts in such programs yield relatively few savings because the non-universalized entitlements represent only a very small proportion of welfare state expenditures. Budget cutters in finance ministries or budget offices and economists, all safely immunized from public pressures, prefer to aim for the jugular. But politicians are not anxious to be splattered by the blood, especially inasmuch as some of it may be their own. Even so, the discussion of what may be possible in entitlement cuts has moved dramatically in a decade's time. It is likely to move further and possibly take new directions, including privatization of the management of social insurance assets or of health care. Another course of attack for governmental leaders is to go after the discretionary budget. Doing this for a long enough period of time will produce unusually structured governmental budgets. The accumulation of discretionary spending cuts produces budgets that prominently feature mandated expenditures for universal entitlements and other commitments, such as military and civil service pensions, plus increased proportions of outlays devoted to deficit management (OECD 1995:162-9). Eventually, they will squeeze the discretionary or annually appropriated budget until virtually no new policy proposal requiring appropriated expenditures can be funded. Furthermore, an accumulated stress on the discretionary budget is likely to result in a continuing crisis of funding operational expenditures. Notably, the balanced budget accord, reached in the United States between President Clinton and the opposition-dominated Congress, cuts the domestic dis-

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cretionary budget by about 10 percent while leaving untouched, for now at least, mandatory universal benefits programs. In this scenario, there is, realistically, little likelihood of governments adopting new programs requiring significant expenditures. From this standpoint and for the foreseeable future, the policy state is finished - though, to be sure, the foreseeable does not extend very far into the future. In spite of snipping away at discretionary budgets or vulnerable entitlements, and slowing the growth rates of universalized entitlements, state expenditures may continue to show little if any net reduction. While the structure of expenditure appears to be heading toward an inexorable rearrangement of its mass (more bulge in entitlements and deficit management), expenditure shrinkage itself may be nearly impossible. No matter how the data are sliced, there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that government expenditures as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) have shrunk in any of the OECD countries. The OECD average of public outlays as a proportion of GDP was 28.1 percent in 1960, 34.6 percent in 1974,41.2 percent in 1984, and 43.4 percent in 1993. These same contours hold as well for the 0-7. Growth in government expenditure slows down in the past decade or so, but even within this most recent time frame, the proportion of GDP devoted to government expenditure does not decline; in fact, it grows slightly (OECD 1995:72). Thus, reductions are in rates of growth in expenditures but not in the aggregate expenditures themselves. The reasons for this are clear and are rooted in three inexorables. One inexorable is the impact of older populations; a second is the impact of declining fertility rates. The first places a greater call on pensions and health care. The second narrows the revenue base. The third inexorable lies in the accumulated standing deficits that need to be financed. Paradoxically, then, there may be a lot of huffing and puffing and cutting even as the state grows no thinner from the standpoint of the proportion of GDP devoted to the public sector. Smaller expenditures are likely to be targeted first, while cuts against popular big expenditure items, likely to raise the ire of mass-based constituencies, will be gradual, well disguised, and wherever possible, exacted against a future generation of recipi-

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ents (and voters). From the politician's standpoint, only the dead bite bullets. Neo-Liberalism and Political Leadership

Demography may be destiny when it comes to entitlement programs. That destiny most assuredly is not compatible with finding more things for government to do. But destiny has been pushed along by the surge of neo-liberal governments in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States in the 19805. Perhaps even more important than the composition of governments was the vitality of ideas. The main source of ideas as the fiscal predicament of the modern welfare state grew were founded in neo-liberalism. Historical circumstance produced a match between strong ideas countering the prevailing inertia of governments and strong and articulate leaders, embodied especially by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, to publicly articulate and advance those ideas. Convictions were helped along by conviction politicians. The push of budgetary crisis responded thereby to the shove of political leadership. In the aggregate, of course, and precisely for the reasons articulated above, none of the champions of neo-liberalism made a dent in contracting the expenditure side of big government. That was largely beyond their control. To some degree, however, where they could, they did influence what it was that money was being spent on (Aberbach and Rockman 1985; Rockman 1997). Mostly, they helped set in motion changes in the operations and culture of their governments, especially the bureaucracy and the civil service (Savoie 1994). They deeply influenced the rhetoric and symbols of the public agenda and thus the problems to which government can plausibly attend. In the longer run, when persistently applied, symbols do change the prevailing inertia (March and Olsen 1984). Neo-liberal leadership was buttressed, if not induced, by the rise of a powerful set of ideas emphasizing the virtues of markets and the vices of government (Aucoin 1995; Campbell and Wilson 1995; Pierre 1995; Self 1993). No one will recognize these themes as startlingly new. Indeed, these arguments are tried and true, or

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at least tried if not necessarily true. We cannot know for certain precisely why they took hold with such impact. It is certainly conceivable that much is a product of circumstance (Kingdon 1984). A set of problems involving big government may have provided the opportunity for a different breed of policy entrepreneur (almost an anti-policy entrepreneur) to increase the level of respectability for their arguments, as the problems of government turned from, What can be solved? to, How can we stay solvent? Which is more important, ideas or political leadership? While it is not possible to answer this question precisely, it is possible to point to cases where the ostensible political left has more or less acted on behalf of a neo-liberal agenda. Australia under Labor governments, until the most recent elections, was perhaps the most prominent case. But in the United States, also, Bill Clinton has accepted, perhaps because he has had little choice, the fundamental features of the neo-liberal agenda. He has publicly announced that "the era of big government is over," and among other things has acquiesced in substantial budgetary cuts in discretionary domestic program expenditures. In addition, he has bought into "welfare reform" legislation designed to throw the indigent (particularly children) off the public dole. Clinton may be winning political battles but he has clearly lost the larger policy war - assuming he was ever willing to take sides in it. In Britain, too, Tony Blair has announced that he will not seek to overturn all that seventeen years of Toryism hath wrought. Fiscal circumstances and neo-liberal ideas have melded together in a way that make it difficult for the political leadership of the left to follow its basic instincts. In the era of welfare state expansion, the right could rationalize and to some extent dampen down some of the features of that expansion. In the era of neo-liberalism, the left's role has been principally reduced to modifying what it deems to be the most egregious aspects of the neo-liberal regime. The longer-term policy shift appears to dominate the inevitable vicissitudes of political fortune that take place within the dominant policy agenda. The revival of neo-liberalism no doubt has much to do with fiscal reality and a regulatory state often perceived to be overbearing. These realities, however, partly have been interpreted hand-

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somely by good theories (there being nothing quite so practical in public debate as one) and effective public advocates. In economic theory, rational choice theorizing displaced Keynesian macroeconomics. It emphasized government not as a supplier of public goods but as a host for interests seeking rents from it at the cost of the public interest (Moe 1989; Olson 1982). Rational choice theories have as their virtue elegance and tightly wound reasoning. The theory, to oversimplify a bit, characterizes public sector choices as being motivated by the need to satisfy powerful political interests or those of the agents themselves rather than to supply the public good that public agencies, such as schools (Chubb and Moe 1990), are charged with doing. This inescapable capitulation to powerfully aggrandizing interests, according to much of rational choice theory, seemed also to coincide with a loss of public confidence in government as high growth rates turned into low growth rates and either higher unemployment or wage stagnation. Political leaders with enthusiasms become hosts for ideas they find appealing. Neither Thatcher nor Mulroney nor certainly Reagan was likely to be reading scholarly articles in economics journals, to be sure (a feat these days probably beyond most of us as well), but scholarship provides respectability to idea popularizers and to politicians looking for the right (-winged) stuff. Despite the emphasis placed by neo-liberals on the bureaucracy as a manifestation, indeed a source, of bloated government, there is clear evidence that the proportion of the labour force working in the public sector actually has declined in the past decade or so. In 1984, for example, the OECD average was 15.3 percent which had declined to 14.8 percent by 1993. Among the G-J, the decline was from 14.5 to 13.9 percent (OECD 1995:44). The evidence is quite clear that while governments have become smaller, their expenditures have risen, and their expenditures have risen not because of self-perpetuating bureaucracies but because of the fundamental social contract between democratic governments and their citizens. The costs of this contract are at the core of macro-level issues involving both the size and shape of government. They are, it goes without saying, not easy to resolve. It is, however, in this fundamental democratic relationship between governments and their

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citizens that resolution must be found, elegant if inane theories of bureaucratic pursuit of the public treasury notwithstanding (Niskanen 1971). Globalization

The collapse of European communism revealed the worst features of the dead-hand syndrome of state control of the economy. Its collapse and the subsequent movement toward market economies in the region was itself part of a larger pattern toward a broader recognition of the impossibility of self-contained and controlled economies. Implosion of the state-centred economies, in retrospect, seems to have been virtually inevitable. The death of European communism also coincided with greater movement toward the direction of openness in semi-state controlled or protected economies in non-communist countries. Neo-liberal ideas have been contagious. Markets, privatization, and deregulation are the watchwords of the new era. Even the mercantilist economies of Asia and Latin America have reduced their protectionism and regulatory control, and have moved toward greater privatization or at least reforms of state-owned enterprises (Lord 1992). Regional success stories often stimulate imitation which, as the saying goes, is the sincerest form of flattery. The opening of the Chilean economy and its drastic reduction of the public sector (to a considerable extent achieved under the authoritarian Pinochet regime) helped stimulate economic opening in Argentina and Brazil among other places. The Argentine and Brazilian economic troubles and their high inflation rates required economic stabilization, which is hard to come by without moving the state out of the way. Financial stabilization requirements (i.e., the likelihood of national bankruptcy) and the emergence of regional trade markets forced economic liberalization. The protectionist policies of import substitution in the case of Brazil, for example, are being abandoned. State enterprise is in retreat - a function also of the global contagion of market ideas, the result of trade agreements, and the development of transnational entities (created by those agree-

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ments) that generally have tightened the screws on the use of state subsidies to industries competing in world or regional markets. Two British economists note that Governments around the world have adopted policies of transferring state enterprises to the private sector. Privatization is now fashionable in the European Community, Australasia, South America, and Eastern Europe. Many developing nations, encouraged by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, are actively considering privatization as a vehicle for the reform of parastatals and other public sector agencies. (Bishop and Kay 1990:241)

In addition to these international pressures, selling off public enterprises or other assets is also a way to momentarily relieve governmental budgetary shortfalls while eliminating longer-run financial drains. As with clearance sales, governments need liquidity, and clearing the house of assets can provide the liquidity to cover up budgetary deficits, if only in the form of a one-time financial windfall. Globalization is characterized by a number of features - the free flow of ideas, a freer international flow of goods and services, and the development of trade regimes that, to some extent, standardize the rules of the trading game. With reference to the last point, rules perceived to benefit any given player unduly are regarded as illegitimate and can be subjected to international factfinding. The effect is to weaken state interventions, regulation, and protectionism and typically give more latitude to market forces. The overall consequence of globalization is to produce a more limited state with a lighter hand on the economy. THE NEW PUBLIC M A N A G E M E N T

Management as Fashion

Some of the changes in the role of the state are certainly influencing how the state should be managed, and I discuss these below. However, it is easy to overlook the fact that the profession-

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alization of administration has also brought with it a profession of management reformers. Certainly schools of business and management, and perhaps even those of public affairs, have a vested interest in exploring processes by which to better manage. Veteran observers of management fashion will note how quickly these fashions enter and depart the world of management discourse. Like the fashion industry, new products have to be trotted out. Politicians looking for something to sell in order to say that they are doing their all to run a tight ship and save the taxpayers money watch the runway for newly fashioned models - Program Planning Budgeting System (PPBS), Zero-Based Budgeting (ZBB), Management By Objectives (MBO), and Total Quality Management (TQM) - to name a few. While churning out management techniques does not by itself lead to their adoption, management techniques meet in time with management needs. In the halcyon days of the 19605, PPBS was promoted as a means for breaking through processes of disjointed incrementalism (Schick 1969) by forcing decision makers and budgeteers to think synthetically, keeping the big picture in mind. Keeping the big picture in mind, of course, required us to discard how the little pictures got to be painted in the first place (Wildavsky 1966). As with other salvationary movements, management technique as salvation urged us to forget history and reality. A far, far better world could be upon us. It is not surprising that the social planning world of PPBS would be replaced by the justificatory requirements of a technique such as ZBB. PPBS assumed a world filled with possibilities, the key being to break away from the restrictive conditions of budget lines and existing programs. ZBB, by contrast, forced us to think about why something was being done; cost-benefit analysis, which became more prevalent as budget problems arose, along with the desire to have government do nothing, forced us to think even harder, putting the onus on whether an activity ought to be done at all rather than how it could be done better (Aberbach and Rockman 1989). The present environment emphasizes markets and consumer sovereignty. It is busily erasing the distinction between public and

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private management. What the consumers (formerly citizens) want should be primary. It is hard to resist how closely if unwittingly this formulation is to what used to be called "clientelistic capture." Mark Considine (1988:13) notes in a critical review of public management developments in Australia that "it becomes increasingly more difficult to justify increased levels of public involvement in organizational activities when the community itself has been defined and reduced to consumers." It should be noted here as well just how drastic the change has been in prevailing techniques. PPBS assumed a wider public good and required (as matters turned out impossibly) a budgetary process to address and optimize that good. The present analytics and techniques address much narrower questions or rather address the questions of public good through a more narrowly defined perspective. The language of products and customer relations has replaced that of policy goals and accountability. An interpretation of the Citizen's Charter in Britain makes clear the driving model of the New Public Management: "These reforms... have projected into the centre of public performance the realization of greater competition and efficiency in public performance, i.e., borrowing what are seen as fundamentals of the marketplace and transporting them into the public sector" (Lewis and Birkinshaw 1993:31). The worm has fully turned. From the techniques prevalent thirty years ago emphasizing programmatic integration in an era of expansionary government, we now have turned to techniques that more or less float each ship on its own bottom. Keeping customers happy presumably is a way to keep the ship afloat. All management techniques produced from the management reform industry are inherently one-sided in dealing with the problem of public sector agencies. They are understandably committed to the management side of the public sector rather than to its policy and, especially, legal sides. The policy side, as Considine implies, forces consideration of a larger array of interests beyond immediate clienteles, however important those are to an agency's political interests. Ironically, keeping the customer happy may not necessarily be in the public interest. The legal side represents a set of rule-driven constraints designed to

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protect the integrity of public transactions (Kaufman 1977; Kettl et al. 1996; Thayer 1997). Legality restricts the latitude necessary to optimize management efficiency. This latter tension is an especially difficult one to settle. Management requires freedom of manoeuvre; legality requires agency. As Peter Aucoin notes (1990), there are pendular swings across a variety of administrative principles, just as there seem to be in the length of hemlines. In the current administrative fashion sweeping across at least the Anglo world, the main concern, according to Aucoin, is that accountability might be given short shrift. Political Responsiveness and Public Accountability

One of the enduring tensions in public management is that between the legal concept of accountability and the political concept of responsiveness. Neither concept is self-evidently understood across all contexts, and Charles Gilbert (1959) thought of these two different, yet necessarily linked, elements of public administration as forming a part of the broader concept of administrative responsibility. Accountability demands both obedience to the law and following the chain of command. It is presumed that the two are compatible. When they are perceived otherwise is when things get interesting. British civil servants swear allegiance to the Crown, yet operationally are accountable to their ministers. U.S. civil servants swear allegiance to the constitution, yet operationally are accountable mostly to their administrative superiors and tangentially to Congress and the courts. Responsiveness is equally if not more complicated. It can be configured abstractly or concretely; it can go upward and outward; and it can go upward and downward. Let me illustrate. As regards abstract and concrete forms of responsiveness, a civil servant can be responsive to all governments or merely to any one, but likely cannot be equally so to each. Responsiveness to any set of rulers (presuming their constitutional legitimacy) is the traditional role of neutral competence - offering governments of different political stripes options as to how get where they would like to go, while pointing out complications and obstacles along each

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of the pathways. Engaging this role is delicate because it requires substantial self-control on the part of both civil servants and their political overseers, a mutual recognition that displays of enthusiasm for any given policy course by civil servants supersedes the neutral competence norm. An alternative form of responsiveness has come to be called "responsive competence," which emphasizes responsiveness particularly to the incumbent political rulers (Aberbach and Rockman 1994). It implies thereby that civil servants are as disposable as yesterday's diapers. Once it is perceived that a civil servant has gone over the line, his or her usefulness is at an end and the notion of the continuity and experience of the civil service likewise is at an end. This dilemma mainly but not exclusively confronts civil servants at the most senior levels. In times of great change, senior civil servants are especially placed under considerable stress to show their enthusiasm for and adaptability to the new direction. It is fair to say that one of the prominent allegations these days is that civil servants have been subjected increasingly to pressures of a "responsive competence" sort rather than of a "neutral competence" sort. After all, one reflects a concrete interest, namely the existing rulers, whereas the other represents an abstraction (the ability to serve the state regardless of who its rulers happen to be). An inability to elicit the appropriate enthusiasm for a given course often produces efforts to penetrate the traditional structures of the civil service with outsiders (Huddleston and Boyer 1996), layer political overseers above them (Light 1995), or create new organizational structures (Hood 1990). Much of this is being thought of in terms of the new managerialism. But a lot of it could be thought of as merely a form of political cronyism. In any event, it is unlikely that the civil service anywhere will be granted the deference it once held as a respected source of expertise and judgment to any set of governing elites. In the peculiar American case, responsiveness can also reach outward as well as upward, a product of the separation of governmental powers and frequently also of divided government (Aberbach and Rockman 1976; Aberbach, Putnam, and Rockman 1981). Notably, however, more recent evidence even from the u.s.

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case indicates that responsiveness upward is on the rise and responsiveness outward to the legislative branch is on the decline, an indication perhaps of the rise of managerialism and of executive controls (Aberbach and Rockman 1995; 1997). Responsiveness can also be upward (to ministers and political executive officials) and downward to the citizens, or in the language of New Public Management, the customers. In fact, New Public Management seems to emphasize both simultaneously giving policy control to the top and moving management discretion downward, all the while searching for a thread to coherently tie the two together (Campbell 1995; Kettl and Dilulio 1995). Upward, of course, means pleasing the political leadership, while downward means having the discretion to please the customers. Achieving both will be difficult especially inasmuch as there is little clear guidance as to how to do it, and especially because achieving that goal is built from seemingly incompatible objectives - producing both control and discretion. It is likely that political leaders will reassert themselves ex post in the face of discretionary judgments that have gone bad (McCubbins 1985). The question of who is responsible remains a decisive issue for the New Public Management as well as for a state that ships out a number of its functions to be privatized. New Public Management, Budget Scarcity, and the Market Paradigm Observers have pointed out that for privatization to work and for the New Public Management to function effectively, it will be important to plow sufficient resources into management (Kettl 1993; Grabosky 1995). Otherwise, a devolution of responsibility will ensue in the absence of any managerial capacity or means of ensuring quality. Whether these resources will be forthcoming is dubious because to some extent the impulse for moving things away from the centre is not independent of budgetary stringencies. And in the allocation of resources, it is commonly accepted that management per se is among the least favoured areas to be the recipient of an ever-diminishing set of resources.

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The New Public Management is bundled into the resource constraint problems of modern governments. Hiving off activities to the private sector, decentralizing them, and emphasizing efficiency criteria are reflections more of scarcity in the public sector than of abundance. In the absence of resources for new programs, management becomes an increasingly significant element of the public agenda. Since it is difficult to undertake new things, old things must be undertaken in new ways. But they may not be undertaken any better than they were in the past unless there is some coherent theory to guide the process and resources sufficient to support the development of management capabilities. In this regard, there are different stories in different places (Aucoin 1995) but there is no doubt that broad trends are at work across OECD countries to promote a newer user-friendly and more accessible public service (OECD 1996). The role of the state, as such, is accordingly less a mechanism of the impersonal rule of law and more a mechanism for market-generated values. Adaptability is the byword these days. It supplants a tradition of predictability and regularity that was the trademark of old public administration. The market, it is self-evident, has become the paradigm for assessing efficiency in both the private and the public sectors. It is a paradigm for a shrinking state on the assumption that a public service ought to be provided only if there is a demand for it. The other side of the citizens-as-consumers logic is that broad-based taxes for the provision of public goods and services ought to be replaced by user fees and other earmarked sources of revenue. Government as a series of markets could have much the same effect as cable television, namely to segment and splinter publics rather than to integrate them. It will certainly impact the civil service in similar fashion. The implications in this regard are probably to create, for better or worse, something like the American model of the civil service - a highly agency-focused one with little integration. By definition, no one can foresee the unforeseeable, but unless sufficient emphasis is given to the integrative character of government, this may be one of the foreseeably unforeseen consequences of applying market paradigms to government.

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There is no doubt that the market paradigm is not to stop only with the distribution of concrete producer goods and services of the sort that James Q. Wilson (1989) noted were easiest to assess and to contract out if need be. Rather, the market paradigm is clearly treading on turf formerly reserved for civil servants, namely the provision of advice. In 1990 the General Government Division of the General Accounting Office (GAO) of the u.s. federal government held a series of seminars on "What Is An Essential Government Role?" As participants in the seminar, we were given a series of scenarios including contracts rendering advice to public officials. At what point had the balance between openness and legal accountability been breeched? At what point had the balance between efficiency and regularity been tipped? Questions such as these, it seems to me, remain at the core of the New Public Management. Enthusiasts for markets may be inclined to forget that a supplier's need to keep the customer happy and therefore coming back is counterproductive to the public interest, especially if the supplier is supplying policy advice. In a pure market paradigm, the supplier will be principally interested in pleasing the governors rather than the government, the minister rather than the ministry. Commercial television, after all, supplies what people will watch, not what they should watch. The competitive supply of advice in a market setting may provide all the advice the recipient wants to hear rather than all the advice that should be heard. Markets, after all, do not distinguish between "tastes." An uninformed opinion is as good as an informed one. A vulgar taste is as good as a cultivated one. Within the market paradigm, it is snobbish to think otherwise. To be sure, civil servants themselves usually understood the receptivities of their political superordinates and used those to render their arguments in a way their superiors would find most plausible. There was, as well, always competition of a sort within government. The more fragmented the system, the more places a political executive might go to find advice of his or her pleasing. Yet the idea that civil servants were to provide advice not just within the framework of the present governors' preferences but

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also with respect to a future in which such preferences might not constitute the prevailing framework (neutral competence) was an integral part of the older paradigm of the role of the civil service. In a sense, the civil servant represented first and foremost the role of guardian and protector of the integrity of the state, not that of efficient manager or purveyor of instant wisdom. Of course, civil servants have their flaws and markets their virtues. It is possible that the coming shape of government will contain more markets and fewer civil servants (Kettl et al. 1996). Predicting the future is inherently problematic. I simply have no idea as to how durable the present reform paradigm will be, how successful it will prove to be, or, alternatively, what crises, if any, it will provoke. The traditional role of the civil servant, however, is undergoing a shift from protector of the integrity and regularity of public transactions to that of management scientist. And it appears to be undergoing a shift from neutral expertise to responsive competence, with the implication being that insufficient responsiveness from within government will lead to acquiring more responsive advice externally. Indeed, more generally, outsiders may be called in to transform structures in a manner that civil servants have shown little predisposition or inclination to do. In sum, should the new management paradigm persist, it will reflect the retreat of traditional conceptions of the role of the state and of the civil service. Like other modern organizations, governments may get remade to be managerially adaptive. This is apt to mean fewer rules and more discretion, less predictability and more risk-taking. It also suggests that there will be fewer state-run services and more contracting out and privatization. The state is surely not shrinking financially (though its rate of growth is) but its corpus of rules and regulations and procedures may well shrink. While all of this is in some measure speculative and remains to be seen, should it come to pass, it would in fact constitute a revolution truly spelling the end of the dominance of the Weberian paradigm. There is, of course, always the possibility that a new public management will displace the New Public Management.

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The Changing Role of the State CONCLUSION

Summary I have tried to address in this paper both macro- and microdevelopments concerning the changing role of the state. They are, to be sure, interrelated. What is happening at the macro-level is for the moment clearer than what is happening at the micro-level mainly because it is being driven by more homogeneous processes. If one distinguishes between outlays on the one hand and personnel and organizational structure on the other, it may be that the future holds a sizeable public sector, but one that will have less government. Efforts to control entitlement spending are already evident. Public sector expenditures may already have peaked. Budget controls, especially viewed in the context of slower growth in public expenditure as a proportion of GDP, have generally worked. But the welfare states are faced with inexorable pressures that will require extraordinary efforts to control and which could cause tremendous backlash if controlled. The public sector as a supplier of transfer payments will continue to be big, but, depending upon the persistence of the present features of the new management paradigm, government itself may turn out to be fairly hollow from the standpoint of administrative infrastructure. What could be more ironic than to have a smaller government responsible for big but largely concentrated expenditures? What Does Government Do Well?

The answer to the question of what does government do well is inevitably tinged with ideological predisposition. Neo-liberals tend to think that the only thing that government does well is to extract resources from the productive sectors of the economy. The fact of the matter is that it is not in the least bit evident that government overtaxes for the level of activities to which it is committed. Government, of course, may be over committed, that being a matter of belief or taste. The basic problem of government,

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however, is not that it is spending more on new things, but that it is spending massively on old things. Thus, the resources committed to the core activities of entitlements (disproportionately devoted to the elderly) are very large and underfinanced. The nub of the issue is that governments everywhere are bumping up against resistances to increasing the state's extraction of resources but have yet to bump up against a seemingly limitless demand for social services and transfer payments. It is thought that the private sector might manage this demand better by rationing resources available to meeting it. In the United States, but likely soon to appear in some fashion everywhere, managed health care rations supply, often through micro-management rather than through provider discretion. The private sector model is more generally seen to be an efficient one able to enforce cost-cutting, whatever the sector to which it is applied. One thing should be abundantly clear from this, even though it is often missed in arguments skewed toward the construction of private sector criteria as a model for how the public sector ought to work, and that is that maximizing producer efficiency is likely to be distinctly consumer unfriendly. Anyone who has flown a long trip in segments can attest to this. It is possible to fly through several meal cycles without ever seeing a meal on an airline. The producer efficiency is designed to enhance the performance of the producer to its shareholders, not necessarily to its consumers. In fact, the reverse is often the case. Catering to consumers often produces inefficiencies and reduced financial performance. What seems true for airline meals, or their absence, may well be true for health care, or its absence. The view that the private sector can do it better depends mightily on what the "it" is. One thing that the "it" is not likely to be is delivering services equitably and probably even adequately. Does the public sector do that better and more responsively? The answer is probably. One reason has to do with politicians' fears that voters will get upset at cuts in the services they receive. Private sector managers want to contain costs. Public sector managers want to provide services. The latter, in fact, are apt to be

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more user friendly. Ironically, in the case of the U.S., the only health care recipients not subject to extensive reviews of diagnostics and procedures are the uninsured indigent. It is possible that this good is being oversupplied, but it is equally possible that the private sector is undersupplying the good. It is necessary to remove ourselves from the tyranny of metaphors to understand what the public sector is about and what the private sector is about. If the problem is to discipline costs, competitive markets are likely to do that well. If the problem is to supply services, the public sector does that well, in spite of the abuse heaped upon it. What the private sector does well that the public sector does less well is to bring into balance the costs and supply of goods. The private sector is better able to do that because markets are transparent. The public sector does this less well because it depends upon extracting public resources through taxes. It can frequently conceal the nature of this extraction. If markets, after all, are about transparency, politics is about opaqueness and concealment. Politicians tend to be especially consumer friendly, and they have a stake in showing that they can make agencies act that way. But they are not likely to extract resources sufficient to pay the bills. Therefore, they tend either to run up deficits or transfer costs to others who are likely to push it on to still others. However indelicate this will sound, the basic problem of the public sphere lies not in the supply of services but in the willingness to extract revenues that accurately correspond to those costs. The problem, in short, is not that the public sphere is user unfriendly. Far from it. The essential problem of the public sphere is that too often it is fiscally irresponsible. And, alternatively, the private sector often achieves fiscal responsibility but does so by failing to be user friendly. Before the process of dismantling the public sector proceeds much further, it would be judicious to recognize both the virtues and the limits of the market metaphor and the distinctive virtues and liabilities of the ways the private and public spheres operate. Looking for quick fixes, by definition, fixes nothing. Getting it right first requires knowing what we want to get.

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Bert A. Rockman BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aberbach, Joel D., Robert D. Putnam, and Bert A. Rockman. 1981. Bureaucrats and Politicians in Western Democracies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Aberbach, Joel D., and Bert A. Rockman. 1976. Clashing beliefs within the executive branch: the Nixon administration bureaucracy. American Political Science Review 70:456-68. - 1985. Government responses to budget scarcity - USA. Policy Studies Journal 13, 3:494-504. - 1989. On the rise, transformation, and decline of analysis in the u.s. government. Governance 2, 3:293-314. - 1994. Civil servants and policymakers: neutral or responsive competence? Governance 7, 4:461-9. - 1995. The changing political environment of the u.s. federal executive. Paper presented at the IPSA/SOG Conference on New Challenges of the State in Comparative Perspective, Seoul, Korea, October. - 1997. Back to the future? Senior federal executives in the United States. Governance 10,4:323-49. Allison, Graham T. 1979. Public and private management: are they fundamentally alike in all unimportant respects? In Classics of Public Administration, 2nd ed., ed. Jay M. Shafritz and Albert C. Hyde, Chicago: The Dorsey Press. Aucoin, Peter. 1990. Administrative reform in public management: paradigms, principles, paradoxes, and pendulums. Governance 3:115-37. - 1995. The New Public Management: Canada in Comparative Perspective. Montreal: Institute for Research on Public Policy. Bishop, M.R., and J.A. Kay. 1990. Privatization and the performance of public firms. In Privatization and Deregulation in ASEAN and the EC: Making Markets More Effective, ed. Jacques Pelkmans and Norbert Wagner. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Campbell, Colin. 1995. Does reinvention need reinvention? Governance 8:479-504. Campbell, Colin, and Graham K. Wilson. 1995. The End of Whitehall: Death of a Paradigm? Oxford: Blackwell.

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Chubb, John E., and Terry M. Moe. 1990. Politics, Markets, and America's Schools. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution. Considine, Mark. 1988. The corporate management framework as administrative science: a critique. Australian Journal of Public Administration 47:4-18. Cowell, Alan. 1996. Germany's leader calls for big cuts in welfare state. The New York Times, national edition, 27 April, pp. i, 4. Gilbert, Charles E. 1959. The framework of administrative responsibility. Journal of Politics 21:373-407. Grabosky, Peter N. 1995. Using non-governmental resources to foster regulatory compliance. Governance 8:527-50. Hood, Christopher. 1990. De-Sir Humphreyfying the Westminster model of bureaucracy: a new style of governance? Governance 3:205-14. Huddleston, Mark W., and William W. Boyer. 1996. The Higher Civil Service in the United States: Quest for Reform. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Kaufman, Herbert. 1977. Red Tape: Its Origins, Uses, and Abuses. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution. Kettl, Donald F. 1993. Sharing Power: Public Governance and Private Markets. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution. - and John J. Dilulio. 1995. Inside the Reinvention Machine: Appraising Governmental Reform. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution. Kettl, Donald F., Patricia W. Ingraham, Ronald P. Sanders, Constance Horner, and Alan K. Campbell. 1996. Roadmap to Leadership: Building a Government that Works. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution. Kingdon, John W. 1984. Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies. Boston: Little, Brown. Lewis, Norman, and Patrick Birkinshaw. 1993. When Citizens Complain: Reforming Justice and the Administration. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. Light, Paul C. 1995. Thickening Government: federal Hierarchy and the Diffusion of Accountability. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution. Lord, Rodney. 1992. Privatisation Yearbook, 1992. London: Privatisation International. MacManus, Susan A. 1995. Taxing and spending politics: a generational perspective, journal of Politics 57:607-29.

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McCubbins, Matthew. 1985. The legislative design of regulatory structure. American Journal of Political Science 29:721-48. March, James G., and Johan P. Olsen. 1984. The new institutionalism: organizational factors in political life. American Political Science Review 78:734-49. Moe, Terry M. 1989. The politics of bureaucratic structure. In Can the Government Govern? ed. John E. Chubb and Paul E. Peterson. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution. National Performance Review. 1993. From Red Tape to Results: Creating a Government that Works Better and Costs Less. Washington: Government Printing Office. Niskanen, William R. 1971. Bureaucracy and Representative Government. Chicago: Aldine-Atherton. OECD. 1995. Historical Statistics, 1960-1993. Paris: OECD. - 1996. Responsive Government: Service Quality Initiatives. Paris: OECD. Olson, Mancur. 1982. The Rise and Decline of Nations. New Haven: Yale University Press. Pierre, Jon. 1995. The marketization of the state: citizens, consumers, and the emergence of the public market. In Governance in a Changing Environment, ed. B. Guy Peters and Donald J. Savoie. Montreal and Kingston: Canadian Centre for Management Development and McGill-Queen's University Press. Pierson, Paul. 1994. Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Retrenchment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rockman, Bert A. 1997. "Honey, I shrank the state" - on the brave new world of public administration. In Politics and Bureaucrats in Modern Systems of Governance, ed. Ali Farazmand, 275-94. Newport Beach, CA: Sage. Savoie, Donald J. 1994. Thatcher, Reagan, Mulroney: In Search of a New Bureaucracy. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Schick, Allen. 1969. Systems Politics and Systems Budgeting. Public Administration Review 29:137-51. Self, Peter. 1993. Government By the Market? The Politics of Public Choice. Houndmills, UK: Macmillan. Thayer, Frederick. 1997. The u.s. civil service 1883-1993 (R.I.P.). In

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Farazmand. Newport Beach, CA: Sage. Whitney, Craig R. 1996. In France, national health care meets a Gallic version of H.M.O. The New York Times, national edition, 25 April, p. A-6. Wildavsky, Aaron. 1966. The political economy of efficiency: costbenefit analysis, systems analysis, and program budgeting. Public Administration Review 26:292-310. Wilson, James Q. 1989. Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It. New York: Basic Books.

Managerialism Revisited CHRISTOPHER POLLITT

At the end of the 19805 I wrote a book entitled Managerialism and the Public Services (Pollitt 1993). The book advanced the thesis that managerialism was a distinct ideology and that it was rapidly becoming the dominant way of thinking about running public services in the U.S.A. and the UK. It traced the origins and character of the approach and identified the forces and circumstances that had propelled it into favour. It described some of the actual administrative and organizational reforms which had been carried out under its sway. In the present paper, seven years on, I have been invited to reconsider the impact of managerialism. In doing so I will try to look more widely than my original selection of the UK and the u.s. My foci will be first, the nature of managerialism's dominance; second, our state of knowledge concerning the impact of managerialist practices; and third, the relationship between managerialism and the wider challenges of good governance. In respect of the second and third of these foci I will attempt to "take stock," in the sense of offering an assessment of what has been achieved, and what has not. This is already a vast canvas and, to prevent its growing any larger, I have concentrated exclusively on those organizations which remain within the public sector, thus arbitrarily excluding from further consideration privatized enterprises, despite the fact that in a number of countries privatization has formed an 45

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important and in some senses successful component of managerialist reform.

MANAGERIALISM: THE CONCEPT REVISITED Since 1990 "managerialism" has become a popular term, and has paid the price of success. It has now been used with such a variety of meanings that it is in danger of becoming meaningless. In the hope of minimizing confusion I will distinguish three perspectives, which it will be my intention clearly to signpost throughout the remainder of this paper. Three aspects of managerialism will be discussed: managerialism as an ideology, as a rhetoric, and as a set of practices. The three are interrelated. The underlying values and logical structures which constitute an ideology are most readily identifiable in the use of language - in the rhetoric of (in this case) managerialism. Rhetorical analysis may therefore help to provide a kind of template of the underlying ideology. Furthermore it is language again which is often studied in order to ascertain the extent of actual practices. While a variety of investigatory methodologies may be deployed in order to establish the presence or absence of specific "marker" practices (such as the use of performancerelated pay or the decentralization of budgetary authority), in practice interviews remain one of the most common ones. In the academic world, at least, they are a more common method than, say, direct observation or the collection of quantitative data. And the interview situation is one in which the investigator is faced with a rhetorical account of the world as perceived by the interviewee. All in all the analysis of managerialism rests heavily on the interpretation of discursive accounts (spoken or written) by participants, and the modern study of rhetoric offers a set of tools for performing just such an analysis. This concern with language and ideology is in no way intended to suggest that the assessment of the practical value of managerialist reforms is secondary or unimportant. Nor is it to devalue attempts at direct observation of management practices. Wherever sound empirical evidence concerning the effectiveness of manage-

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ment practices has been assembled and is known to the author it will be referred to. The chapter thus draws extensively on conventional surveys and evaluations, both "official" and academic. Yet these cannot stand apart from the framework of ideas within which they were conceived or the words in which their "findings" are expressed and interpreted (Fischer and Forester 1993:1-5). MANAGERIALISM AS AN IDEOLOGY

The ideology of managerialism was described in some detail in the earlier book and there is no need to do more than pick out a few key features here (Pollitt 1993:1-27). At the most general level managerialism rests upon the assumption that better management (rather than better policies, new technologies, or different kinds of constitutional arrangements) offers our societies the best chance of material progress. It also assumes that "management" is a distinct and separate activity, and one that plays the crucial integrative role in bringing together plans, people, and technology to achieve desired results. Along with these very basic assumptions go various corollaries and implications. One is that managers should be given the room - or "right" - to manage: that they should not be tied down by pettifogging rules or constraints. Another implication is that management is an essentially dynamic force, quite distinct from old-fashioned "administration" (which, indeed, is seen as part of the problem to which management is the solution; for an early specimen, see Keeling 1972). Another corollary is that there is no fundamental difference between public and private sectors in the above respects - both need better management if they are to improve. In these, as in other respects, managerialism exhibits a typical characteristic of many ideologies, namely that it is formulated partly in reaction to some previously influential set of ideas. Last, but not least, there is the sotto voce implication that the sphere of management is or should be expanding while the sphere of politics should be limited. The latter is a realm of disorder, amateurism, short-sightedness, conflict, and drama; the former is a realm of order, professionalism, dynamism, and strategic thinking.

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Like other ideologies, managerialism displays five main characteristics: First, that it consists of values and beliefs or ideas about the state of the world and what it should be. Second, these cognitive and affective elements form a framework. In other words, ideology is not simply a summation of a set of attitudes, but consists of some kind of relatively systematic structuring (though the structuring may be psychological rather than logical). Third, ideologies concern social groups and social arrangements - in other words, politics in its widest sense of being concerned with the distribution and ordering of resources. Fourth, an ideology is developed and maintained by social groups, and thus is a socially derived link between the individual and the group ... Fifth, ideology provides a justification for behaviour. (Hartley 1983:26-7)

At a detailed level the content of a particular ideology may undergo shifts of emphasis over time, and, indeed there may be competing schools of thought among the larger body of believers. This has been visible with managerialism within the public sector where, for example, the somewhat crude thrust toward economy and efficiency that was typical of the first half of the 19803 in the UK and the U.S.A. has been replaced by a more balanced package that also emphasizes quality, standards, and the "empowerment" of front-line staff (Pollitt 1993:188-96). And in the mid-iggos there are clearly differences between softer, "relational" or "postbureaucratic" models and harder "market-oriented" models more exclusively founded on neo-classical micro-economics. Looking back over the past two decades it is hard not to conclude that managerialism as an ideology has been a tremendous success. The broad pattern of beliefs sketched above has spread throughout most of the OECD world (with Germany and Japan as important exceptions, Jones 1993; OECD 1995). If we examine managers' attitudes and beliefs in more detail, confirmation of the spread of managerialism is not hard to find. Few now think - as they might have done during the early 19803 - that the New Public Management (NPM) is a passing fashion that will soon blow over. In a 1993 survey of 3800 UK public sector managers,

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Talbot (1994) found large majorities acknowledging change toward greater efficiency and reduced costs and expressing positive attitudes toward experienced increases in personal job responsibilities. The same survey registered an increasing use of private sector management vocabulary within public sector settings and extensive use of private sector techniques - both interpretable as signs of a growing "genericism" in management (that is, a belief that all management is essentially the same). Yet to conclude that an ideology of managerialism has become widespread is not at all the same as suggesting that a uniform model of change is dominant throughout the Western liberal democracies. Nor, certainly, is it to suggest that an identikit set of management practices is everywhere being put in place. As we know from the examples of many totalitarian states, such ideologies may bear only limited relation to actual practice and may in fact be opposed, in greater or lesser part, by large sections of the societies concerned. It is worth noting, therefore, that most of the "promotion" of the "new global paradigm" (Hood 1995) comes from the English-speaking countries - the U.S., the UK and New Zealand. As has already been mentioned, Germany and Japan appear distinctly lukewarm. In fact many continental European states seem much more cautious and selective in their approaches to the nostrums of the NPM than do the Anglo-Saxons. These countries tend to favour "post bureaucratic" variants of managerialism over the "economic rationalism" celebrated by the Anglo-Saxons (Barzelay 1992; Yeatman 1994). Compared with the pro-market, micro-economic rationality of the NPM, the post-bureaucratic variant places more emphasis on preserving existing relationships between groups (including trade unions) and much less on the dualisms of principal and agent, funding and providing and "steering and rowing" (Yeatman 1994:293). It could be said that Germany and the Nordic countries place a higher priority on preserving within their public sectors the "social capital" of trust and a tolerably stable legal order. So they are correspondingly more nervous about importing types of reform that appear to be based on the principles of self-interested economic individualism (Fukuyama 1995). Thus, in their different

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ways, Germany (especially), the Nordic countries, and France have been much less "gung-ho" for the application of market mechanisms and business models in public sector organizations than, say, the minister for the civil service in the UK or Vice President Gore in the u.s. (Gore 1993; Waldegrave 1994). More typical for continental Europe might be the comparative study undertaken for the Finnish government by a German academic: "Contrary to the official view taken by the OECD as an organization, there is no evidence of a linear, homogenous trend in public sector development... There is not one, but rather - as a mixture of international trends and local factors - a limited plurality of development paths of public sector modernisation" (Naschold i995:ii; see also the differing paradigms identified in Nicole de Montricher's chapter). This is an important qualification, but should not be overstated. For even in Germany (especially at the municipal level) and certainly in France and the Nordic states there is still a strong concern for public management reform, and an underpinning belief that this is an important way of restraining public expenditure (and thereby assisting economic growth) as well as restoring governmental legitimacy (see OECD 19963, for a particularly effusive ministerial statement of these themes). The precise model of management chosen may be different but better management is nevertheless regarded as an important part of the "solution" to the problems of governance. Thus the dominance of the managerialist ideology - and the particular model of good management that is advocated - varies from country to country. But its prevalence also appears to vary by type of organization and level within the hierarchy. In brief, there is, first, some evidence to indicate that managerialism as an ideology has found it more difficult to take root in organizations concerned with the delivery of public health, welfare, and education services than in organizations with more technical or bureaucratic functions such as issuing licences, delivering the mail, or paying benefits. Second, managerialism seems less popular at lower hierarchical levels than among senior and top managers. Thus research in the

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much-reformed UK National Health Service frequently reveals that top managers are far more enthusiastic about managerialist reforms than are hospital doctors or lower-level employees (e.g., Harrison et al. 1992). Similarly, the large-scale evaluation of Australian NFM reforms carried out by the Task Force on Management Improvement included the finding that lower and middle management were less convinced of progress than their superiors (Task Force on Management Improvement 1992). Of France Rouban writes: "For instance, it is clear that senior civil servants support personal performance appraisal systems much more than clerical employees do... The legitimacy of the various managerial tools is not the same along the hierarchical line" (Rouban 1995:51). All of which is not particularly surprising, since among the most common practical effects of the NPM are increased authority (and often salaries) for top managers and the shedding of staff at lower and middle levels. Thus these subordinate groups are well positioned to compare the pretensions of the managerialist ideology with actual daily practice. In sum, therefore, one might say that managerialism as an ideology has indeed achieved considerable penetration during the last fifteen years or so. It has broadly suited at least two powerful groups - politicians and senior officials - and has appeared to offer hope in the difficult circumstances of intensified global economic competition and pressures on public spending. It has been successful in undermining the older ideology of public service and planning. However, no ideology ever achieves complete dominance, and the strength of attachment to managerialism appears to diminish the further one moves down from the top levels of public organizations and/or away from generalist officials or technical services towards highly professionalized services delivering interpersonal services. Also, the prevailing species of managerialism varies from country to country, with the harshest, most market-oriented varieties taking deepest root in Australasia, the UK, and the U.S.A., while milder, more "relational" versions gain currency in the consensualist Nordic political systems and (for different reasons) in the more state-centred and legalistic cultures of France and Germany.

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Managerialism Revisited M A N A G E R I A L I S M AS RHETORIC

To study rhetoric is to examine texts as assemblages of linguistic practices consciously intended to secure some specific interest. A text is thus considered to be a piece of purposiveness action, an argument constructed so as to persuade a particular audience of a particular point of view (Summa 1992). This approach is relevant to our theme of management reform because "the work of central government officials consists mostly of speaking and writing. Planning in the bureaucracy is at its most concrete level always in production of text, development and selection of verbal arguments" (Summa 1993; see also Majone 1989). Thus, while this is not the place to go into the technicalities of modern rhetorical analysis, any review of managerialism which entirely ignored its rhetorical dimension would surely be deficient. A brief review of the nature of managerialist rhetorics is therefore in order. Following Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1971) one may distinguish among the framework of argumentation, the starting points, and specific argumentative techniques. The nature of the relationship with the (explicit or implicit) audience is usually central to the framework of argumentation. Managerialist texts address themselves to a number of different audiences depending on the precise type of document (for example, some are addressed to junior and middle level officials, some to specialist international audiences, such as national contributions to OECD documents). Here there is space to consider only one type of such document, that class of public domain publications which include white papers, government statements, and ministerial speeches. In these a universal audience is addressed: it is assumed that any rational person will accept the basic problem framing and starting points for the argument. One starting point assumption that is often made in such official texts is that the citizen audience already knows and agrees that public bureaucracies are somehow inadequate to contemporary circumstances and in need of fundamental restructuring. For example: "We must make cuts where necessary; we must also make our government more effective and efficient" (Gore 1993:43).

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In the same year an even more emphatic example came from the British financial secretary to the treasury. Note in this case the unfavourable contrast of the public sector with the private - a theme to which we will return: "All around the world Governments are recognising the opportunity to improve the quality and effectiveness of the public sector. Privatisation, market testing, and private finance are techniques being used in almost every developed country. It's not difficult to see why" (Dorrell 1993). A second starting point is that there exists a body of proven ideas and management approaches which can be relied upon to bring about certain kinds of desirable change. Neither of these assumptions is usually subject to any critical scrutiny or supported by much evidence. These themes are more frequent and prominent in American, British, and Australasian texts than elsewhere, but can be found in more muted form in documents from the Nordic countries (e.g., Gore 1993; Prime Minister 1991; Ball 1993). A recent OECD overview well summarized the mood: Member countries have acknowledged the imperative for wide-ranging re-invention within their public sectors. Management structures have been analysed and innovations introduced ... The common agenda that has developed encompasses efforts to make governments at all levels more efficient and cost-effective, to increase the quality of public services, to enable the public sector to respond flexibly and more strategically to external changes, and to support and foster national economic performance. (OECD 1995:7)

The assumption here is clearly that techniques are available ("Management structures have been analysed," and so on) and that efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and quality can all simultaneously be improved. There is no hint of the desperate struggle with rising demands and diminishing real resources that many governments actually face. A third common starting point for managerialist argument is the self-evident importance and desirability of efficiency.Yet the term itself- "efficiency" - is often used "in a metaphorical way as it is not connected to any specified input/output relation"

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(Summa 1992:148). Indeed, the empirical underpinnings of the broad efficiency claims of NPM may be quite flimsy (Pollitt 1995). In any case efficiency is only an instrumental value, not an end in itself, so the case for efficiency is always incomplete unless one also specifies "efficiency for what?" (Goodin and Wilenski 1984). "Flexibility" is often a rhetorical ally of "efficiency." Public services should be "flexible" because in that way they will be more efficient, and also more responsive to the consumer (see below). Quite what is to be flexible about them often remains undefined, and in this referential vacuum it is hard to see how anyone could be opposed to such a positive-sounding condition. In practice, however, the rhetoric of "flexibility" frequently conceals a shift toward the weakening of job tenure for various categories of public official, the working of more unsociable hours, and employment of a much higher proportion of part-time and temporary staff. Such developments, while likely to save money, may carry either positive or decidedly negative consequences for the citizens who use the services concerned. While efficiency has been a pervasive argument since the beginning of the present wave of management reform in the late 19708, more recently a second cluster of metaphors has emerged around the notions of quality and customer or consumer choice (Pollitt 1993:177-87; Pollitt and Bouckaert 1995:1-10). These constitute a fourth starting point for the rhetoric of reform. Consider the following speech by the u.s. vice president: "We are going to rationalize the way the federal government relates to the American people, and we are going to make the federal government customer friendly. A lot of people don't realize that the federal government has customers. We have customers. The American people" (Gore 1993:43). These concepts are also frequently deployed in contexts where quality is either undefined or used in a highly contestable sense, and/or where the average "customer" or "consumer" probably has very limited scope for choice, and where managers, professionals or legislators continue routinely to define the available options. It is clear that those in abject poverty do not choose to "consume" social security benefits in quite the same sense as

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supermarket shoppers choose to consume passion fruit rather than bananas. Neither can the five-year-old schoolchild, the resident in an old persons' home, or the patient undergoing haemodialysis be sensibly spoken of in quite the same breath as the Saturday afternoon shopper looking for a new dress or jacket. Yet these categories of person actually represent the majority of the "consumers" of public services. Take, for example, the UK Customer Charter (Benefits Agency [BA] 1992). The preface states that "this national charter sets out how we aim to provide a quality service." It then goes on to give details of the promptness and accuracy with which "customers" may expect to receive payments, of grievance procedures, and of the way in which the agency is measuring "customer satisfaction." This is fine as far as it goes. What it fails to mention, however, is that "customers" cannot go elsewhere, because the BA is a national monopoly, and that the eligibility rules governing the payment of, for example, income support, have been progressively tightened throughout the period during which the charter has been in existence. Both "quality" and "customer" therefore take on rather peculiar and distinctive meanings within the charter rhetoric. For benefits claimants, as for many other public service users, the term "quality," insofar as it has any concrete referent, signifies a greater concern with essentially procedural rather than substantive issues - with whether income support claims are dealt with within an average of four days rather than whether the level of benefit allows one to live decently, with whether the person in the hospital accident and emergency department is seen within thirty minutes rather than with whether the clinical quality of treatment is good or whether there is, in fact, an accident and emergency department within a reasonable distance of the person's workplace or home. What appears to be happening in these cases is that the rhetor (the government) is using the language of quality in such a way as to persuade the universal audience that, while procedures can and are being better managed, matters of deeper substance are beyond anyone's control and therefore, by implication, not worth discussion. This is, very precisely, the conversion of a potentially political agenda into a managerial one.

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In sum, managerialist speeches and documents tend to construct their arguments on the basis of four founding assumptions which are themselves only rarely subject to critical reflection or empirical test. These four starting points are: a that existing public sector organizations are outmoded and in need of reform b that a body of proven management ideas and techniques is available to guide the reform process c that it is self-evident that efficiency will flow from the application of such techniques and that greater efficiency and flexibility are desirable in themselves d that it is progressive to redefine the citizens who interact with public sector organizations as consumers or customers. To conclude our consideration of the rhetorical perspective it is necessary to add some observations about the argumentative techniques typically employed. These are the figures of speech and other devices which build upon the key assumptions and starting points in order to construct an argument calculated to persuade the intended audience or audiences. Here one is not merely referring to the choice of a snappy "sound bite," a seductive comparison, or a dazzling metaphor, influential though these can be ("steering not rowing," "The Citizen's Charter is about giving more power to the citizen"). Equally a statistical survey or a battery of performance indicators may be used as powerful techniques for shrouding specific interests in a cloak of "scientific" neutrality (Throgmorton 1993). One of the most striking features of many managerialist texts is the way in which the language of the business world has been imported to the world of public sector affairs. As one might expect, this is at its most obvious in the Anglo-Saxon "NPM" countries, but is also present to a lesser degree elsewhere. The "businessification" of the language of public administration is manifest not only in the deployment of specific terms ("strategic positioning," "business plan," "product," "value-added," "customer satisfaction," "corporate vision") but also in the

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attempt to give documents and speeches the sort of pace and attack which they formerly lacked. This latter move infuses reform documents with a sense of dynamism and urgency which one would hardly have associated with machinery of government changes in, say, the 19505. Unfortunately there is no space in an essay such as this for an extended example of close textual analysis. A serious interrogation of argumentative techniques would entail a careful effort to identify representative "samples" of text. Here, however, only a brief and impressionistic glimpse can be attempted: Cut red tape ... Put the customer first... Empower employees ... Cut back to basics. (Gore 1993) Executive agencies ... have played a decisive part in ensuring that the executive functions of the civil service are progressively carried out in a more businesslike and effective way, with greater openness and closer to the citizen. (Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster 1994:1) The Chief Executive's role is to produce the agreed outputs for a price. (Ball 1993:7) In the new managerial style of government it is the result that matters, not the way it is achieved ... Resources are allocated within more flexible frameworks, allowing government departments and their managers more room for manoeuvre, whilst stressing their accountability for good results. (Ministry of Finance 1993^7)

In the first of the above extracts the U.S. vice president exemplifies the kinds of shifts referred to above. The language is pugilistic ("cut," "empower," "cut") and peppered with would-be sound bites. The "customer" is to the fore. The politician is not mentioned (indeed, lack of a realistic analysis of political roles was one of the weaknesses of the National Performance Review; see Kettl 1994). There is also an interesting use of the term "basics," implying that the audience will all know what these are, that they existed in some former, simpler time, and that we can somehow

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get back to them. One could spend an interesting half hour "unpacking" this concept alone! In the second extract the prose is less punchy, but the message is essentially similar. The claim is that what was basically an internal restructuring of ministerial departments would not merely satisfy the ubiquitous requirement to be more "businesslike" but would also result in "openness" and "closeness" to the citizen. As we will see later in the paper the performance data actually published by these new agencies, though voluminous, is significantly flawed in terms of "openness." As for "closeness," this property is made to sound desirable, but is hard to define and even harder to measure. I am unaware of any systematic evidence to indicate that citizens feel "closer" to executive agencies than they did to their predecessor organizations; indeed, the whole idea sounds fairly implausible. The third extract, from the Central Financial Controller of the New Zealand treasury (Ball 1993), exemplifies both the business orientation and the fondness for economistic metaphors within that particular wing of managerialist thought. The chief executive's role sounds neutral, technical, cut and dried. Yet the reality to which Ball refers is presumably that of senior officials in daily contact with ministers, arguing, defining, compromising, juggling among different priorities, pressured by various interest groups, defending their own organizational interests and so on. Finally there is the extract from a document published by the Finnish Ministry of Finance. It is significant that at this point the document is describing what its authors take to be the character of reforms undertaken in other countries. The language here is less evangelical than in the first two extracts, but there is nevertheless a characteristic reference to "flexibility" as a virtue and to the idea that managers need more freedom in order to get "results." "Results" are portrayed as important, procedures much less so. Taken in isolation (or, more precisely, against a background of an assumed distaste for "rule-following bureaucracy") this sounds unobjectionable, but again, as soon as one begins to analyse more deeply, problems appear. For example, isn't it the case that procedural questions (how things are achieved) are fundamental to

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our notions of democratic governance? Some variant of the concept of "due process" is central to most systems of administrative and constitutional law. The idea of civil servants being able freely to invent shortcuts and new ways of doing things simply in order to achieve what someone (who?) defines as better results is not at all a comfortable one. MANAGERIALISM AS PRACTICE: WHAT WORKS AND WHAT DOESN'T?

It is far easier to ask questions about the impact of managerialism on practice than to answer them. Quite a few writers and speechmakers have set out to address the seductively simple question, "What works and what doesn't?" but their labours have not yet yielded reliable and operational checklists. In fact there are several reasons why a mechanical approach - while it may well spawn checklists and warnings - is unlikely ever to generate a specific yet global "cookbook" of actions. To begin with, "managerialism" itself is not a simple entity, a single technique, or even a coherent and closely interrelated set of techniques. As indicated above, it is a complex ideology, expressed through a variety of rhetorical devices and able to "claim" a wide range of specific practices as part of its domain. Some of these techniques may work quite well across a variety of contexts, others may be successful only when a demanding set of prerequisites is in place, and still others may be fundamentally flawed. Therefore any overarching judgment as to whether managerialist practices "work" is likely to conceal as much as or more than it reveals. Second, the issue of context is vital. It is a commonplace observation of practitioners that what works quite well in one setting fails in another. It is an equally commonplace conclusion of social scientists that when examining any kind of intervention the context as well as the intervention requires theorizing. Both notions are correct. What is more, contexts are highly specific: it is not merely that hospitals are different from ministries of finance or that Nordic consensual and decentralized political regimes

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provide a different context for management reform from the British centralized and adversarial regime. The problem goes deeper: one hospital is different from another and one French ministry will make a success of centres de responsabilite while another will smother them with inertia (Trosa 1995:54-6). Third, the question itself ("What works?") is misleadingly straightforward. Of course, one must ask, "What is meant by 'works'?" Any such analysis immediately reveals a multitude of possible criteria, the relative weightings of which are highly contestable. Consider, for example, what might be meant by the statement, "Decentralizing budgetary authority to line managers really works." This could have at least the following meanings: a Line managers like it b Such decentralization produces greater allocative efficiency in spending c Such decentralization produces greater technical efficiency in spending d Such decentralization makes it easier to cap and reduce spending (greater economy) e Line managers choose to spend the money in ways which generate higher levels of satisfaction among the users of their services f Central players (politicians, finance departments) no longer have to bear such a large share of the unpopularity that accompanies painful allocative decisions under conditions of a severe shortage of resources. And so on. In practice the decentralization of budgetary authority is likely to make things "better" in some of these respects and "worse" in others. Thus the question of the success of a particular approach or technique quickly resolves itself into a deeper question about values (and hence returns us to some of the ideological considerations referred to earlier). What relative priorities are we to give to the satisfaction of service users, the morale of service providers, the popularity of politicians, the

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equitability of expenditures, the waste of resources that could have been put to other purposes, and a number of other possible considerations? There are also some tricky issues around the choice of the unit of assessment. Following the application of managerialist techniques a hospital may be seen to become more efficient, in the sense that its average length of stay falls and more patients are put through a smaller number of beds without any measurably adverse effect on the clinical quality of the services provided. Thus it would seem incontestable that the techniques have "delivered." However, if the scope of analysis is broadened it may be discovered that convalescing patients are now being discharged to a community that is ill-prepared to receive them. Community nursing services, friends, and relatives may be under unbearable new pressures. The extra resources needed to cope with the earlier, sicker discharges may be equal to or even greater than those that would have been required to allow the patients to spend an extra day or two in hospital. The system as a whole has not improved, although one part of it apparently has. This is a focus for real controversy where, as in the health and education sectors in the UK, NPM reforms have led to a fragmentation of the pattern of institutions and a measure of competition between service providers (Painter et al. 1996; Birchall et al. 1995). Similar concerns arise in the service quality debate where divergences can appear between micro-quality, meso-quality, and macro-quality (Pollitt and Bouckaert 1995:14-16). For example, it could be argued that, over recent years the macro-quality of the UK university system has improved, principally through broadening access (30 percent of the age cohort now enter higher education as compared with 15 percent during the 19703) and beginning to pay more systematic attention to teaching. However, mesoquality has in some cases declined insofar as individual institutions are admitting much less well-prepared students and teaching them in much larger groups and in a more mechanical way. Micro-quality may depend on the luck of the draw - which particular staff a particular student happens to be taught by. It is perfectly possible to go to Oxford and be incompetently taught.

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By this point in the chapter advocates of managerialism may well be becoming somewhat impatient. In my experience, faced with all the doubts and qualifications expressed above, their counterarguments tend to follow an understandable line. It goes something like this: Yes, managerialism may have some of the features of an ideology. Yes, managerialist ideas are certainly "sold" through the use of carefully chosen rhetoric which may sometimes conceal the weaker or less pleasant aspects of their logic. And Yes, evaluating whole programs of management change is a complex business, difficult to do well. But all this academic nit-picking ignores the most important features of the situation facing governments. These are (a) that external pressures are forcing fundamental reform and (b) that the accumulated experience of many managers is that changes can be achieved and benefits in terms of increased efficiency and sometimes improved service quality have been won. What is more, (c) the reformed systems, by generating more performance information, are much more transparent and available for democratic scrutiny than they were before. These practitioner arguments are forceful indeed. The initial point can be readily conceded: external pressures do seem to demand change within our public sectors. The second point concerning the experience of change - is also a telling one. We know, for example, that considerable economies can usually be made by compulsory competitive tendering of services such as buildings cleaning, catering, refuse collection and so on. These savings are made principally at the expense of the terms and conditions of the work force, but from the taxpayers' viewpoint they are real nonetheless (Kerr and Radford 1994). We know that we can devise performance indicator systems and link them to resource allocation processes in such a way as to secure real behavioural change. This change can be beneficial if the indicator sets are intelligently designed in conjunction with experts in the service concerned, and there is now a good deal of codified experience on how to minimize the effects of perverse incentives (Likierman 1995; Carter et al. 1992). We know that greater

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institutional autonomy in budget-setting and the management of staff is both appreciated and creatively used by local hospitals, schools, and housing associations, though their appreciation is (unsurprisingly) diminished if the global cap on local budgets is very tight (Birchall et al. 1995). As far as raising the quality of public services is concerned, we are deluged with advice on different systems for improvement and examples of local achievement (for example, Bouckaert and Pollitt 1995; OECD i996b). Among UK public sector managers there is strong survey evidence of an increased emphasis on a "customer focus" (Talbot 1994: 41-3). More generally we can now read many books and articles retailing apparently successful instances of public sector management reform (Osborne and Gaebler 1992 is a famous example of this genre). All in all there can be little doubt that change is underway and that some clearly identifiable benefits can confidently be associated with certain types of reform instrument - so long as allowance is made for the specific context in which implementation is taking place. The third practitioner point concerns the availability of information for accountability. As one of the ministerial architects of the UK reforms put it: The separation of policy from executive, of purchaser from provider, enables agencies (unlike the traditional Whitehall Departments) to publish their framework documents, key annual targets, annual reports and accounts, and, subject to security and commercial sensitivity, their corporate and business plans. All this has significantly increased the information available to Parliament on their activities, compared to their previous anonymous existence as part of the Whitehall machine. It has, more importantly, made transparent the links in the accountability chain which were pretty obscure before. (Waldegrave 1993 in Flynn 1994:84; emphasis in the original)

This claim, also, is to a significant extent true. More performance information is published than ever before. The entitlements of citizens as public service users are better codified and pamphleted since the advent of the Citizen's Charter program. This

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information is worth having. But the devil is in the detail. On closer inspection it turns out that the serried ranks of mission statements, charters, and performance indicators seldom offer conclusive evidence concerning the success of managerialist reforms. Let us take as our example one of the most-trumpeted successes among the UK reforms - the creation of executive agencies or Next Steps program, to which Waldegrave was specifically referring. Since 1989 well over 100 agencies have been launched and they now employ approximately two thirds of the civil service. The program generally commands bipartisan support in the House of Commons. Each year a review document is published by the government which contains a record of each agency's performance against the targets for the previous year and a statement of the targets for the coming year (for a compendium see Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster 1994, for more detail see each agency's annual report). This is an impressive volume of data. The University of Glamorgan Business School (Talbot 1996) has recently carried out a detailed analysis of the annual reports of all the agencies. This study set some minimum criteria for performance information, arguing that the reports need to: a translate each agency objective into a key performance indicator or indicators b show what resources are allocated to achieving each objective c relate outputs to objectives d relate outputs to inputs. Their conclusion was that "very few Agency Annual Reports, on our initial scan, would meet all of these very crude criteria" (Talbot 1996:23). Indeed, almost half of agency aims and objectives were not covered at all in their key performance indicators. Nor is this an isolated example. In Australia a study of twentyfive federal programs revealed that, in the majority of cases, there was little discernible linkage between the general program objectives and operational targets and actions (Trosa 1995:288). In New Zealand great energies have been applied and considerable progress made. Nevertheless the allocation of costs to outputs has

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proved particularly difficult, and the intense focus on outputs has led to a neglect of outcomes (Boston et al. 1996:278). In Finland, despite considerable efforts to establish "results-oriented budgeting" from the late 19803 onward, an evaluation "showed that in practically all cases the link between money and the level of performance was missing: a central shortcoming of performance targets presented in budgetary proposals was the lack of a logical chain leading from targets to costs" (Summa 1995:158). However, all is not lost. Significant productivity gains seem to have been achieved in many of these organizations (in the Finnish case, for example, government agencies that had adopted results budgeting saved on average more than 10 percent of their appropriations). The problem is not that nothing is happening. Rather the problem is one of establishing the full chain of linkages from strategic objectives (set by politicians) through intermediate levels to operational output targets, incorporating effectiveness as well as efficiency measures throughout, and also attaching reliable costing systems to these chains of intentions. This is a complex, subtle, and time-consuming task. Departments and agencies are likely to require a degree of stability over a period of several annual iterations to get such systems firmly in place. This will be the case even when the agency concerned is well motivated to adopt the new system, which will in turn depend on the wider context in which the reforms are taking place, including the degree of trust prevailing between different departments and between politicians and civil servants. Reference has already been made to a number of evaluations or reviews of managerialist reforms. The total number of such evaluations must be very large, and to do justice to them is beyond the competence of this author. However, very many of these are highly context-specific and therefore provide only a fragile basis for generalization. The number of broad-scope evaluations of managerialist reform programs is much smaller. It is to these macro-evaluations that the remainder of this section will be directed. Most of these broad assessments of reform have suffered from some quite severe methodological limitations (Pollitt 1995). First,

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they have experienced considerable attribution problems. Where they have found "effects" they have not been able to be certain which of a variety of simultaneous changes have been the most influential "causes." Second, they have often lacked reliable baselines or benchmarks and have therefore been unable to measure with any confidence just how much change has been achieved. Third, they have had only limited success in tackling the problem of taxonomizing or theorizing contexts, so the likely "fit" between specific techniques and organizational characteristics remains unclear. Fourth, the measurement of costs and benefits has seldom been easy. Distinguishing between transitional and continuing costs has been one problem and balancing efficiency gains against increases in transaction costs has been another. Fifth, the choice of evaluative criteria for these evaluations seems seldom to have been the subject of much explicit debate. Concentrating exclusively on the officially stated objectives of reform programs is understandable (especially for in-house evaluations) but carries with it at least two dangers. The first is that, by limiting evaluation to the rhetoric of official policy, the process of enquiry immediately swallows the value assumptions and starting points of that discourse. The second (a corollary of the first) is that unintended effects may well be missed - for example, a gain in efficiency (officially sought) may be achieved at the price of decreasing equality of opportunity (for a survey of this effect pertaining to compulsory competitive tendering see Escott and Whitfield 1995). MANAGERIALISM AS PRACTICE: REFLECTIONS

Overall, therefore, my reservations about managerialism in practice are not principally concerned with its claim to be able to increase the intensity of public sector activity. Of course, not all managerialist attempts to do this succeed. But a significant number of them do, and there is a fair international trade in learning lessons as to what approaches and techniques are likely to work and what are the pitfalls to be avoided. This lessonlearning may not be quite so systematic or theoretically selfconscious as some of us academics might wish, but it seems useful and important nonetheless.

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Nevertheless, I would wish to draw attention to a series of larger issues that, in effect, frame the rising productivity of many public sector agencies. First, as we have seen, there are the issues of the scope and coherence of the flood of new performance information. To a considerable degree the limitations apparent a decade ago are still present - much of the information is input, process, or output data which helps to confirm efficiency gains but does little to illuminate deeper questions of need, quality, equity, and effectiveness (Pollitt 1986; National Academy of Public Administration 1994). What is more, the coherence of the available information is often low in the sense that the relationships between program objectives, operational targets and performance indicator sets are obscure or radically incomplete. Second, at the systemic level, managerialism's empirical foundations are surprisingly flimsy. Compelling evidence for transformations of public sector performances is simply not yet there. Few large-scale evaluations have been carried out, and where they have (most conspicuously in Australia) the methodological limitations are considerable (for example, Task Force on Management Improvement 1992). While we can be reasonably confident in attributing specific changes in specific institutions to this or that managerial reform, the more global effects are still shrouded in considerable uncertainty. There is a sense in which we know we have made a whole series of specific efficiency gains in specific agencies and departments but that we do not yet have a very clear or reliable picture of what we have "paid" for these achievements. A problem for analysis is that their probable "costs" have been paid in a variety of incommensurable currencies such as increasing inequalities and inequities, falling morale among certain groups of public servants, lessening trust, increasing stress and uncertainty, and so on. Within this larger point there is reason for particular concern at one particular "cost" - the loss of inter-agency coordination and planning that can result from the kind of organizational fragmentation and quasicompetitiveness which have been imposed upon some public sectors. Clearly there is a lot of rowing going on but it is not always clear whether anyone can still steer the flotillas of autonomous agencies in the direction of any broader public good.

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This, in turn, leads to a third concern. The issue is that of the nature of public service within our newly managerialized public sectors. This is partly (but only partly) a question of the pace and sequence of implementation. On the one hand, it is extremely unlikely that there could be one best implementation strategy to fit every variety of political system and culture. Indeed, several authors have commented on the diversity of implementation strategies which have been adopted in different countries and parts of the public sector (Naschold 1995; Klages and Haubner 1995; Boston 1995). Some governments have thrown themselves at reform with evangelical zeal, proclaiming high expectations and roughly overriding dissenters and resistance from public service unions (New Zealand and the UK). Others have approached reform openly but cautiously, seeking to preserve consensus wherever possible (Finland) while some have deliberately avoided dramatic restructurings and programmatic statements (Denmark). Some have attempted a good deal of evaluation (Australia); others have been so convinced of the Tightness and necessity of their programs that they have usually rejected calls for pilot projects or concurrent evaluation (UK). Some have worked with a coherent and explicit overall model of reform (New Zealand again) while others have proceeded piece by piece without the aid of a general theory (France, UK). In one respect, however, most governments in most countries have been similar. The redefinition of the roles, responsibilities and codes of practice of civil servants after managerialist reform has tended to take a late and often-muted role on the public agenda. Only in the mid-1990s, a decade or more after the most intense wave of reform began, have some governments been prepared seriously to address the medium- and longer-term consequences of their decisions in terms of the motivation, culture, integrity, and accountability of public officials. Of course a good deal of effort has been expended on human resource management (HRM) issues such as performance-related pay, the increasing use of term contracts, the decentralization of personnel powers, and so on. It is not these HRM issues that are being referred to here, but rather the more fundamental questions of, "What will it mean to

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be a civil servant in ten years' time?" or, "Will some new stability ever be attained, and if so, what will it look like?" or, "Is there nothing more for staff to look forward to than continuing waves of 'downsizing' and privatization?" A further fundamental question is, "What is now the role of politicians within the reformed system, and how will civil servants relate to them?" Consideration of these questions leads us directly into the final section of the essay where there is a brief discussion of the wider question of the relationship between managerialism and good governance. MANAGERIALISM AND GOOD GOVERNANCE

At the beginning of this chapter it was noted that one of the features of managerialism as an ideology was its assumption that management was an orderly, problem-solving activity, whereas the realm of politics was one of unpredictability, emotion and conflict. A frequently drawn corollary was that as much as possible of the running of our public services should be distanced from "politics" so that it could be better managed. Such distancing might take the form of privatization or of decentralization within the public sector. Either way, managers would have a better chance to manage, without sporadic interference from "amateur" politicians. This vision is clearly inadequate for a democratically governed society. At its best managerialism may be conducive to greater efficiency, heightened sensitivity to the wishes of public service users and even to improved transparency of organizational performance. Yet of itself it lacks (or at least has tended to lack in most instances to date) three crucial ingredients of good governance. These are: a A coherent prescription for the central steering capacity of governments b A convincing model for the role of politics and politicians within the reformed public sector c A vision for what is to be the distinctive character of work as a civil servant, especially with respect to issues of accountability, professionalism, integrity and ethical commitment.

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These three are closely interrelated. The first problem is intimately connected to the second, in that normatively central steering must include a substantial political component. The second problem is connected to the third because until it is clear what political leaders will accept responsibility and culpability for and how they should behave in their dealings with civil servants, it is hard to specify what should be the roles and responsibilities of the civil servants themselves. Given managerialism's origins in business models of organization the absence of the second and third ingredients is hardly surprising - for there are problems at the heart of government that have no real parallel in the world of corporate affairs (Pollitt 1993:111-30). Of course managerialism does have something to say about the centre. Indeed, its model of small, policy-making central agencies is well known. There are at least two problems with this formulation. First, it is too general to be really helpful. Second, as Jon Pierre argues in his chapter, central agencies are being advised to slim down and concentrate on policy advice at exactly the time when the competition to provide policy advice seems to have moved somewhat against civil servants. Numerous debates have taken place in, for example, the UK and New Zealand about the organization of the provision of policy advice and the kind of mechanisms needed to coordinate policies across government. Some have argued for the extension of the managerialist technique of contracting out to this area also, but others have suggested that contracts would be quite inappropriate (Boston 1994; Kemp 1993; Pollitt 1994). Some have rejected the very idea of central coordination as harking back to the bad old days of planning while others have bemoaned the increasingly fragmented nature of public policy implementation and the lack of mechanisms for strategic thinking (Blackstone and Plowden 1988; Painter et al. 1996). Ironically in Sweden, one of the pioneers of highly autonomous agencies, some of the key reforms of the 19805 were directed at recovering central, ministerial control of these expansionist, tooindependent organizations. It is noticeable that Osborne and Gaebler, despite having a whole chapter devoted to "steering rather than rowing" say very

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little about central policy coordination. Most of their examples of "steering organizations" are pitched at a much lower level than central departments of state such as cabinet offices, prime ministers' departments, or ministries of finance (Osborne and Gaebler 1992). In short, there is an important issue here for which managerialism does not yet seem to have a convincing answer, either in practice or in theory. It has arrived quite late on the agenda, partly in reaction to the visible difficulties caused in several countries by the first wave of managerialist reforms. One of the first reports to highlight the problem came from New Zealand, the country which is generally credited with having pushed managerialism furthest and fastest: "Ministers were underresourced to fulfil their objectives in the areas of strategically sound decision-making and holding departments accountable," while among civil servants, "some considered that ministers are disinclined to think strategically" (Steering Group 1991:64, 47). Yet despite many warning signs, the NPM enthusiasts continue to prescribe a set of roles for ministers that few ministers seem able or willing to fit: "Freed of many of the detailed tasks involved in input control, the centre can devote more resources to strategic policy issues and evaluation" (OECD 1995:74). The above quotations carry the argument directly to the second problem, that of the role of politicians. As is now widely acknowledged, managerialist prescriptions tend to send politicians confusing messages. On the one hand these prescriptions promise more control - agencies will have to work to specific results targets, and so on - but on the other they preach that managers should be left to manage while politicians refrain from trying to row and concentrate on strategic steering. At the same time, as Paul Thomas points out in his chapter, the decline (in Westminster systems) of the efficacy of the doctrine of ministerial responsibility increases uncertainty for civil servants. The issue could be summed up with the question, "What should the new politicians do, and how can we ensure that they do it?" It is already clear that this is a stressful issue in several countries. In a survey of 3800 public managers, UK researchers found that their largest negative response (from among an extensive battery of questions) con-

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cerned the managers' "power to resist political interference in operational management decisions" (Talbot 1994:37-8). In the us the unwillingness of congressional politicians to go along with the strategic, "hands off" role implicitly assigned to them by the National Performance Review offered an early stumbling block to NPR'S successful implementation (Kettl 1994). In Australia many departmental secretaries report growing concern about their vulnerability to political pressures, given their "loss of tenure" since the new contracts of employment came in 1994 (Halligan forthcoming). Last but not least there is the question of where managerialism leaves the public service. In the u.s. (under Reagan), the UK (Thatcher), Canada (Mulroney), and New Zealand (Lange), civil servants were frequently depicted as an obstacle to change - as part of the problem (see Patricia Ingraham's chapter). The New Zealand case is perhaps particularly instructive. Genuine attempts to develop a "humanist" model of HRM have been overwhelmed by the contrary forces of cutbacks, pay restrictions and impossibly increased workloads (Boston et al. 1996:213). After a decade or more of restructuring in a number of countries there has recently been a sudden flurry of activity to begin to address some of these contradictions. The need - motivational and constitutional - for a vision of the civil service of the future has belatedly been recognized. Thus in the UK the government has finally accepted the case for a new code of practice for the civil service (Prime Minister 1995). Meanwhile in New Zealand a new document entitled Principles, Conventions and Practices was launched in 1994 by the State Services Commission. Interestingly, neither of these developments could be described as managerialist: rather they represented a return to some more traditional concerns and issues which had, in effect, been lost sight of at the height of the managerialist push to get things done. Both New Zealand and the UK have also experienced dramatic events which have caused public concern to focus upon the postmanagerialist relationships between politicians and civil servants (and between civil servants at different levels within decentralized public service organizations). In New Zealand there was the

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tragedy of the collapse of an observation platform at Cave Creek where, despite great media pressure, neither the minister nor the chief executive of the Department of Conservation was willing to resign (Commission of Inquiry into the Collapse of a Viewing Platform at Cave Creek 1995). In the UK there was the dismissal, by the home secretary, of the chief executive of the prison service and the subsequent court case against the minister on grounds of wrongful dismissal and inappropriate political interference (Mills 3995). This was followed, a year later, by further public tensions between the same minister and the subsequent chief executive. These and other cases are symptoms that all is not well in the brave new world of managerialism. Some important pieces of the picture of the new governance are still missing. One is a coherent account of what relationships should henceforth prevail between politicians and civil servants. Another is a vision of what kind of civil service (and civil servant) will be required. The argument here is that in order to fill these weaknesses in our systems of governance we need to go beyond managerialism and to call upon other ideologies, rhetorics, and practices. BIBLIOGRAPHY Ball, I. 1993. New Zealand Public Sector Management. Paper presented to the 1993 National Accountants in Government Convention, Hobart, 26-8 May. Barzelay, M. 1992. Breaking through Bureaucracy. Berkeley: University of California Press. Benefits Agency. 1992. Customer Charter. London: Benefits Agency. Birchall, J., C. Pollitt, and K. Putman. 1997. Opting Out and the Experience of Self-Management in Education, Housing, and Health Care. Glasgow: Economic and Social Research Council. Blackstone, T., and W. Plowden. 1988. Inside the Think Tank: Advising the Cabinet, 1971-1983. London: Heinemann. Boston, J. 1994. Purchasing policy advice: the limits to contracting out. Governance 7,1:1-30. - 1995. Lessons from the Antipodes. In Next Steps: Improving Manage-

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ment in Government? ed. B. O'Toole and G. Jordan, 161-77. Aldershot: Dartmouth. - J. Martin, J. Pallott, and P. Walsh. 1996. Public Management: The New Zealand Model. Auckland: Oxford University Press. Carter, N., R. Klein, and P. Day. 1992. How Organizations Measure Success: the Use of Performance Indicators in Government. London: Routledge. Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (1994). Next Steps: Agencies in Government: Revieiv 1994, Cm 2750, London, HMSO Commission of Inquiry into the Collapse of a Viewing Platform at Cave Creek. 1995. Wellington: Department of Internal Affairs. Dorrell, S. 1993. Public Sector Change is a World Wide Movement. Speech by the Financial Secretary to the Treasury to the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy, 23 September. Escott, K., and D. Whitfield. 1995. The Gender Impact of CCT in Local Government. Manchester: Equal Opportunities Commission. Fischer, F., and J. Forester, eds. 1993. The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning. London: UCL Press. Flynn, N., ed. 1994. Change in the Civil Service: A Public Finance Foundation Reader. London: CIPFA. Fukuyama, F. 1995. Trust: the Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity. London: Hamish Hamilton. Goodin, R., and P. Wilenski. 1984. Beyond efficiency: the logical underpinnings of administrative principles. Public Administration Review 44, 6:512-17. Gore, A. 1993. Creating a Government That Works Better and Costs Less: the Report of the National Performance Revieiv, Executive Summary. Washington, DC: National Performance Review. Halligan, J. forthcoming. Study of departmental heads (final title unknown at time of writing). Harrison, S., DJ. Hunter, G. Marnoch, and C. Pollitt. 1992. Just Managing: Power and Culture in the National Health Service. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Hartley, J. 1983. Ideology and organizational behaviour. International Studies of Management and Organization 13, 3:26-7. Hood, C. 1991. A public management for all seasons? Public Administration 69,1:3-19. - 1995. Contemporary public management: a new global paradigm? Public Policy and Administration 10, 2:104-17.

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Jones, G. 1993. International Trends in Public Administration. LSE Public Policy Paper No.y. London: London School of Economics and Political Science. Keeling, D. 1972. Management in Government. London: Allen and Unwin. Kemp, P. 1993. Beyond Next Steps: a Civil Service for the 2ist Century. London: Social Market Foundation. Kerr, A., and M. Radford. 1994. TUPE or not TUPE: competitive tendering and the transfer laws. Public Money and Management 14, 4:37-45. Kettl, D. 1994. Reinventing Government? Appraising the National Performance Review. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution. Klages, H., and O. Haubner. 1995. Strategies for public sector modernization. In The Enduring Challenges in Public Sector Management, ed. A. Halachmi, and G. Bouckaert, 348-76. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Likierman, A. 1995. Performance indicators: 20 early lessons from managerial use. In Measures for Success in the Public Sector, ed. P. Jackson, 57-66. London: CIPFA. Majone, G. 1989. Evidence, Argument and Persuasion in the Policy Process. New Haven: Yale University Press. Mills, H. 1995. "The accusations that threaten Howard." The Independent (19 October)^. Ministry of Finance. 19933. Government Decision-in-principle on Reforms in Central and Regional Government. Helsinki: Ministry of Finance. - i993b. The World's Best Public Sector? Helsinki: Ministry of Finance. Naschold, F. 1995. The Modernization of the Public Sector in Europe. Helsinki: Ministry of Labour. National Academy of Public Administration. 1994. Towards useful performance measurement: lessons learned from the initial pilot performance plans prepared under the Government and Performance Results Act. Washington, DC: NAPA. New Zealand States Services Commission. 1994. Principles, Conventions, and Practices. Wadlington: ssc. OECD. 1995. Governance in Transition: Public Management Reforms in OECD Countries. Paris: OECD. - 19963, 5-6 March. Statement by the chair of the ministerial symposium on the future of public services (OECD News Release). Paris: OECD. - i996b. Responsive Government: Service Quality Initiatives. Paris: OECD.

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Osborne, D., and T. Gaebler. 1992. Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit Is Transforming the Public Sector. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. O'Toole, B., and G. Jordan, eds. 1995. Next Steps: Improving Management in Government. Aldershot: Dartmouth. Painter, C, J. Rouse, K. Isaac-Henry, and L. Munk. 1996. Changing Local Governance: Local Authorities and Non-elected Agencies. Luton: Local Government Management Board. Perelman, C., and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca. 1971. The New Rhetoric: a Treatise on Argumentation. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Pollitt, C. 1986. Beyond the managerial model: the case for broadening performance assessment in government and the public services. Financial Accountability and Management 2, 3:155-70. - 1993. Managerialism and the Public Services, 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell.

- 1994. Making Policies: If Agencies Are the Answer What is the Question? LSE Public Policy Paper No.n. London: London School of Economics and Political Science. - 1995. Justification by works or by faith? Evaluating the New Public Management. Evaluation i, 2:133-54. - and G. Bouckaert, eds. 1995. Quality Improvement in European Public Services: Concepts, Cases and Commentary. London: Sage. Prime Minister. 1991. The Citizen's Charter: Raising the Standard, Cm 1599. London: IIMSO. -

1995. The Civil Service: Taking Forward Continuity and Change, Cm 2748. London: IIMSO, January.

Rouban, L. 1995. The civil service culture and administrative reform. In Governance in a Changing Environment, ed. B. Guy Peters and D. Savoie, 23-54. Montreal and Kingston: Canadian Centre for Management Development and McGill-Queen's University Press. Steering Group. 1991. Review of State Sector Reforms. Auckland, New Zealand. Summa, H. 1992. The rhetoric of efficiency: applied social science as depoliticization. In Writing the Social Text, ed. R. Harvey-Brown, 135-54. New York: de Gruyter. - 1993. The rhetorics of bureaucracy. In Tracing the Semiotic Boundaries of the Politics, ed. P. Ahonen. New York: de Gruyter. - 1995. Old and new techniques for productivity promotion: from

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cheese slicing to a quest for quality. In Public Productivity Through Quality and Strategic Management, ed. A. Halachmi and G. Bouckaert, 155-65. Amsterdam: IDS Press/International Institute of Administrative Sciences. Talbot, C. 1994. Reinventing Public Management: a Survey of Public Sector Managers' Reactions to Change. Corby: Institute of Management. - 1996. Ministers and Agencies: Responsibility and Performance. Paper submitted to the House of Commons Public Services Committee. Pontypridd: University of Glamorgan Business School. Task Force on Management Improvement. 1992. The Australian Public Service Reformed: an Evaluation of a Decade of Management Reform. Canberra: Management Advisory Board. Throgmorton, J. 1993. Survey research as rhetorical trope: electric power planning arguments in Chicago. In the Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning, ed. F. Fischer and J. Forester, 117-44. London: UCL Press. Trosa, S. 1995. Moderniser I'administration: comment font les autres? Paris: Les Editions d'Organisation. Waldegrave, W. 1994. The reality of reform and accountability in today's public service. In Reader: Change in the Civil Service, ed. N. Flynn, 81-8. London: Public Finance Foundation. Yeatman, A. 1994. Reform of public sector management: an overview. Australian Journal of Public Administration 53, 3:287-95. Zifcak, S. 1994. NewManagerialism: Administrative Reform in Whitehall and Canberra. Buckingham: Open University Press.

What Works? The Antiphons of Administrative Reform B. GUY PETERS

New growths insensibly bud upward to fill each vacated place, unforeseen accidents hinder intentions, and old plans are forgotten. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Attempting to say in advance which reforms of public administration will work and which will not is an extremely hazardous occupation. Far too many "logical," "necessary," and "appropriate" reforms have failed miserably, and an equal number of unlikely reform adventures have produced greater benefits than those anticipated, or even hoped for, by their advocates. For example, the successful decentralization and deconcentration of French administration over the past decade appears to run contrary to the state tradition of that country (Hazareesingh 1994; Montricher 1995), while the participatory ethic of many reforms adopted in North America has not fared particularly well, despite growing populism in those regimes (Kernaghan 1992; Spice and Gilburg 1992). Further, we might not have expected the reforms of the British civil service to have been as successful as they appear to have been, given its strongly institutionalized character (but see Brooks and Bates 1994). It appears that almost any administrative reform can work, and equally, any reform can fail, given the particular set of circumstances within which it is attempted. 78

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What I will attempt to do is to extract a number of competing lessons from the administrative reform experiences of Canada, the United States, and several other industrialized democracies. The purpose is to take stock of what has happened during the past decade and a half and to develop some preliminary ideas about the factors that contributed to the success of reform. Herbert Simon (1947) noted half a century ago that the proverbs of administration tended to appear in contradictory pairs. Likewise, Herbert Kaufman (1978) found that recommendations for administrative reorganization also were contradictory. It appears that the "proverbs of reform" discussed below also occur in pairs that are seemingly contradictory (see also Hood and Jackson 1994; Self 1972:247-61). In most instances, however, the contradiction in these pairs is more apparent than real, and when explained the pairs of propositions can help us to understand better the dynamics of administrative change.1 Exploring the sources - theoretical and experiential - of the contradictory advice given by would-be reformers will help us understand how reform efforts arise and why they are placed on agendas in certain ways. Even if we were able to understand how to resolve these contradictions, however, it remains difficult to predict the success of a reform a priori and there is still a great deal of research required to be able to advise prospective reformers confidently.2 What appears to be needed is a set of contingency statements to link particular problems with one side of the pairs of recommendations that are found in the reform literature. The most fundamental point to be made is that reform of the public sector is a political exercise that is rarely, if ever, informed unambiguously by organization theory. This may not be an earthshattering statement, but it is useful to reiterate given the number of proto-theoretical statements put forth by management "gurus" and reformers. Further, would-be reformers in the public sector appear to have forgotten that simple point as they follow the advice of one or another school of reform, and have forgotten the point to their own detriment. Even if appropriate organization

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theory did guide these reforms, they might still flounder on familiar but important political criteria such as accountability and implementation. Although we will be primarily discussing apparently contradictory reform ideas encountered in the public sector, contradictions and paradox are an increasingly important part of thinking about management more generally. For example, scholars such as Handy (1994), Morgan (1986), Evans, Doz, and Laurent (1990), and Stroh and Miller (1994) tend to think of paradoxes and contradictions as inherent in managing organizations - public or private. Others scholars, such as Cameron, Freeman, and Mishra (1993), have examined paradoxes more in the context of downsizing organizations, primarily those in the private sector. At a more political level Wright and Peters (1996) have pointed to the continuing conflict between Weberian ideals of public management and ideals of the "New Public Management" advocating a business model for government. All of these studies have pointed to dualisms that appear necessary to understand organizations, and especially organizational change. ADVOCACY AND OWNERSHIP

A Administrative reform cannot succeed unless the top of government is involved and committed B Administrative reform will not succeed unless it is "owned" by the lower echelons of organizations

Evidence and argumentation can be marshalled to defend both sides of this first apparent contradiction about reform. In terms of organization theory, this pair of statements represents a more recent manifestation of an ongoing debate about "top-down" and "bottom-up" views of organizations and management (see Barley and Kunda 1992). This debate goes back to Weber and the challenges to that hierarchical model of administration contained in approaches such as "human relations management." The basic question remains whether organizations are best understood as systems of authority or as systems of social relations. They have,

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of course, some elements of both, with the consequent need to specify under what circumstances each approach should be dominant. To be truly successful, both the top and the bottom of organizations must be involved in and committed to a reform, although, paradoxically, if there were that much agreement within government concerning what was necessary to produce greater effectiveness, then the formal reform efforts might not have been needed. If there is not that agreement, and there rarely is such wide agreement about the problems in government (or any component organization) and the appropriate reform strategies, then we do need to identify the impetus for reforms in different systems. We must also examine to what extent one level or another of the system has been the crucial element in the success or failure of those reforms. One interesting contrast would be the experiences of the Grace (u.s.) and Nielsen (Canada) commissions, as opposed to those of PS 2000 (Canada) and the Gore Commission (u.s.). The former exercises were imposed on the civil service by activist political leaders with little or no involvement of rank and file public servants (Savoie 1994). Those reform efforts, in turn, tended to create resentment and resistance within the civil service and (most would argue) failed to achieve their goals (Goodsell 1984; Wilson 1988; Peters and Savoie 1994). Critics of the public service argue that failure of these programs represents the intransigence and entrenched nature of the public bureaucracy (Burton 1985). On the other hand, one can identify examples of not dissimilar reforms that were implemented successfully - the Rayner scrutinies in the United Kingdom and state cost-control commissions in the United States are clear examples (Warner 1984). The difference in success appears to be at least in part a function of involvement of public servants in the process, as opposed to their denigration - especially by the Grace Commission (Levine 1985). The more recent set of reforms involved the civil service at the planning stage, and appeared to be more acceptable to rank and file employees (Savoie 1994:228; Tellier 1990). On the other hand, the declining commitment of political and administrative elites to these reforms has placed their long-term prospects into doubt. For example, the several changes in government and replacement of

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many senior public servants in Canada has put PS 2000 on the back burner while the Liberal government proceeds with some of its own initiatives concerning the public service, especially public expenditure control. In the United States the president, and particularly the vice president, appear nominally committed to implementing the proposals of the Gore Commission (properly the National Performance Review) but their involvement is minimized by the large number of immediate political problems facing the administration. These two cases highlight some reasons for the importance of involving public servants in the process of reform. First, elected governments come and go, and most find it unexciting at best to carry through with the programs of a previous government. This is especially the case for programs in an area such as administrative reform that have relatively little political appeal outside the national capital. If there is any political mileage to be gained from administrative reform, it comes through advocating new programs, even if they are really just an old program with a new name. Thus, if there is to be any continuing commitment to a set of reform ideas, it will have to develop through actively involving the career public service. Further, governments face numerous issues and demands on their time and tend to lose interest in issues such as administrative reform that have little political sex appeal. Only political leaders with a strong technocratic bent (President Carter) or a strong ideology about the necessity of reforming government (Thatcher, Reagan, and Mulroney) appear willing and able to sustain a commitment to implementing administrative reforms. Thus, if a political leader wants an enduring impact on the administrative machinery of the public sector, he or she would be well advised to develop reform programs that can be more accepted, and perhaps even "owned," by the permanent employees of government. Political leaders may not be able to get all that they want in the reforms if they (explicitly or implicitly) bargain with the permanent public service, but politicians may get more than they would if they try to ignore the bureaucracy and its own administrative priorities.

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In addition, the political leaders must be willing not to receive any real political credit for their efforts, for the reforms may not bear fruit for some years to come. For example, although the Grace Commission received most of the publicity during the Reagan administration, a number of that administration's other reform efforts actually were implemented more successfully. The President's Management Improvement Council, Reform '88, and the Productivity Improvement Program (Barkley 1983; Salamon and Lund 1984) were not particularly flashy and they attracted little media attention. They did, however, produce a number of managerial changes that have made American government perform more efficiently. Some of the reforms that have been advocated more recently by the Gore Commission actually were anticipated by these programs of the Reagan administration. There are few visible examples of the public service itself leading on reform without the involvement of political leaders. The fact that these reforms do not spring to mind does not mean, however, that they do not exist. What it means is that changes are carried out within organizations or parts of organizations and, if successful, may find a political leader (or senior public servant) willing to take credit for them. Some evidence about the degree and success of reform activities arising within the bureaucracy itself can be gained from the Institute of Public Administration of Canada (IPAC) and Ford/Kennedy awards for innovation in government (Borins 19953). The reforms recognized in these competitions rarely have exciting [sic] names like "Reinventing Government" or "PS 2000," but often have produced substantial improvements in the performance of individual organizations. What may be required of top management in those cases is simply to get out of the way of energetic middle managers and their staffs. CENTRAL AGENCIES

A Central agencies are often the source of reform, and drive reformefforts B Central agencies have a difficult time reforming themselves, and are generally the least reformed parts of government

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Just as it is important for senior political officials to have a direct involvement in reform efforts, so too is it apparently crucial to have "central agencies" involved (Campbell and Szablowski 1979). Given that these agencies are responsible for the overall management of government itself, it makes sense for them to play a central role in any attempts to make the system function better. Further, there is often a direct link between these organizations and political leaders so that central agencies may really speak on behalf of the political leaders, as well as on behalf of their own institutional interests. Thus, we would expect that any reform efforts that did not involve the central agencies, for example, the Privy Council Office and Treasury Board Secretariat in Canada and the Office of Management and Budget in the United States, would have little chance to succeed. On the other hand, however, the central agencies may have little incentive to advocate and push for the typical reform being implemented during the 19805 and 19905. Many of these reforms advocate decentralizing authority and decision making within the political system, with consequent losses of the power for the central management organizations. The empowerment of public employees, for example, and shifts toward global budgeting or entrepreneurial financing of quasi-autonomous organizations delivering public service remove the capacity of the central agencies to exercise oversight. This is true whether that control is exercised on behalf of the political leadership or their own organizational interests. Central agencies have been at the centre of the reform process, but have done little about changing their own structures and behaviours. In fact, most central agencies appear to have been increasing in size and have attempted to centralize their power while telling other public sector organizations to do the opposite (Kelleher 1988; Boston 1992). In fairness, these organizations must reflect other political pressures in addition to the pressures for reform. For example, both the Treasury Board in Canada and the Office of Management and Budget in the United States have to cope with the continuing financial problems of those two governments

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and do not believe that they can afford to relax the controls they exert over public expenditure (Clark 1994). Likewise, central personnel agencies often believe that they must keep up pressure on line agencies to implement important social goals such as affirmative action hiring. There are some cases of central agencies reducing their own size voluntarily, as the Treasury in the United Kingdom appears to have done, but these seem to be the exception. These examples point to the ambiguous characterization of central agencies in public administration and political science theory. On the one hand, these organizations can be the handmaidens of their political masters and can utilize their central position in the public sector to implement the programs of each successive government (Pliatsky 1989). On the other hand, these organizations can be seen as having important values (Heclo and Wildavsky 1974) and institutional interests (Kato 1994) of their own. Again, there is evidence for both sides of this argument and for accepting either version of the role of central agencies in reform. TIME A Reform must have clear programs and clear deadlines B Reform must be continuous

The evidence about the relationship of time and deadlines to the success of reforms efforts is, at best, ambiguous. This is true in general analyses of organizational change as well as in the particular round of administrative reforms in the 19805 and 19905. Some theorists argue that planned organizational change must occur in relatively dramatic fits and starts, or it will simply be lost in the ongoing business of any structure. Other theorists have argued that change must not be thought of as a discrete phenomenon but rather as a continuous process of renewal and redefinition. This same ambiguity can be found in contemporary efforts at administrative reform. On the one hand, political reform efforts appear to require being announced with great fanfare with "jazzy"

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names (PS 2000, National Performance Review, Next Steps, and so on) and predetermined time limits for implementation. The idea, according to the history of reforming government, is that without a major effort and a sense of mission any reform will be killed by the entrenched forces of the status quo. This does not mean that officials (political or career) will consciously sabotage attempts at change, but only that inertia is a powerful force in any organization, public or private. Of course, there may be instances in which officials do attempt to circumvent any more gradual and subtle attempts at change, but merely announcing a major reform effort may be no talisman against that obstructive behaviour. On the other hand, most enduring change requires long-term commitment and evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, efforts (Singh 1990). The Gore Commission and its follow-up bodies appear to understand the long-term nature of reform somewhat better than most other efforts. They have conceptualized the reform process as being at least a ten-year adventure, and have been planning with enough flexibility to entertain some diversions along the way (Peters and Savoie 1994). In addition, interviews with officials in Washington indicate that many of the reforms now going on in the name of Gore actually were already planned and even being implemented prior to the announcement of the National Performance Review. These were all efforts initiated by managers committed either to the ideologies of the New Public Management, or simply to good management itself. In many instances, then, reform can happen without the effort at a "big bang" if managers are allowed sufficient latitude to be creative in their work. The experiences of reform in the United Kingdom and New Zealand further illuminate the relationship between time and reform. On the one hand, reform in New Zealand was largely a "big bang" with a very rapid implementation of the ideas of the incoming Labour government in igS/.3 This was announced not so much as a program but rather as a set of principles by which the reform would take place. Corporatization was clearly the result of a committed government that appeared capable of sweeping away any opposition and getting on with the business of imple-

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meriting change (Scott, Bushnell, and Sallee 1990). Further, these reforms could not be achieved through incremental means but rather represented a rapid and radical transformation of the system that might not have been possible save through such quick and decisive action. The reforms begun in the Thatcher years in Britain, on the other hand, have occurred over almost a decade and a half and have been, for all their apparent radical character, implemented in a rather slow and deliberate manner. The Next Steps initiative was announced seven years ago, and implementation of the original plans remains far from complete (Greer 1994; Hogwood 1993). Without the remarkable experience of fifteen years of unbroken Conservative control of government (Hood 1996) and the leadership of one exceptional prime minister for most of that time, it seems unlikely that these reforms would have had any major impact. This impact has been heightened by the capacity of a government in office for that long a period to change the culture of the civil service (as well as many top civil servants themselves) and thereby to minimize resistance to change (Rhodes 1994). These reforms continued to be expanded and implemented during the Major government, with even more significant changes in the structure of the senior civil service under active consideration (CM 2627 1994). It is not only internal factors that have an influence on the role of time in determining the success of administrative reforms. Allowing more time and depending upon gradual change also provides more time for the forces of the status quo in government and society to mobilize and to deflect those efforts. Although the public is often perceived to be hostile toward government, and indeed often are so toward government in general, the public is also really a massive collection of beneficiaries of a variety of programs provided by government. As such, changes in a program can be seen to potentially injure them. The more time there is for individual groups to mobilize and to create alliances with other groups who are threatened by reform, the greater the probability that the reforms simply will not work as intended.4

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What Works? The Antiphons of Administrative Reform BODY COUNTS

A Clear goals of cost-savings and employment reductions may be politically necessary B Target figures invite resistance from employees and may make otherwise successful efforts appear to be failures

Another apparent dichotomy in the success of reforms is the extent to which they depend upon quantitative targets both to make the case for the importance of changes that are happening and to provide a standard against which to measure performance. This is a political point rather than an issue of organization theory. It is always tempting to establish numerical targets for reform. To the public these figures provide some tangible evidence of the benefits they presumably will receive from reform. For example, the often-quoted figure of reducing the u.s. civil service by some 252 thousand employees is reported to have been a late addition to the Gore report (Peters and Savoie 1994). It was added to make the report more credible to people "outside the beltway" while risking disturbing employees inside that domestic borderline. Even outside the beltway significant reductions in public employment may not be seen as an undivided benefit. Although there is substantial public scepticism about government, these structures and programs also provide some sense of security and stability, and therefore attempts to reform may appear threatening. The threat is most obvious to the beneficiaries of government programs. In general, the public is schizophrenic about public programs, believing that the ones that benefit them are extremely worthwhile but the others are wastes of tax money. Therefore, telling the public what they can expect to receive (in terms of implied reductions in taxes) as a result of reform may make the process more palatable, even if some anxiety is created at the same time.5 On the other hand, to those individuals working inside government the figures about "cuts" often appear both unrealistic and threatening. The public service in most countries has become both accustomed to and angered about being the target of virtually all reforms in government. In the United States they heard

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inflated estimates of possible financial and personnel savings coming from the work of Grace Commission (Congressional Budget Off ice/General Accounting Office 1984). In Canada the predictions from the Nielsen Commission were less dramatic but still there was a sense that the ultimate purpose of the exercise was to reduce the number of public servants. In the United Kingdom the fifteen years of Conservative government have indeed produced the types of reductions in personnel that were both promised and desired by the government, but feared by civil servants (Farnham and Horton 1993). Further, if the target figures are not reached the general public will have their inherent scepticism about government reinforced. For example, although most official and unofficial analysts believed that most of the recommendations coming out of the Grace Commission in the United States were unrealistic (Congressional Budget Off ice/General Accounting Office 1984), the public was perhaps not so sophisticated about the exercise. The failure of the American government to produce anything like the savings anticipated by Grace was seen by many who followed the results to indicate the recalcitrance of an entrenched bureaucracy.6 An interesting contrasting case emerging in this context is the recommendation of the Gore Commission for the reduction of public employment. Early indications (National Performance Review 1994) are that these targets will be met by the year 2000, and without excessive demoralization. This movement toward success may represent an interaction with the time dimension discussed above; targets may be unreasonable if they promise too much too soon, but are beneficial if adequate time is provided to reach them. THE IMPORTANCE OF P E R S O N N E L

A The principal goal of reform is to empower public employees, create autonomous and effective public managers and make government a more attractive employer B Effective government will only work by reducing the power of the civil service and empowering their nominal political masters

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As well as focusing on the number of employees that may be eliminated by reform efforts, other personnel issues arise, and arise in contradictory manners. On one hand, a number of reform efforts have been directed toward enhancing the power of the average employee of government to make decisions and have greater control over his or her own job. As noted above, empowerment has been one of the more common and powerful slogans for reforms during the 19803 and into the 19905. Whether it is at the level of individuals or of groups of employees, advocates of change argue for breaking down organizational hierarchies and permitting greater autonomy and discretion for employees. The benefits are presumed to be both greater organizational efficiency and greater commitment and satisfaction of employees. One aspect of this side of the contradiction is the stress on "managerialism" in the public sector (Hood 1991; Pollitt 1990; Zifcak 1994; Borins 1995^. While the emphasis on introducing managerial devices borrowed from the private sector and making government more business-like is intended to make government more efficient, it also enhances the power of public managers (Kettl 1994). If the advocates of managerialism are to be taken seriously, there should be less political control over managers "let the managers manage" continues to be a prominent slogan of this trend in public sector reform. Further, in some ways this approach to running the public sector would make conventional forms of political accountability less viable (Moe 1994), despite the claims of its advocates to the contrary (Greenaway 1995). The other side of the apparent contradiction also appears to have substantial validity. The reform efforts of the past ten or fifteen years have tended to place the onus of apparent inefficiency and ineffectiveness of government on the public bureaucracy. The presumed cure for those governance problems therefore is to reduce the power of that public service and enhance the power of elected and appointed political officials over the permanent members of government. In this conception of reform, empowerment of public employees would not be a solution to the problems of government but instead would exacerbate those problems. In this view, the real solution to the problems of government would be for elected leaders to gain more complete control.

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One can find empirical evidence that supports the view that both components of this pair of proverbs have been adopted. On the one hand, there are a number of efforts at empowering employees and providing them with greater latitude to make decisions. Many of these experiments are found in subnational governments (Light 1994; Terry 1994; Barzelay 1992), but many experiments are also now being implemented in central governments. Those changes are, however, less visible and less dramatic than the denigration of the public service by political leaders that has amounted to "burning the village" (Peters 1986). That is to say, the close working relationship that has characterized top public servants and the political leadership in government has been destroyed, or at least seriously damaged. As two analysts (Kymlica and Matthews 1988) of the reforms during the Reagan administration put it, the federal civil service was "crippled" after years of being bombarded with hostile remarks, pay freezes, and loss of influence over policy. The same can be said of the higher civil service in many other industrialized democracies, including some in which the public service traditionally has been widely respected (Olson 1991; Savoie 1994; Bodiguel and Rouban 1991). There is at least one way to resolve this apparent contradiction. That is to argue that the two sides focus on very different levels and roles of the public service. The advocates of empowerment are usually talking about empowering the lower echelons of the public service, while the critics of bureaucratic power tend to focus on the role of the senior public service. Likewise, the managerialists tend to press the managerial as opposed to policy roles of the civil service. Further, some of the implications of managerialism separate management of individual facilities and organizations from the overall management of a cabinet department. Even with the above caveats, there can be a contradiction and perhaps a more profound one. If the lower echelons and agency managers are empowered, there is no reason to believe that their decisions will be any more in conformity with the wishes of political leaders than have been those of the upper echelons of the public service. Indeed, the close linkages of client-level employees and their clients (Adler and Asquith 1981) may make them less re-

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sponsive to the wishes of the conservative politicians who have been most vocal in making the attacks on the upper echelons. Empowerment can be a dangerous concept for anyone seeking to control the activism of the public service. At a more theoretical level, this pair of statements illustrates the marked differences between managerial and political logics in public administration. On the one hand, a good deal of organization theory (see above) advocates decentralizing authority in public organizations and involving lower-echelon workers in decision making within those structures. On the other hand political logic would argue that ensuring accountability and the political direction of policy is a crucial, or the crucial, value in a democratic government, so that any reform that violated that precept would be undesirable no matter how much it might enhance efficiency and morale within the organization. BUDGET-DRIVEN CHANGE

A Administrative reforms should be driven by managerial concerns, not simply by financial concerns B The budget is the central priority statement of a government and any meaningful reform must be connected to the budgetary process

Management issues are rarely as likely to concentrate the minds of major players in government as are budgetary issues. That pattern of attention to financial questions may result in reform focusing too much on budgets and finance and not enough on the management and structural issues that may produce real and enduring expenditure change over the long term. Political leaders are often faced with real needs to reduce their budgets, and to do so in a very limited period of time. This need for quick results tends to drive the leaders toward short-term "solutions" to their problems and toward ignoring the basic changes that can pay real benefits. Further, the changes that can be produced from the basic managerial changes can pay dividends long into the future, while many budgetary solutions are quick but may be temporary.7 On the other hand, budgetary pressures can be used to motivate other changes in the public sector. If a government organiza-

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tion faces a reduced budget it may be forced to find a way to survive and to continue to deliver services, and often can find innovative means for doing so. For example, in Sweden there has been an ongoing budgetary exercise called the "main alternative" (or colloquially the "cheese slicer") which begins the annual budgetary discussions with a 2 percent cut in running costs (Eriksson 1983). The assumption is that efficiency gains can make up for the lost funds. For the most part this has been true and there have been marked efficiency gains in response to this program. Of course, not all government programs are capable of such efficiency gains. Programs that have a large element of transfer spending will find it more difficult to squeeze money from their budgets, without real reductions in the benefits granted (Dunleavy 1991). Not only can a concentration on reforming via the budgetary process neglect opportunities for other types of efficiency gains, but it may also ignore important sources of some popular discontent with government. The problems perceived by the public are not always in what government does, but how it does them and how it interacts with the public. Therefore, as well as making government more efficient, reforms such as PS 2000 in Canada and the Citizen's Charter in Britain (Pollitt 1994; Doern 1993) attempt to make government more "user friendly." In the extreme, this strand of reform translates the role of the public from that of citizen to that of consumer (Lewis 1994). As some critics of these changes in government (Pierre 1995) have pointed out, this pattern of thinking about the public may result in a real denigration of the role of citizens and their relationship to the state. UNIFORMITY

A If government is to reform then the same principles should be applied to all parts of government B Reform must be conducted on a contingent basis with different targets and procedures for change in different organizations

Again, both horns of this apparent dilemma about reform seem to have substantial merit. On the one hand, if administrative

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reformers did not apply the same principles in all parts of government, they would run the risk of creating internal dissension within the civil service and having the leaders of different organizations shopping around for the best deal that they can get from political leaders. Furthermore, by adopting a highly differentiated strategy reformers would encounter the risk of imposing a heavy burden of analysis and information on themselves. Finding administrative reforms that might succeed in general has proven difficult enough, without having to develop a repertoire of different strategies for the numerous different organizations and programs in the public sector. Uniformity may not be a perfect strategy for change, but it is perhaps a better option than attempting to develop a highly differential strategy that may be doomed to fail. On the other hand, the assumption that "one size fits all" does not necessarily match the reality of a complex public sector very well. Government is not a uniform entity but rather represents a huge variety of organizational formats, management problems, and program delivery strategies. Any politician attempting to impose a uniform policy for administrative reform will soon learn that the problems are different in different policy areas and different organizations (Freeman 1985; Muller 1985). Furthermore, the managerial styles associated with those policy areas and organizational cultures also may be significantly different. We have already pointed out this variability in the extreme case of the central agencies, but it may also be evident in line agencies with different missions and serving different constituencies. Most reform efforts over the last decade have sought to implement rather uniform programs throughout government. Some of these efforts have been successful, for example, the President's Management Improvement Council (PMIC) in the United States, while others have largely been qualified failures, for example, the Financial Management Initiative (FMI) in the United Kingdom (Gray and Jenkins 1991; Tomkys 1991) and the Financial Management Improvement Program (FMIP) in Australia (Campbell and Halligan 1992:149-52). Again, there appears to be a real need to define the conditions under which these changes can succeed. For

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example, the financial ideas contained in the American reforms may fit better with the administrative culture there than do the ideas of FMI in the British government. Further, the FMI was imposed from the top of government, while although they were certainly advocated by the Reagan administration, the set of managerial reforms in the United States were developed in consultation with the permanent civil service (in contrast to the Grace Commission reforms implemented by the same administration). One interesting observation about the contemporary pattern of change is that one of the most popular uniform strategies has been to create greater administrative differentiation within the public sector. Ideas such as Next Steps, special operating agencies, and "corporatization" all attempt to provide the organizations created by the reform initiative with greater latitude to make their own decisions about policies, programs, and their own internal management. Part of this differentiation is intended to come from the entrepreneurial activities of the leadership of the newly created agencies, with an increasing amount of policy initiation coming from below rather than from political leaders at the top. Even when there are not major structural changes, other reform strategies are also driving management toward much greater differentiation within the public sector. In the United States, for example, the Office of Personnel Management and the Office of Management and Budget are advocating eliminating traditional pay and grading systems in the civil service in favour of personalized contracts and merit pay (National Performance Review 1993). This strategy for personnel management will mean, then, that the public sector would become much less uniform than it has been in the past. In many countries - even those with histories of wage solidarity - performance contracts are becoming common means of rewarding public employees, especially top managers of major public enterprises and other senior managers (Laegreid 1994; Sjolund 1994). A final question concerns the uniformity of contexts for reform - that is, the extent to which reforms that are successful in one national context can be borrowed and transplanted into other settings. If one size fits all, can you buy the reforms off the peg?

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There has been a pronounced tendency for advocates of reform to borrow heavily without thinking sufficiently about the real difficulties of making the transplants.8 Some of the most commonly advocated changes, such as reinvention (Osborne and Gaebler 1992), are thought to be successful at one level of government and are then implemented at another level with little apparent thought. Similarly, the ideas contained in the Next Steps reform in Britain were adopted from Sweden (Fudge and Gustafsson 1989), and then have been spread to other countries (Kickert 1992). The problem with a highly differentiated approach to organizational reform is that organization theory in the public sector is not yet sufficiently advanced to provide adequate guidance for wouldbe reformers (Pitt and Smith 1981; but see Durant and Wilson 1993). Our classification of government organizations tends to be on the basis of what they do - health, defence, and so on - rather than on structural or managerial grounds that would provide more of a basis for reform recommendations. While we can think of a number of potentially important criteria, such as size, professionalization, client involvement, there is not yet sufficient evidence to make good predictive statements to aid reformers. THE R E A L I T Y OF R E F O R M

A Administrative reform is an exercise in the genuine transformation of the public sector B Administrative reform is a rhetorical exercise only

Finally, we come to the question of the real source of change emanating from the reform process. The advocates of administrative reform are quick to stress the real benefits that are expected to accrue to government through the particular mechanism for change that they propose. Each one of the numerous reforms mentioned above has been argued by its promoters to be capable of changing government in some fundamental ways, and to be able to change it for the better. The advocates can produce a catalogue of the benefits and will even attach monetary values to those

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benefits. In this view of reform the various programs are real management "tools" that will alter the structure of the public sector and/or the behaviour of employees within government. The assumption is that reformers (whether politicians, public servants, or "experts") know enough to be able to engineer changes in performance through changing formal rules and changing the organizations within which people work. The alternative view is that administrative reform is almost entirely an exercise in rhetoric and persuasion.9 In this view experts do not know enough about the management of organizations, whether in the public or the private sector, to be able to engineer changes in the way that is usually assumed. Further, given the tendency of many reformers simply to transplant what has occurred in the private sector into the public sector, the chances of successful guided changes in government are even more remote.10 Therefore, the best way (from this perspective) to think about administrative reform is as a rhetorical exercise in which the virtue of reforming is advanced as a normative claim and constitutes an attempt to create a new social reality (Best 1991; Rochefort and Cobb 1993). In this view change comes not from engineering but from inspiration and from the desire on the part of employees in the public sector to do their jobs better. Also, the claims for benefits arising from reform are better conceptualized as political statements to convince rather than empirical statements about probable outcomes of any attempts to guide change. Again, we can see some validity in both of these contradictory perspectives on reform. On the one hand it does appear that some reforms we have been examining are derived from adequate understandings of organizational behaviour and can be identified as "engineering" changes with some substantial validity and probability of success. Unfortunately, many of these reforms appear to have produced rather modest benefits and have not been the high-profile reform initiatives that have created the greatest publicity. Examples might be the financial and managerial changes associated with PMIC in the United States, or the Rayner scrutinies in the United Kingdom. The benefits created through these reforms are not insignificant but they are not the huge

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changes sometimes anticipated, or at least hoped for, as the result of all the efforts required for change. On the other hand, the principal benefits created by reforms may be through their manipulation of symbols and raising the consciousness of citizens and the employees of government." The real impact of reform then may be simply through putting issues of improving the performance of government onto the collective agenda of government and society. The general malaise of contemporary government in most industrialized societies is unlikely to have produced complacency, but reform messages tend to place the emphasis on what can be changed for the better. This positive approach is opposed to the usual enumeration of the problems existing in the public sector, with little hope for amelioration of the problems. SUMMARY Administrative reform always has been complex and more subject to interpretation as an art than as a science. Rather than being able to develop iron-clad rules that are suitable to all reform situations, analysts have produced an ample supply of proverbs about administrative change. All these proverbs have substantial validity, but many of them are also contradictory. The prospective reformer, therefore, has a wide range of options from which to choose when proposing changes but has little or no certainty about the efficacy of the particular reform selected. There are no administrative " keys" that easily fit into the locks presented by the problems of governing, although the advocates of various reforms may make it appear so. The fact that there is more than a little truth in both parts of the apparent contradictions points to several difficult practical, as well as theoretical, problems. The task remaining is to specify the contingencies under which each of the points is valid and applicable. I am afraid that existing understandings of the political and organizational dynamics involved in reform are not yet up to that task in any truly comprehensive fashion. I will attempt, however, to provide several preliminary generalizations and observations about

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the contingencies involved in the success or failure of administrative reforms. Those observations should be conceptualized as hypotheses for testing in a comparative manner as much as firm conclusions about the political processes that undergird these changes. First, the question of time (contradiction 3) may hinge upon whether the object of change is structure or values. If "all" the reformer intends to do is to change values, then a quick, decisive reform may be most appropriate, limiting the opportunity to mobilize opposition to the proposed change. If, however, the more difficult task of changing values is involved, then a longer-term process of change must be expected. Changing values may be the most effective form of change in the long run, but it may require time and persistence, as indicated in the long-term strategies of the Gore Commission. Similarly, the specification of "body counts" (contradiction 4) may depend upon the extent to which the change being proposed has a known and predictable methodology for producing change. Without such a method attempting to predict outcomes in quantitative terms becomes risky. Selection of the top-down versus the bottom-up approach to change (contradiction i) may be a function of the nature of the work force within the organization. As government organizations become increasingly professional, their leadership will find it difficult to ignore the lower tiers of personnel who possess substantial program knowledge and participatory skills. On the other hand, traditional "machine bureaucracies" (Mintzberg 1979) may still be amenable to control from above and may not be well suited for more participative forms of management and organizational change. Governments have a limited capacity to learn from their own past reform experiences and from those of other countries (Olsen and Peters 1996). This is to some degree a function of the frequent changes in political leadership and the associated loss of memory, along with a perceived need to propose new and "innovative" programs. It is also a function of failing to systematically evaluate the results of one reform before going to the next reform; fads in public administration appear to come and go almost as rapidly as they do in the world of high fashion. If we are to resolve any of

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these apparent contradictions and make any more specific recommendations about reforms, then there must be a capacity to evaluate their successes and failures more definitively. Perhaps the most fundamental paradox of all we are discussing is that a set of reforms so much dedicated to efficiency and good management has had little systematic evaluation within the public sector. Following from the above, it may be that the sets of apparent contradictions are in reality a statement of the need for balance, rather than a statement of the need to choose. The danger in administrative reform appears to arise in selecting one part of the dichotomy to the exclusion of the other. Selecting one end of the continuum accentuates one truism about administration but ignores other equally important aspects of effective management. Reforms that begin when the administrative system is already at one extreme might benefit from concentration on a single dimension of change, but in most cases balance, even if difficult to find, may be the best target of change. More extreme changes are likely merely to beget the need for further reforms. Finally, it must be reiterated that administrative reform is more a political activity than an exercise in management. There is some theoretical basis for all of the reforms proposed and implemented, but there is also some theoretical opposition to each. With some notable exceptions, the reformer then maybe looking for theoretical reasons to justify a reform that he or she would advocate anyway, rather than looking for guidance in the initial design of the changes. In the public sector, politics and ideology continue to play a crucial role in the selection of the mechanisms that are supposed to make government (in the words of Vice President Gore) "work better and cost less." NOTES

1 An earlier version of this paper given to a collection of academics and Treasury officials in London was described by the commentator as being an "antiphonal" presentation of the subject. 2 The simplest explanation is that reform is cyclical and when government organizations go too far in one direction (e.g., centralization),

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there is a need to swing back in the other (e.g., decentralization). There are a number of such dualities that comprise a good deal of reform activity. There were some antecedents, but the State Sector Act of 1988 did constitute a radical move on the part of that government (Walsh 1991). Although not specifically administrative reforms, the failure of President Clinton's health reforms and the slowing of the Republican juggernaut of change point to the capacity of social mobilization over time to deflect policy reforms. In reality, the relationship between reducing the number of civil servants and reductions in taxes will not be direct, given that the most expensive programs in almost all governments are transfer programs such as social security. The interest group established by Peter Grace - Citizens against Government Waste - attempted to keep the recommendations of the commission in the public eye and to point to the failure of government to meet the targets set. For example, there is a tendency to cope with immediate budget deficits by mechanisms such as reducing maintenance or accelerating revenue collections. These do produce benefits in the short run but may actually impose greater costs in the long run. There is a growing body of literature on the difficulties in transplanting substantive policies (Rose 1993), but much less on the difficulties of transplanting administrative innovations. This is true despite the common occurrence of such transplants, among levels of government, among different national governments, and between the private and public sectors. The harshest critics would probably argue that reform is really an exercise in deception and duplicity, by attempting to persuade people (employees and citizens alike) that change is easy, immediate, and costless. At the extreme the argument is made that administrative systems are self-organizing and will manage to reinterpret any attempt at reform and deflect its impact (in t' Veld 1991). This might be seen as the "Field of Dreams" conceptualization of reform.

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Public Sector Values and Administrative Reforms NICOLE DE MONTRICHER

The aim of this chapter is to "take stock" of the changes that have occurred over the last fifteen years in public sector culture. Its approach is based on the traditional division in a modern state between the public sector and the private sector, with the former being responsible for general concerns (the public interest) and the latter being the area where individual or sectoral interests confront one another (self-interests). The principle of this division is the result of a long political and social battle where the outcome was a balance between political authority and public will in the determination of desirable social developments. Invariably, each state has chosen its own institutional design to ensure the longterm survival of the values on which it bases its social identity. At the same time, each state has defined the relative scope of public and private concerns, with government intervention being considered legitimate each time the general situation brought about the disintegration of the economic fabric. To maintain their development following the end of the Second World War, all the industrialized nations equipped themselves with a large public sector. During the 19505, however, the first moves toward the globalization of the economy challenged the strictly national character of the public sector. At another level, the consequences of budget cuts were already being felt in the public sector by the beginning of the 19705. By the middle of the 19705, under the pressures caused by these two trends, many 108

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governments began to realize that the size of the welfare state had reached an intolerable level: it was too costly, and it was unable to adapt to change. In this context, and with increasing unemployment, jobs in the public sector began to be perceived as privileged because they were protected against market shifts. As it has always been inclined to do, public opinion is less critical of governments than it is of the individuals who serve them, and the very notion of a government job became synonymous with a weak work ethic (Singly and Thelot 1988:3). Therefore, by the 19805 the image of the public sector had become tarnished. As a result, governments in industrialized countries began to implement reforms aimed at reducing expenditures while at the same time improving government operations. All these initiatives were based on public management methods that evolved mostly from experience with private sector practices. It is therefore open to question whether government officials identified the new rules as being their own, and, especially, whether the values inherent to the national public service were being maintained, were changing, or were disappearing under the onslaught of reform. The experience in France will serve as an example for examining this issue, because it is a country with a powerful and prestigious public service that is clearly committed to an increasingly broad policy of change while maintaining its distinctive public sector values. Through its experience we can assess the conditions governing the relationships between the values informing the public service and those at the basis of reform. This assessment is based on the assumption that there is an essential cohesiveness originating both from an ideology and ethics specific to the public service and from reform driven by neo-liberal economic theory. P U B L I C SECTOR C U L T U R E

Public sector culture is a product of the way a government is designed. In each country, it is expressed through a set of symbols that determines the rationale according to which public policy is developed. For some, government is the manager of society's

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interests, as is the case, for example, in the United Kingdom. For other countries, such as France, it is the government that determines what is the public interest (Chatelet and Pisier-Kouchner 1981). Each government builds a coherent system of legitimacy based on an organized communication strategy that explains its position in the social structure. Thus, the specific nature of public policy is justified by its objective of social change, and for this reason its content is always both value driven (desirable change) and results oriented (achievement or non-achievement). For public servants, this results in a vision of the world and of their profession that reflects the political and ethical values on which their decisions concerning the ends and the means of policy directions are based (Simon 1983). This ideological framework is a key issue in interpreting the role and values of public servants, and for this reason we will discuss first the various national conceptions of the public sector. National Conceptions of the Public Sector

The specific character of the public sector, unlike that of the private sector, is determined within the framework of democratically expressed expectations. In this sense, it reflects a conception of the nation state in which the public sector is responsible for implementing policy. This close relationship gives to the culture of the government official's professional environment an explicitly "political" character that finds its expression in both the use of coercive powers and the pursuit of objectives that benefit the whole community. In countries with a long democratic tradition — the only ones that concern us here — it is ultimately parliament, through the authority of its various jurisdictions, that always determines the values put in practice by the public sector at the operational level. It does so, however, within the limitations imposed by the history of the public sector organizations and their central core, the administration. For this reason, despite the illdefined and fragmented nature of the public sector, its ideological unity is built upon civil servants whose approach to their job con-

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trasts with that of employees in the private sector. This approach could be attributed to permanency of tenure and submission to a set of unilaterally defined rules (Claisse and Meininger 1994:9). The Relationship between the Public Sector and Civil Society The national culture of the public sector is expressed through two quite opposite world views. Liberal countries generally agree that the state must respect the freedom of civil society. Beyond that, however, two contrasting views dominate: "This double variant, where liberalism is always the axis, is represented roughly by the Anglo-Saxon model and the Franco-German model of the public service, bearing respectively the images of Locke and Hegel" (Pisier and Bouretz 1988:35). THE FIRST MODEL In the first model, the public sector is subject to civil society and there are therefore a limited number of rules governing policy implementation. Here, the dominant culture gives precedence to the market and to statutory authority; the public sector is only a manager of the public interest. Being a civil servant is an occupation like any other where each official can take initiative to carry out his or her duties according to regulatory standards. If such officials are given special status, however, it is only for technical reasons. Thus, there are two ways of perceiving the public service. According to the first (in the United States), becoming part of the public service means that certain professional skills are recognized in a specific field; thus, an official can leave the public service to join a private firm, and vice versa. There is a close relationship between the group that is being managed and the administrative service. The public service developed in response to pressures from special interest groups that created corporatetype relationships (Lowi 1979). Automatically, the public service sees itself as being "at the service" of its clients and their interests. Its objectives are largely the result of compromises with the groups concerned; negotiations are carried out between "professionals." The sectoral and technical vision accompanying policy

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implementation is reinforced within the administration by the discretion afforded by its dual responsibility to executive and legislative authority. According to the second (in the United Kingdom), social regulation occurs for the most part at the local level; it is through the development of a legal framework for social policy that the public sector developed. Individual initiatives can only go so far because of the rigid social divisions that are maintained and that perpetuate the privileges of the elite. There are few national civil servants, and the central government has only a weak territorial hold on the outlying areas. On the organizational level, there is a clear separation between the administration on the one hand and political groups and civil society on the other. Public servants are generalists by training and they specialize "on the job." THE SECOND MODEL In the second model, the public sector transcends civil society. Here, the dominant culture prefers to see the role of public sector organizations as one of promoting action rather than regulating it. Therefore, it is the administrative body that defines the public interest of the community and, for this reason, it is subject to a specific legal code. The public service is a specialized profession and its status fulfils a basic requirement: it expresses the independence of the administration from civil society. People are recruited at a young age and they remain in the public service throughout their career. Public servants are trained as generalists, and whether their job is functional or technical, their training allows them to occupy various positions, which ensures a certain amount of consistency within the administration. In a country such as France, the public service sees as its mission the need to go beyond the interests of the various groups that compete in civil society (Chevallier 1979). In fact, the public service traditionally plays a predominant role in the economic, social and cultural development of the country and it is for this reason that there are specialized learning institutions to train future public servants. The senior public service, in particular, draws its members from two institutions: 1'Ecole polytechnique for technical staff and 1'Ecole nationale d'administration for

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administrative staff. There is a broad consensus supporting administrative centralization, because "only Paris can maintain a broad enough perspective to properly identify the public interest" (Thoenig 1987:170). The absence of reliable information makes it impossible to compare how a country's stakeholders perceive the ideal relationship between society and the administration. However, it is evident that in France there is a strong demand for continued government services throughout the whole country, despite the criticism that is sometimes made against specific service delivery arrangements. For example, an opinion poll revealed in 1994 that 67 percent of the population is satisfied with the performance of social security services, that 66 percent share the same opinion in the case of public education, and so on (Conseil d'Etat 1995:32). Public Sector Values The identity of the public sector is structured around a certain number of common values that are shared by all its organizations. These are defined rather loosely to give public authority appropriate flexibility, but they also play a key role in interpreting social reality (March and Olsen 1989). Accordingly, public sector institutions receive their mandates from Parliament and these are then more concretely applied by government officials (Peters 1989). Adorno's thesis, according to which an individual's attitudes form a coherent whole through which his or her personality is expressed (Adorno et al. 1950), suggests that individuals attracted to a career in the public service share certain moral values. In fact, the ideology of the public service includes a mythical image of the public servant that is mentioned particularly in the ritual speeches given by politicians to introduce the new year, for example, or to present awards: they speak of loyalty, commitment to the public good, and dedication to serving the public (Lochak 1980). Public servants thus tend to subordinate individual interests to the public interest. In keeping with such an image, the public servants of most countries are politically inclined to support "left-leaning" parties.

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Traditionally, there has been a division between private sector management that supports conservative parties and promotes market forces, and public service management that supports the Socialist Party and promotes government intervention. "In 1981, 71 percent of State public servants, 53 percent of public servants at the local level and 16 percent of the military intended to vote for F. Mitterand during the first round of the presidential election (Le Point - IFOP, March 2, 1981) ... During the first round of the presidential election of 1988,57.8 percent of government workers stated that they had voted for F. Mitterand, compared to 46.7 percent of workers in the private sector. During the second round, the numbers were 74 percent in the public sector and 59 percent in the private sector (Le Monde - BVA, April 27 and May 11,1988)" (Siwek-Pouydesseau 1989:204). On the other hand, in the case of the senior public service, political preferences vary across the whole spectrum (Rouban 1994). Bearing in mind nonetheless that the gap between the public and the private sector is related to a society's values, an organized structure of representations specific to the public sector can be developed. Definition of the System of Values It should be noted at the outset that the public service does not form a cohesive unit. There are in fact two distinct groups with contrasting features: senior public servants on the one hand, and middle managers and employees on the other. The upper levels are occupied by the "administrative elite" which, irrespective of its legal status, is closely linked to the instability of political staff; the symbolic attribute which characterizes this group is power. At the other levels, all studies point to the importance of employment stability and employee benefits in the decision to choose a career in the public service. The symbolic attribute here is quality of life (Singly and Thelot 1988:5). Another division is also apparent between headquarters executives who promote social change and local program managers whose main concern is service delivery. These differences reveal that public service values must be considered at two levels, one involving the public sector in general and the other involving its component organizations. The arrangements governing the relationships

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between these two groups determine the cohesiveness of the public service culture. To identify the public service values, we cross-checked historical, contemporary, political and legal documents dealing with the public service in several countries (Europe and North America), and paid particular attention to the areas where criticism has been focused. We also reviewed sociological studies that compare, in the case of France, the ideological behaviours of private and public officials. Statistical data originate from a survey carried out in 1991 among senior executives of the French public service (Rouban 1994). On the basis of this information, it seemed that public service culture could be organized around four basic values, each of which covers two fields: in the first instance, public policies, through which they provide guidance as to the changes that are appropriate; and in the second, career development, where they provide ethical benchmarks. Several examples are also provided to illustrate the system by which each of these values is represented. THE PUBLIC INTEREST The public interest is a political notion that determines the objective of social change. This challenge is legitimately defined by an institution representing a body of citizens that is sufficiently broad to allow it to claim a certain degree of universality. The complexity of the objectives to be attained is an inevitable feature of the public interest. In this regard, policy initiatives in the public sector have a different rationale than those in the private sector where, even in the case of non-profit organizations, initiatives are based on specific targets. In the public service culture, initiatives are based on the assumed purpose of serving the general public interest and, according to democratic tradition, they are operationally designed by public servants to respond to the will of parliament. It is therefore evident that the whole system is designed to operate in a relatively stable environment, both upstream where the electorate determines policy and downstream to respond to society's needs. This alignment of relationships between demand in society and the response given by institutions results in the promotion of continuity.

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In the area of public policy, the public interest is defined according to a political norm as expressed by a "general" will separate from individual interests and developed as such at the centre. Its implementation is then carried out within the framework of the line of command which, as a result, becomes highly valued for its responsiveness to political authority. The public interest is expressed in the principle of "neutrality" in order to allow for a diversity of opinions. It symbolizes an institutional value, namely the permanent character of the administration in the face of an unstable political environment. However, its meaning is imprecise because it defines both acceptance and non-acceptance of all opinions. The relevant indicator here would be the educational system, which in France is based on the secular character of the State, compared to the pluralist attitude of Anglo-Saxon countries. The public interest also relies on organizational procedures, high standards of expertise and impartial advice provided to the political decision makers. Here there are two different approaches: one where advice is mostly sought outside the administration, and another that relies on the public service elite. In France, the latter model is traditionally followed. It is based on the prestige of the large national bodies which have been advising the country's political leaders since the last century (Kessler 1994:85). Finally, the public interest relies on an ethic of solidarity between public sector organizations. Thus, the pioneering experiments conducted by the Renault Company over the last fifty years in the area of social policy have resulted in measures that have been adopted at the national level. The public sector draws its legitimacy from implementing the public interest as defined by political authority. This is a requirement that is defined within the framework of a certain number of rules that determine the public servant's code of ethics. In this way, a standard of conduct based on submission to line authority and the rule of law is promoted. Under such a process, effective management rests on a solid statutory mandate and its related procedures. In fact, for employment in the traditional public administration, the main requirement is experience in the legal

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profession, because in a democratic society, the secular arm of the state cannot act outside established standards and procedures. This ethical rule has been popularized under the slogan of "due process." In certain cases, such as in France, the specific nature of the public sector is also protected by a special legal code (administrative law) that is enforced by a specialized body, the Conseil d'etat. This type of professionalization promotes the arm's-length relationship between the administration and civil society. Public servants are also committed to adjusting policy initiatives to changes in the environment and to local conditions. In fact, the translation of policy initiatives into operational programs is a responsibility assigned to "field" personnel whose projects and their implementation are subject to more or less binding controls. The result is that, beyond compliance with line authority and statutory standards, traditional management operates largely according to an ethic emphasizing initiative and confidence. Finally, the public interest creates a condition of ambiguity that fosters the persistence of a tradition of secrecy that has considerable influence on the daily operations of public sector organizations. In France, this tradition gives rise to both a statutory obligation to protect information and a requirement for public servants to release information and justify their decisions. EQUALITY The principle of equality is at the heart of the initiatives of public sector organizations, where it is a key requirement in the development of their strategy. Accordingly, what is at issue is not real people but rather abstract individuals whose only relevant status is that of members of society. Such a view by the public sector is in contrast to the view that prevails in the private sector, where individual differences receive the greatest attention. In the area of public policy initiatives, the culture of equality is based on a certain number of principles. First there is an organizational principle whereby certain countries tend to promote service delivery decentralization to private or public organizations by claiming that these are closer to the final users. Such a policy is not applied in France, where standardized service delivery is the main goal; this standardization is achieved by assigning state public

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servants to specific geographic regions throughout the country. Equality also implies the political principle of accessibility, whereby spending for services is considered independently of service delivery costs. This has resulted in the perception that, in the public sector, the quality of a service is related to the quantity of available resources. In a country such as France, for example, during the civil service strike of 1979, the whole labour movement complained that there was a decrease in the quality of government services, especially because of personnel cuts. Similarly, in 1987, "the Federation Generale des Fonctionnaires outlined its proposals on ways and means of providing quality government services. It criticized all personnel cuts, which would be detrimental to administrative efficiency, to the services provided to the beneficiaries or users, and to the status of the public service. It opposed any policy aimed at limiting government services based on claims of streamlining or modernization. Instead, it claimed that it should be possible to give all government workers a shorter work week and better wages and working conditions" (Siwek-Pouydesseau 1989:28). Lastly, the principle of equality is process oriented in that it leads to a preference for quantitative rather than qualitative criteria. The result is that government grants are awarded to local communities on the basis of their population and are awarded to individuals on the basis of their revenues. Equality is a key value in a professional public service. It underlines first of all the importance of avoiding discrimination between citizens based on sex, race, labour affiliation, and so on. It promotes especially the principle of "loyalty," which emphasizes commitment to serving the institution as opposed to the arbitrariness of line officials. Equality also applies in the rule of promotion according to seniority which is a real ethical value that legitimizes the waiver of competition and regular career development. In fact, experience in the public sector reveals that, notwithstanding individual merit, operating procedures require the use of such a formula according to a rating system that applies to all civil servants. In France, the principle of equality has also been used to justify recruitment based on general skills because it creates a level playing field for all public servants.

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PUBLIC SPENDING There is a paradox in the fact that while democratic revolutions have often occurred to protest against excessive or abusive taxation, public sector organizations have been operating for a long time on the assumption that their budgets are untouchable. The reasons for such a perception were first, the prestige of the state that seemed to justify all expenses, the classic administrative theory that efficiency results from the rule of law, and, lastly, the social usefulness of the initiatives, which was never challenged. In fact, since initiatives by public sector organizations are determined according to the common interest, the services produced do not have any market value, which puts into perspective the issue of costs. For that matter the goal of "service to the public" is often accompanied by the idea that the efficiency criterion is unrelated to the amount of the expenditure. For this reason, public sector facilities are managed without giving any consideration to depreciation or the need for replacement. Each service spends the money it receives according to the principle of annual budgeting. For example, during the 19705, the Confederation generale des travailleurs (CGT) public union considered that the "application of cost-effectiveness led to underestimating qualitative social elements, to the benefit of commercial elements, and this was especially detrimental to services to the public" (Siwek-Pouydesseau 1989:272). On another level an emphasis on public spending leads to a greater commitment to the principle of equalized payments. For example, government agencies have traditionally followed a strategy whereby capacity utilization was undercut in the interest of smaller clients. The state power company, Electricite de France (EOF), provided more favourable conditions to small users compared to the larger ones, and the French national railway company, Societe nationale des chemins de fer francais (SNCF), financed commuter services with revenues from the main lines. Lastly, focusing on public spending tends to create a link between the political importance of a problem and the funding assigned to its management. Professional life in the public service entails dedication by public servants who work for salaries that are considered inferior to those in the private sector. There is no causal relationship

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between the quality of the work and wage levels. Such a status is consistent with the rhetoric of the public service as a "calling," where the public servant is a person who is totally committed to his or her professional duties in serving the public trust. In more concrete terms, perceptions in the public sector are influenced by the counter-productive image of the private sector manager as a person whose only goal is to climb the ladder, contrary to the public servant whose main focus is personal lifestyle. Working conditions are of greater concern to the public servant, who appreciates regular working hours and wishes to have time available for the family (Boltanski 1982:350). Such a willingness to serve the public does not exclude a strong commitment to the right to strike. MERIT Entry into the public service is sought after not only because of the employment stability and fringe benefits the public service provides, but also because of its role in gaining social standing. In fact, since the beginning of the nineteenth century competition has become the process for recruitment based on public service values, in contrast to private sector values that allow for arbitrariness and social gain in the evaluation of each personnel file. Entry into the public service therefore reflects the option of a group that relies on its intellectual capital rather than on its economic capital for occupational success. However, a distinction has to be made between expectations at the lower levels and at the higher levels. The former reflect a hope for improved social status and the latter embody the ambition to acquire prestige. Generally speaking, this is a group that values education and whose perceptions establish a strong link between the level of education and the level of employment. The relationships between these values lie at the basis of the founding model of the public service: a basis for legitimacy: public interest; a rule for action: equality and public spending; an organizational principle: merit; and finally, a specific approach to the workplace that ensures integration of all these elements and that is based on the observance of a specific set of rights and obligations.

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There are differences from one country to another, but these principles crystallize the separation between public sector employees and private sector employees. In France the statute that is presently recognized dates back to 1983. Its symbolic importance is critical because it is this statute that sets out the specific identity of the administration, in the sense that it links the values that, taken together, constitute the ideology that motivates public servants. ADMINISTRATIVE REFORMS

The values that determine the scope of the public sector create an ambivalent image for the public service: for some it is an idealized world at the service of the common good, while for others it is a place where indifference has become established as a principle. In fact the public sector is often depicted as an area resistant to change, while in reality it is in constant renewal, as recent history has demonstrated. By the end of World War n, industrialized countries were at a developmental stage and the benefits of growth were being redistributed to the population as a whole based on policies designed to enhance the overall standard of living. Accordingly, to deal with their increasing responsibilities, public organizations were justified in expanding their structures and their work force. However, by the end of the 19505 this expansion was interrupted by two events: the development of monopolies became subject to controls, and, after the second oil shock, resources became scarcer. In France it is generally agreed that public sector costs became a focal point with the publication of the Nora Report (Nora 1968). Within this context, and dating from the early 19703, the influence of intellectuals who promoted the principles of economic liberalism became more widespread (J. Buchanan, G. Tullock, and others). These authors challenged every tenet of traditional governance theory. They maintained that demand generated by the state has no link with the public interest, that supply originating from the state only serves individual interests, and therefore that production created by the state does not contribute to the

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public interest but rather sustains certain private interests at the cost of extreme social squandering (Greffe 1981:13). According to this point of view, the state has no specificity, and, as a result, it cannot have its own rationality. Furthermore, development occurs as a result of freedom of individual initiatives and not as a result of collective action. Accordingly, reconstruction of the economic fibre is no longer achieved through government intervention but rather through its withdrawal. This line of thought was carried forward at the beginning of the 19805 by political leaders (Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher) whose policies were based on this new ideology that challenges the legitimacy of the public sector. The application of this philosophy in the area of administrative reform is marked by a rhetoric based on postulates which promote "market forces," namely: • the private sector is better managed than the public sector • the user is a well-informed individual who makes clear and reasonable demands • an efficient service costs less • a government service can be compared to a private service, with the result that the user becomes a client. At the operational level this type of thinking is supported by a managerial approach according to which an oversized administrative structure and the monopolistic character of its actions have resulted in dysfunctional situations. This argument is based on three ideas: the illusionary character of the public interest as defined by elected officials, the promotion of the private sector and of the individual, and support for the managerial approach as a lever for reform. Grounds for these notions are provided on a technical level by the findings of several international institutions: in 1983, the World Bank published a report stating that during the 19705, economic development in countries with lower taxation was greater than that of others, and in 1985 a study conducted by the OECD established a correlation between the rate of economic growth and the size of the public sector (Durupty 1988). However, the relation between reforms and their impact on the objectives of the public service has remained rather confused, and

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the issues relating to changes in the role of public servants have not been addressed as such. Specifically, the issue of the criteria delineating the boundary between what should remain in the public sector and what could be privatized has been raised, but it has not been resolved. Moreover, the risks resulting from an imbalance between centralization and decentralization of administrative structures have not been clarified. The result has been considerable uncertainty as to the criteria according to which public servants must operate. Shared initiatives are in fact based on the individual understanding of each person involved, and such an understanding can only be acquired through objectives that are sufficiently clear to allow each person to comprehend and interpret each situation. Under such conditions, have the reforms implemented since the early 19803 aimed at altering, or had the effect of altering, the values which have traditionally shaped the identity of the public sector? Since the beginning of the 19803, changes brought about in the machinery of government have been justified by external pressures and are no longer simply driven by an internal willingness to adjust. In particular there is a radically new basis for action because the traditional assumption of a link between government initiatives and their desirability has been replaced by the necessity for the administration to base the legitimacy of its policy initiatives on their social usefulness. The ambivalent character of this notion has often been interpreted in the light of fiscal restraints. Services to the public are expensive and globalization of the economy necessitates the reduction of government deficits. This requirement is especially restricting in Europe because of the need to comply with the measures required to pursue integration. This means that administrative reform over the last fifteen years has mostly revolved around efforts to trim government expenditures. In this way it is the pressure of concrete and urgent problems and not organized strategic efforts that has conditioned the evolution of the administration, in much the same way that government withdrawal has been occurring in response to budget priorities. Modernization involves two challenges. There are on the one hand measures aimed at reducing the relative weight of the national government and on the other policies designed to alter its

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component organizations. For example, the government of the United Kingdom has pursued change with the notion that pressure from users would automatically force administrative services to become modernized. This is a reform through external means (Trosa 1995:131). In France on the other hand the government has based its program on the renewed motivation of public servants within the confines of the public service. This is a reform from within (Rocard 1989). The Managerial Lever The innovations implemented because of the high cost of government are grouped under the term "public management." The apparent objective of public management is to protect the stability of the administration against the turbulence of politics. To achieve such stability this approach tends to consider that the main stakeholder it should be dealing with is no longer parliament, as in the conventional theory, but the user. The focal point of the managerial principle is the search for efficiency, that is, the capacity to obtain the best return for a given cost. Public policy is therefore no longer legitimized by the pursuit of the public interest as defined by elected officials, but by the cost-effectiveness of government programs and services. It so happens, however, that in practice, efficiency, according to Henry Mintzberg, is linked to quantifiable criteria. This situation results in three fundamental consequences: Because costs are more easily quantifiable than benefits, efficiency is very often reduced to simply achieving savings...; because economic costs are generally more easily quantifiable than social costs, the result is much too often that efficiency leads to a sharp increase in social costs considered as external effects ...; because economic benefits are more easily quantifiable than social benefits, efficiency very often leads the organization to adopt principles that are economically sound but that are socially wrong. (Mintzberg 1994:482)

In fact, because reform tends explicitly to do away with the values related to line authority and centralization, it has at the

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same time eliminated the immediate convergence that occurred previously between the culture of the public sector and the culture of its component organizations. Adjustments between old values and new values must occur, from now on, on a case-by-case basis. Budget Consolidation and Management Control Although it has been accepted without difficulty, this reform alters quite significantly the policy rationale guiding operational services in that it promotes an economic approach based on cost-cutting measures and results-oriented processes. While it does not favour public spending, this financial approach has been little contested in principle. In practice, however, these measures have had the effect of transforming the conditions under which decisions are made. In fact the autonomy that budget consolidation provides is accompanied by a requirement for those responsible for the services to show results. This requirement brings about changes in the respective importance of the persons who influence policy decisions within the organization. Reform leads in particular to a weakening of those groups that embody traditional values, such as technicians, who symbolize the expertise of the public sector and a service quality determined independently of any cost considerations. Modernization creates such an effect for two reasons. First, because people in such groups have tended to evaluate achievements in quantitative rather than qualitative terms. For example, what counted was the number of kilometres of highway that were constructed and not the reduced number of accidents. The second reason can be found in the rise of the group of "managers" whose philosophy is based on economic considerations and who tend to marginalize any stakeholder who cannot operate under the standards on which this philosophy is based. Emphasis on financial results also changes the public interest purpose on which public sector organizations base their initiatives. In fact, unlike private companies, these organizations pursue objectives that are multiple and difficult to measure, precisely because their basis of action is support for social change. However, the requirement for efficiency prevents fragmentation and ensures that each service will define relatively precise objectives. The result of such an approach is that it automatically

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induces a keener sense of purpose that produces a clearer operational focus. This is the case, for example, of the unit head who no longer provides free legal advice to town mayors because of the costs involved. In the process, however, the principle of accessibility to government services is affected without any political authority having taken a stand on the issue. Decentralization Decentralization represents a dramatic reform in that it promotes behaviours that are often contrary to those whose legitimacy has always gone unchallenged; we are referring to autonomy for service providers and to powers for users. In France this type of change was well accepted because 39 percent of all modernization efforts involve "service projects" and are basically functional decentralization efforts (Rouban 1994:21). However, the effective implementation of decentralization tends to promote initiative as opposed to the values linked to line authority, especially as it relates to submission to political authority as the voice of the public interest. Decentralization of administrative services in fact creates centrifugal trends because their initiatives often depend on demand from local communities. The pressure thus becomes quite compelling, especially if performance objectives have been set. This is why policies developed at the central level can become merely symbolic. An example would be the French Ministere de 1'equipement. The policy of the minister is to seek a new balance in the activities of the lie de France region, by developing the east side of Paris. However, the Departement des hauts de Seine (an elected local community) which is located to the west, is ordering very major works from the local representative of the ministry. The latter sees no reason to deny these requests, although such decisions result in the implementation of an action contrary to the policies set by his minister (Montricher 1994). With this new focus on demand, influences are increasingly felt at the local level to redefine the "public" interest, both in relation to complaints from the electorate and with respect to the requirements of users who are increasingly better organized. Central administrations show very little commitment in this area because they are concerned that service neutrality will be compromised or

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that they will be unable to meet public interest standards. For this reason, they resist decentralization, as in the case of the Ministry of the Environment. Assessing Service Quality and Effectiveness Reform focuses on the user, who is no longer seen abstractly as a citizen with rights but rather as an individual with concrete needs. In France, this type of change is meeting considerable resistance on the part of public servants who remain committed to the separation between the administration and the public in the name of public service neutrality. Obtaining input from sources outside the administration to identify the services that should be delivered has the effect of shifting reference points and, as a result, of altering indicators. Such changes occur because administrations generally have several publics with different values. A case in point is the educational system which must be responsive to students, to their parents, to future employers, and others. Their involvement in the definition of quality would lead to a situation in which some of these groups take the upper hand, thus ending the neutrality of public bodies. Relying on users to provide input into the definition of quality also leads to change in the direction of increasing specialization within organizations, on the model of client segmentation in the private sector, with the concomitant result that the support structures for weaker groups would disappear. The notions of "effectiveness" and "efficiency" are inseparable from a system of contingent values that is quite different from that of the public sector. It seems, however, that there has been little difficulty in introducing these concepts into the administration, where they tend to alter policy initiatives quite considerably by ultimately removing them from public interest concerns. In fact, due to the increasing emphasis on results, unit heads tend to favour short-term policies and to concentrate on the means available in the medium term to achieve their objectives - in other words, on production. As a result there is a shift from "reasonable management" to "economic efficiency" because the latter is based on easily and immediately quantifiable elements, whereas there are no indicators that clearly show the social impact of policy

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initiatives, especially in the long term. Accordingly, when developing an annual strategy, should a unit head in charge of public works decide to repair a road or to engage in advisory activities? Sometimes the options are even more subtle, for example in deciding whether advisory services should be provided to a wealthy local community or to a poor local community. Individualization of Careers Imported directly from the private sector, individualization of careers focuses on results and on the contract, as opposed to a culture based on higher education and stability. It seems, however, that reform is relatively well accepted at the higher levels. Elsewhere, union efforts remain concentrated on salary negotiation and on status protection, because this seems to be the mandate that their members have given them. With reform the job level of public servants tends to be linked to their performance instead of simply to their diplomas. In this respect senior public service managers seem to share with their private sector counterparts the ideology of individual merit and personal success, of a work ethic and of entrepreneurship (Singly and Thelot 1988:6). Contrary to all the stereotypes about the behaviour of public servants, a high percentage of people in the French public service accept the idea of some link between compensation and individual performance evaluations: 48.3 percent are in complete agreement with this idea, 25 percent stipulate conditions with respect to bargaining and the openness of the criteria selected, while 20.6 percent reject such an evaluation and consider it contrary to their status. There is therefore strong support for a results-oriented approach, especially in operational units where it easily replaces the standard of discipline based on submission to line authority and to the rule of law (Rouban 1994:231). There is evidence, however, that the practice of individual interviews with managers is being implemented without creating a direct link with performance rating. For the time being it is mainly a method of communication which the people involved consider proper. This issue brings out the differences in vision that compete in the administration according to job level: field services managers prefer a personal evaluation that is a procedure in which the

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two parties are present and can argue (41.9 percent) and want performance rating to be linked to an assessment of resources (20.4 percent); conversely, few insist on the utilization of objective criteria (23.7 percent); opposite opinions are expressed in the case of headquarters managers for whom objective criteria have considerable importance (57.6 percent) but who insist less on the preliminary interview. As for the large state organizations, they show massive support for the traditional public service ideology: 87.5 percent want the development of objective criteria, but very few support a preliminary interview process (12.5 percent) (Rouban 1994:229). During the 19805 stability as a norm was increasingly replaced by contracting practices, symbolizing an unstable and nonpermanent professional environment which is in direct contradiction to fundamental public service values. Although this new approach was not readily accepted, recruitment under contract became more and more prevalent, both at the upper levels to bring in senior experts on temporary assignments and at the lower levels to make use of underpaid service providers with very low employment security. In fact due mainly to pressures from unemployment, the personal reasons for choosing a career in the public service changed dramatically: in 1987, only 43 percent of French government workers claimed that they had chosen such a career because of job security, while 37 percent said that they had done so because there was no other work elsewhere (Nouvel Observateur-Sofres, 16 January 1987, quoted in Siwek-Pouydesseau 1989:203). The Lever of Knowledge

Apart from structural and procedural reforms, the question arises as to whether governments have endeavoured to make major changes in the instruments through which public servants make sense of the world around them, for example by drawing on different kinds of expertise to promote other viewpoints concerning public sector management and new ways of relating these to occupations. In this regard it appears that two indicators can be iden-

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tified: first, the recruitment system and the evolution of training methods and, second, the transformation of the social base. The Training System In general, changes to the knowledge acquisition system are marginal, except in the development of approaches to continuous learning. In the case of initial training, two different models can be applied: under one model the administration provides its own training, and under the other the same institutions train employees from both the private and the public sectors. It should be noted, however, that in all cases senior management tend to receive their training in the same organizations used by the private sector for this purpose, with the result that their world visions and their approach to policy making are closely aligned. In general, recruitment of senior government officials is highly elitist (Suleiman and Mendras 1995). In France, for example, although the image of the senior public service has become somewhat diminished, its training process has never been questioned. On the contrary its reputation is evidenced by the fact that private companies do not hesitate to recruit young officials at higher levels when they decide not to pursue a government career. This is a phenomenon which was observed especially in the Corps des ponts et chaussees (Department of Public Works) in the late 19805. Generally speaking, the gap between public and private sector outlooks has diminished. This change occurred during the 19805 due to the fact that it is those managers between the ages of 25 and 40 who form the largest group (close to 60 percent) stating that they would consider leaving the public service (Rouban 1994). A process has begun whereby training is being generalized to the point where work in the public service is a career like any other. This change is receiving an impetus from the privatization of industrial and commercial sector monopolies, which is accompanied by the elimination of management positions held by senior public servants. Conversely, the outlook of public servants remains highly conditioned by their attendance at learning institutions that value individual merit and performance - in both the entrance competition and the assessment of a discharge rating - on which the

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individual's whole career rests. It is apparent therefore that although senior public servants welcome any evaluation based on their performance, they have a mindset that causes them to have little inclination for teamwork and group evaluation. On the other hand the public sector is beginning to recruit a generation of young managers who have received their training in schools of commerce. Their influence and continuous training has introduced a new outlook, especially in the technical ministries. However, the integration of this new outlook into the value system is often hindered by the weight of institutional traditions. Institutional reforms continue to be driven by the notion of supply rather than the notion of service. Quality control is still rare in the public sector. At the intermediate level less and less emphasis is being placed on management training based on the acquisition of general skills. Management training is becoming both more technical and comparable to the training recognized in the private sector (for example, in the area of computer science). This tendency is becoming more prevalent with the disintegration of the monopoly held by government field services due to competition from the private sector, to which some local communities now award up to 40 percent of their contracts. The Recruitment System The recruitment system directly influences the degree of consistency in values since, as we have seen, an individual's involvement in an organization is determined by personal reasons. Surveys conducted in recent years indicate that the values linked to the recruitment system have sustained the traditional separation between the central administration and field services. In France the social base has shrunk somewhat at the top of the power structure and this has contributed to strengthening even further the elitism that permeates the whole system: for heads of field services, the public service remains an avenue of social advancement, since only 35.3 percent of its work force is composed of children of senior managers, compared to 52.5 percent for managers of central services and 54.8 percent for members of all the major administrative categories (Rouban 1994:163).

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However, this continuity must be qualified somewhat because the homogeneity of the major national organizations is sometimes challenged. This is the case in particular of the prestigious Corps des ponts et chaussees, which since the 19705 has been accessible to public servants who did not graduate from the Ecole polytechnique. Conversely, the social base has opened up somewhat in the lower categories and in the middle ranks because of the rise in unemployment. This phenomenon tends to alter the balance between contribution and compensation because, since it is no longer the result of a choice, a job in the public sector is no longer highly valued; in particular, public servants often hold lower level jobs than they are qualified for. Work is being depreciated because of this break between the level of education and job offerings, and the situation is being worsened by decentralization initiatives as middle managers find themselves hard pressed between front-line personnel and unit heads. In fact they are being marginalized by the flattening of the power structure. They often react by tightening their grip on the traditional values linked to centralization in order to prevent fragmentation of the public sector and also on the traditional values associated with quality as defined by technical expertise rather than cost effectiveness. CONCLUSION The role of the public sector is being called into question for three reasons: first, because its sheer size has become so counterproductive that, far from supporting the development of civil society, the public sector threatens to suffocate it; second, its management methods are outdated since, instead of serving users, government organizations are operating to serve their own agenda; third, public servants lack vitality because they are concentrating on protecting their own lifestyles instead of rallying to promote their organization. In reality, the debate concerning public servants is longstanding. Novelists depicted them in the nineteenth century (Balzac

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1844). It seems however that a real change has occurred following criticisms of the welfare state. In fact, privatization initiatives and budget cuts have often dramatically altered the size of the public service, while at the same time administrative reform is being driven by values borrowed from the private sector. Questions still need to be answered as to the conditions under which these new standards were integrated into the public service culture and the effects that such change has had on the perceptions of what is proper policy. Any serious stocktaking would be risky because we have no reliable instrument for measuring variances. It is possible, however, to report a certain number of findings concerning trends. Reform involves organizations and individuals, but not the public sector as a whole. The question therefore arises as to whether and to what extent there is convergence between the two, that is to say, whether and to what extent the confrontation between traditional values and new values allows public servants to understand and interpret each of the situations related to their workplace. As we have seen, the answer is ambiguous. The actual implementation of reforms eliminates a certain number of cultural reference points, and this leaves public servants with no guidance as to the desirable public policy to be pursued. Any attempt to identify critical events that have occurred reveals that the uncertainty they experience has dramatically increased because, faced with problems of growing complexity, they no longer have reliable criteria to strike a balance between conflicting values. It is according to their perception of the risk taken that public servants are now choosing between collective values and organizational values. What is at issue are the values that are to be promoted. For instance, in 1993 the Paris court of appeal convicted a senior public servant who, under strong pressure on his department to authorize the sale of a drug, did not state clearly enough that this drug was hazardous to the health of the public (Cour d'appel de Paris, 13 July 1993). It is therefore the job of the public servant to prioritize values according to what is in the economic interest and to what is in the public health interest.

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What is at issue also are the conditions under which performance is being evaluated. For example, if the director of a public facility is given the task of increasing public attendance, must he or she increase service offerings while at the same time increasing personnel costs, or is the director required, on the contrary, to limit service offerings in order to remain within budget? The last point at issue concerns the segmentation of clienteles. For example, must the head of a high school seek to have his or her institution specialize in general education in order that the population be well educated and homogeneous, or should programs be added that encourage the teaching of professions in the schools in order to contribute to the elimination of the ghetto effect? It is surprising to note that the reforms based on public management are often applied without great difficulty, even though the assumptions on which they are based differ from public service values. It seems in fact that these latter values are relatively fragile in the sense that, even though they exist in the minds of people, they are not necessarily followed. The important thing in fact is the relationship between public service ethics and the aims of each organization. This relationship, however, is weak. It functions uniquely through the mediation of senior officials because they are the ones responsible for translating social change objectives into organized public action. Reform is presented as a purely technical process, but it carries its own values which are not readily integrated into the public service culture, even if they are not necessarily incompatible with it. Therefore, the framework of interactions between the culture of the public service and the culture of each of its organizations has to be restructured so that public servants can identify professional and ethical benchmarks. This can be achieved. It seems likely in practice that the new definition of the public servant will be based less on his or her official status than on the consistency of the principles on which the identity of the public service is structured and on the relationship that will exist between these principles and the behaviour of individuals - for example, through a normative rule along the lines of a code of ethics.

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Adorno, Theodore W., Else Frenkel-Brunswick, Daniel J. Levinson, and Nevitt R. Sanford. 1950. The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Harper and Row. Balzac, Honore. 1844. Les employes. Paris: Roux et Cassanet. Birnbaum, Pierre. 1982. La logique de I'Etat. Paris: Fayard,. Bodiguel, Jean Luc, and Luc Rouban. 1991. Lefonctionnaire detrdne? Paris: Presses de la fondation nationale des sciences politique (PFNSP) Boltanski, Luc. 1982. Les cadres. Paris: Ed. de Minuit. Chatelet, Francois, and Evelyne Pisier-Kouchner. 1981. Les conceptions politiques du XXieme siecle. Paris: PUF. Chevallier, Jacques, ed. 1979. Variations autour de I'ideologie de I'interet general. Paris: CURAPP/PUF. Claisse, Alain, and Marie-Christine Meininger. 1994. Fonction publique en Europe. Paris: Montchrestien. Conseil d'Etat. 1995. Services publics: declins ou renouveau, rapport public 1994. Paris: La documentation franc, aise. Derlien, Hans-Ulrich. 1995. Competence bureaucratique et allegeances politiques en Allemagne. In Suleiman, Ezra, and Henri Mendras, ed., 64-91. Le recrutement des elites en Europe. Paris: La decouverte. Durupty, Michel. 1988. Les privatisations en France. Paris: La documentation franchise. Friedman, Milton, and Rose Friedman. 1984. La tyrannie du statu quo, trad, franchise. Paris: J.C. Lattes. Greffe, Xavier. 1981. Analyse economique de la bureaucratic, Paris: Economica. Juppe, Alain. 1995. Circulaire Juppe. Journal Officiel de la Republique franchise du 28 juillet, 11211. Kessler, Marie Christine. 1994. Les grands corps de I'Etat, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Lochak, Daniele. 1980. L'administration dans les discours des presidents de la Verne Republique. In Discours et ideologic, Paris: Centre universitaire de recherches administratives et politiques/Presses Universitaires de France. Lowi, Theodore. 1979. The End of Liberalism. New York: W.W. Norton.

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March, James G. and John P. Olsen. 1989. Rediscovering Institutions. New York: The Free Press. Mintzberg, Henry. 1994. Le management. Paris: Les editions d'organization. Montricher, Nicole de. 1994. La deconcentration. In Nemery, Jean Claude, and Serge Wachter, ed, 61-81. Gouverner les territoires. Paris: DATAR/ed. de 1'Aube. Nora, Pierre. 1968. Rapport sur les entreprises publiques (avril 1967). Paris: La documentation fran^aise. Peters, Guy B. 1989. The Politics of Bureaucracy. New York and London: Longman. Pisier, Evelyne, and Pierre Bouretz. 1988. Le paradoxe du fonctionnaire. Paris: Caiman-Levy. Rawls, John. 1995. Liberalisme politique. Paris: PUF. Rocard, Michel. 1989. Circulaire du 23 fevrier, relative au renouveau du service public. Rouban, Luc. 1996. Les cadres superieurs de la fonction publique et la politique de modernisation administrative. Paris: La documentation franchise. - 1994. Le pouvoir anonyme. Paris: PFNSP. Simon, Herbert. 1983. Administration et processus de decision, trad, franc.aise. Paris: Economica. Singly, Francois de, and Claude Thelot. 1988. Gens du privegens du public. Paris: Dunod. Siwek-Pouydesseau, Jeanne. 1989. Les syndicats de fonctionnaires depuis 1948. Paris: PUF. Suleiman, Ezra and Henri Mendras. 1995. Le recrutement des elites en Europe. Paris: La decouverte. Thoenig, Jean-Claude. 1987. L'ere des technocrats. Paris: L'Harmattan. Trosa, Sylvie. 1995. Moderniser I'administration: Comment fait les autres? Paris: Les editions d'organisation. Vallemont, Serge. 1991. Moderniser I'administration: Gestion strategique et valorisation des ressources humaines. Paris: Nathan. - 1995, April. 33 propositions pour rendre plus efficace I'administration territoriale de I'Etat. Rapport du comite pour la reorganisation et la deconcentration des administrations.

Public Consultation and Citizen Participation: Dilemmas of Policy Advice JON PIERRE

CITIZEN PARTICIPATION AND REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT1

Over the past few years, an increasing number of countries have begun developing new forms of policy advice and citizen participation, or are currently about to engage in such experiments. While there does not seem to exist any universal pattern to the forms that have emerged in these respects, it appears that the basic drive behind these changes is to make policy advice and public policy more directly accessible and responsive to citizens' preferences and also to provide policy makers with a wider variety of ideas, perspectives and suggestions than traditional policy advice can offer. The systems of representative government of the 19905 are remarkably similar to those of the 19305 and 19505, given the almost dramatic changes that have taken place since then in the size and scope of government. However, as this chapter will argue, trends and developments beyond national political control have seriously challenged these systems. Another important catalyst bringing citizens closer to the policy process is that citizens today are, generally speaking, better educated, much better informed, and have more time to engage in political matters compared to just a few decades ago, and hence more apt and valuable players in the process (Dalton 1996). 137

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Interestingly, these new forms of citizen participation, such as public hearings, are in many ways perfectly consonant and consistent with emerging forms of public service delivery which aim at enhancing customer choice and strengthening the position of the citizen vis-a-vis the public sector. Thus, they could be seen as an attempt by government to develop new forms of citizen involvement in politics and policy making (that is, in policy input matters) at the same time as public services (policy output) are becoming less standardized and more customer attuned. Equally important to note, all of this is happening at a time when the overall trust and faith in elected officials seem to have reached an all-time low. It is also an era when much administrative reform aims at putting citizens in a decision-making position, choosing among services produced and delivered under public and private auspices. Moreover, these new initiatives are to be integrated into a policy process which highlights a growing dependency of the state vis-a-vis private think-tanks, "policy institutes," and other organizations hosting huge resources in terms of expertise and knowledge. Finally, it is taking place at a time of significant budgetary cutbacks in which the professional expertise accumulated in the civil service faces layoffs and administrative restructuring, which, in the longer term, will undercut the bureaucracy's role as the main pool of expertise and specialization. These new ideas are not without controversy. First of all, policy advice in these political systems has traditionally - and, indeed, by design - been provided first and foremost by the civil service. New initiatives to encourage direct citizen participation in policy making and policy advice need not necessarily run counter to the interests of the public bureaucracy. Since the key role of the civil service is not primarily to put new issues on the agenda but rather to provide assessments of different alternatives to alleviate policy problems (Kingdon 1995), citizen participation aiming mainly at bringing policy makers' attention to societal problems may well go hand in hand with traditional civil service policy advice. However, to the extent that citizen involvement includes recommendations on policy alternatives, there is an obvious risk of bureaucratic resistance and, eventually, of policy-making deci-

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sions not capitalizing on the expertise harboured in the civil service. Second, the new channels of policy advice and participation challenge the established sources of such advice. The political life of most of the advanced Western democracies - with the United States being the most prominent exception - is highly structured by political parties controlling extensive organizations and vast resources. These organizations tend to be drawn closer to the state apparatus, which suggests that parties remain indispensable facets of the political system (Mair 1994). Much of public policy has its origins in expertise harboured within the party organizations. Moreover in a large number of countries - particularly Germany and the Scandinavian countries - political parties are closely linked with interest organizations controlling vast resources in terms of expertise, money, and membership. Third, opening up new channels for policy advice is likely to reshuffle the policy process and the set of actors controlling key positions in the policy-making process. Over time, "cosy relationships" have developed in many countries between the civil service, parliamentary committees, and organized interests. These and other types of policy networks are not likely to applaud initiatives to bring in new sources of policy input, least of all various forms of citizen participation, because this approach is not in tune with the notion that policy networks should connect peak organizations with key actors in the public sector. Finally, opening up new channels of policy advice has potential systemic effects, some of which could be of such magnitude that they eventually raise questions concerning the net gains to be made by these reforms. In particular, emerging models of citizen participation, facilitating alternative channels of access to decision makers and hence new channels of political influence, potentially undercut the legitimacy of the institutions facilitating the system of representative government. The debate in many countries over using referenda as a means of "bringing in the people" (Suksi 1993; cf. Butler and Ranney 1994) is a reflection of this problem. As Dahl (1994:28) points out, this basic dilemma between citizen participation and the effectiveness of the institutions of the

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political system is closely related to the size of government: "In very small political systems a citizen may be able to participate extensively in decisions that do not matter much but cannot participate in decisions that really matter a great deal; whereas very large systems may be able to cope with problems that matter more to a citizen, the opportunities for the citizen to participate in and greatly influence decisions are vastly reduced." The ultimate - and slightly provocative - question to be raised, therefore, is whether it is in the interests of citizens to have a stronger input on a less effective system, and to what extent citizens pushing for such reform are aware of the potential downside to these changes. Also, given the growing interest in new forms of citizen participation, another intriguing question is how governments assess the costs and benefits of these reforms. We will return to these issues later. This chapter explores the preconditions for policy advice and citizen participation in an era of increasing political and administrative complexities and public sector retrenchment and reform. Policy advice can be studied from different perspectives. One perspective is to look at the type of policy advice that occurs routinely within the system of government between policy makers and the public service (Halligan 1995). The approach employed in this chapter is focused on policy advice in the context of the statesociety relationship, highlighting the state's need for qualified expertise and knowledge not available within government organizations. This perspective obviously will not be able to offer an account of the intra-governmental processes of policy advice. However, it will enable us to look at the strategies used by governments in obtaining critical knowledge and expertise2 in the politics of policy advice, that is, how public institutions, for-profit organizations, organized interests and special interest groups produce, provide, and procure specialized expertise in order to pursue their interests. What makes a discussion on policy advice from this perspective relevant in the context of taking stock of public service reform is that many of these projects have been aimed at changing the channels of interaction and exchange between the public service and civil society. With significant variation across different

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jurisdictions, these reforms have had two types of effects on the public service. First, market-based models of public service production and delivery have reduced the role of the public service as a reservoir of expertise for policy makers. The very idea of these models is to have less public involvement in the production of services. Also, the political elite and the public bureaucracy have become less involved in micro-managing public service production and the organizations involved in this process (Hood 1990). Instead, in the New Public Management (NPM) era, their primary role is to monitor the service production process and to assess the quality of the goods being produced. Also, the (re)introduction of management by objective means that elected officials will be expected to make fewer but bigger decisions (Simon 1960). While expertise and advice will certainly be necessary in conjunction with formulating long-term goals for the public service, there will be less demand for such advice in the day-to-day management of the government and the public service.3 Second, along with the NPM'S crusade sweeping through the halls of ministries and agencies, in most democracies we have seen new patterns of interaction emerging between policy makers and bureaucrats (Aucoin 1995). In the United States, for example, senior civil servants have become "advocates" to a greater extent than a few years ago (Aberbach and Rockman 1996). Finally, in an effort to curb public expenditure and increase cost efficiency, the public service, in a large number of countries, has chosen to spend less on sustaining internal expertise and to rely to a greater extent on the use of external consultants and experts. This deinstitutionalization of policy advice means that policy makers can pick and choose among those whose advice they want to use. The downside, apart from the fact that policy advice in this model is commodified and regulated by transactions instead of public service norms, is that advisors will be less familiar with the organizational culture and the modus operandi of the bureaucracy and will have an instrumental approach to problem solving. While market philosophers like Osborne and Gaebler (1993) probably would applaud this development because it introduces a marketlike competition into the field of policy advice (Lindquist 1996), it remains debatable as to whether external advice is always to be

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preferred to the institutionalized expertise which is the trademark of a modern bureaucracy. This chapter focuses on structuring consultation and on the consequences of involving new categories of non-governmental actors in the process of defining and resolving policy problems. The paper has a "deductive" approach to policy advice and the politics of policy expertise; in order to understand the changing politics of policy advice we must look at changes in the political and administrative dimensions within which policy advice is produced and utilized. Among the key political dimensions are, first, the emergence of a new set of issues on the political agenda, and second, a reconfiguration of organized interests and the interaction of these interests with the state. The changing administrative dimensions include financial cutbacks in the public sector; less control of the public service by policy makers; increased perception by the public service of citizens as clients; the New Public Management philosophy which profoundly changes public organizations in terms of their processes of steering and control, decision making and resource allocation; and, finally, what could be called the deinstitutionalization of policy expertise, referring to public sector employee layoffs coupled with a greater reliance on external consultancy. The chapter has four sections. First, we will briefly describe the increasing policy complexity in Western democracies. This discussion serves mainly as a background, outlining the terrain for policy advice and citizen participation. The second section addresses these phenomena in greater detail. The third section looks at different models of policy advice and citizen participation in a number of Western democracies. The final and concluding section takes stock of public sector reform with particular emphasis on how these reforms have affected policy advice systems and citizen involvement in public policy making. POLICY COMPLEXITY AND POLICY ADVICE

In order to understand in more detail how these new forms of citizen participation and advice relate to the policy process, we

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first need to look briefly at the political milieu in which these emerging forms of citizen participation will occur. The current political scene in the developed Western democracies seems to display a couple of different aspects of growing political, institutional, and policy-oriented complexities. Indeed, it is interesting to note that at the same time as the role of politics and public administration is rolled back in most Western democracies (see, for example, Savoie 1994: ch. 4), the decisions facing politicians and bureaucrats seem to become increasingly complex. First, issues of considerable technical complexity, for instance, within environmental policy and defence policy, are today part of the day-to-day running of government. Even if policy makers do not have to - and indeed cannot be expected to - make qualified assessments of alternative technical solutions to different problems, government action to attack such problems normally requires some kind of political decision - and so, sooner or later, policy makers will be forced to address these technical issues. A second source of political complexity is derived from the multitude and diverse character of the societal problems which confront policy makers. The notions of "overloaded" government (Birch 1984; Crozier et al. 1975) and of "ungovernability" (Lowi 1979) are by no means new. However, the past decade or so has witnessed new clusters of problems and challenges making their way onto the political agenda. These new issues include managing the consequences of increasing social and ethnic heterogeneity in most Western societies; the internationalization of the economy and of state institutions along with the building of new transnational systems of institutions; the rapidly increasing salience of environmental concerns and the multi-level politics and governance processes these issues have triggered; the (re-)emergence of regionalism and devolution both as a political sentiment (Keating 1996) and also as a paradigm for economic development strategies (see, for example, Anderson 1992; Markusen 1987; Sadler 1992) and the challenges these developments pose to the nation state; and the overwhelming development of new information technologies redefining communication patterns and the availability of government documents.

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A third type of complexity facing governments is the different trade-offs and goal conflicts inherent in current public policy, one typical example of which is the conflict between promoting growth on the one hand and sustaining environmental values on the other. Other similar trade-offs include (i) opening up the domestic economy in order to promote export versus protecting the industry from foreign competition, and (2) enhancing citizen participation by increasing regional and local autonomy versus maintaining national interests throughout the country. True, much of policy making has always been a matter of balancing contending values, goals and objectives, but there is good reason to believe that managing these trade-offs is becoming increasingly complicated. One reason for this is that today almost all of these values are promoted by interest groups and political institutions (March and Olsen 1995). A final source of complexity and uncertainty in current policy making relates to the rapidly growing international interdependences. This affects policy making per se as well as policy outcomes. Since not just policy makers but also policy targets are increasingly often involved in international networks, policy making is to a greater extent than ever a matter of shooting at a moving target. More important, these growing international dependencies and the emergence of transnational institutions reduce national political autonomy and control and hence introduce yet another element of uncertainty, which, in turn, affects the domestic preconditions for participation and democratic decision making (Dahl 1994). All of these trends and developments suggest that political issues are becoming increasingly difficult to structure and resolve. There is a growing need among political decision makers to rely on various forms of expertise and on different types of actors controlling such expertise. Arguably, many of these problems and challenges are of a different nature, qualitatively speaking, compared to those which shaped the political debate during the post-war period. They are less redistributive and hence more diffuse in terms of defining winners and losers; and they are more knowledge-intensive than "traditional" redistributive issues

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which were to a large extent a matter of defining social justice. It was these redistributive issues which largely shaped much of the post-war West European political debate (Peters 1991: ch. 5). Indeed, some might say these emerging issues are components of the post-industrial societies and their politics (Bell 1973; Inglehart 1977, 1990; van Deth and Scarbrough 1995). While much of European politics is still largely derived from the conflict between leftist and rightist ideological orientations, these new issue clusters tend to reshuffle the political game by giving rise to new political parties, organized interests, and public bureaucracies. Second, because of the character of these new types of issues there is probably a greater amount of uncertainty involved in formulating a strategy to resolve these emerging problems. Several factors contribute to this development. The previously mentioned internationalization, including closer linkages between nation states and international organizations, relocates sources of jurisdiction and expertise. Also, addressing issues within the environmental policy area inevitably means relying heavily on technical and specialized advice. While a distinct commitment to attacking these issues seems to be a prerequisite for campaigning for political office at any level of government these days, the design and implementation of measures to actually do so cannot be achieved without some form of outside assistance. Partly as a consequence of these developments, policy makers and bureaucrats find themselves increasingly uncertain about the proper selection of policy instruments and the channels through which policy should be implemented. Regardless of the ideological and political objectives of the political elite, the policy responses to these challenges require new sources and new types of expertise and policy advice. The good news is that much of the expertise which would help reduce this uncertainty is usually available. The bad news is that it is available at a price, financially as well as politically. This expertise is frequently located at the receiving end of public policy, that is, among those social groups the policy targets. This seems to be the case not least in areas such as agricultural, health, industrial, and educational policy. Moreover, while key sources of

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policy advice in many jurisdictions have become more "democratic" (Peters 1996), other sources of policy advice have probably become more ideologically biased in recent years. Today, policy advice is less a matter of offering a solution to a given problem than it is a matter of policy experts offering a definition of what is the real cause of the problem as well as how it should be solved. Put differently, "political expertise" has, to a significant extent, replaced "instrumental expertise"; today, policy advice increasingly tends to come wrapped up in an ideological package. MODELS OF POLICY ADVICE

In order to understand the complexities of current policy advice we need to make a couple of simple distinctions. A first set of distinctions refers to the purposes of policy advice: see Figure i. We can identify three overarching purposes of policy advice. Similarly, in the context of citizen participation, it makes sense to separate two types of actors providing policy advice, elite actors and mass actors. First, policy advice obviously serves to provide policy makers with information. Providing policy makers with expertise and professional knowledge is one of the traditional roles of the civil service. Consultation hearings also aim at providing information, but this approach has a broader meaning and involves a multitude of actors. Second, policy advice is an important means of legitimizing decisions to be made (or already made). Consultants could certainly to some extent be said to provide both information and legitimacy, but the assumption here is that their main role is not so much to challenge policy makers' ideas about what should be done but rather to legitimize those actions by their involvement in the policy process. Similarly, public hearings are not primarily geared to developing policy concepts or ideas but instead to conveying the notion that policy makers are indeed eager to share mass views on public policy. Finally, policy advice maybe used as an instrument for decision making. At the elite level, this may take the shape of various forms of exchange between the state and organized interests. Thus

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Jon Pierre FIGURE 1

Types of Policy Advice Purpose of policy advice Actor

Character

Information

Legitimation

Elite

Closed

Old civil service

Consultants

Mass

Open

Consultation exercises

Public hearings

Decision making

Negotiated rule making Referendum

negotiated rule making refers to legislation generating from discussions between the state and affected organized interests. It is a practice which lately has become increasingly common in the United States and Canada but has also been employed in corporatist political systems such as Sweden throughout most of the early post-war period on a wide variety of labour market policy matters.4 Citizen participation and policy advice are very closely related phenomena, both describing some type of external involvement in policy making. However, policy advice strictu sensu refers primarily to an exchange among public and private elites over policy matters, whereas citizen participation denotes models facilitating some form of mass involvement which is not funnelled through political parties in political decision making. Given the close relationship between these two aspects of external input on public policy, we will treat them in one and the same context whenever possible. First, however, we will look more closely at different problems and challenges indigenous to current systems of policy advice. DILEMMAS OF POLICY ADVICE

So far we have been discussing two different problems. First, we have shown the increasing policy complexity that characterizes the governance of the current democratic state. Second, we have discussed different purposes and models of policy advice. Putting

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these two discussions together, we can see that states seem to become increasingly interested in experimenting with new forms of policy advice on a mass level, while at the same time the agenda they are facing seems to be to a growing extent filled with increasingly complex matters. Clearly this pattern is not primarily explained by the theory among policy makers that bringing citizens more directly into the policy-making process would alleviate the problems they are facing. Instead, a much more plausible explanation is that, from the point of view of the political elite, enhancing citizen participation serves to generate legitimacy for public policy. This observation suggests that policy advice, as an instrument of acquiring advice, information, and expertise, cannot be treated as an isolated phenomenon but has to be viewed in the context of public sector reform and what could be called the commodification of expertise. The combined result of the developments described here - including a new set of issues on the political agenda, an increasing uncertainty regarding policy choice and policy outcomes, the introduction of New Public Management and management by objective in the public service, and the deinstitutionalization of expertise in the public sector - has been the increasing salience of a number of dilemmas of policy expertise and policy advice. The significance of these dilemmas and the strategies employed to resolve them varies significantly across national contexts, as we will see in a minute. One dilemma of policy advice is that the growing complexity of policy making and predicting policy outcomes - as described earlier - encourages policy makers to seek external advice, rather than relying on intra-governmental expertise. Such external advice or expertise is increasingly often acquired from those potentially affected by the policy. As a result, policymaking drawing on advice from such sources becomes susceptible to parochial interests. This problem is exacerbated by imbalances in the amount of expertise controlled by public and private actors and the nature of non-governmental policy advice. With more specialized expertise controlled by policy targets than by policy makers, chances of formulating effective and appropriate policy

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are drastically reduced. Also, non-governmental policy experts will not confine their advice to deal with the choice of policy instrument. They will normally also make their own assessment of the policy problem and whether indeed governmental action is the best way of resolving it. A second dilemma is related to the trend that unbiased policy advice is probably increasingly hard to come by. Policy advisors, particularly those associated with organized interests, promote their own interests while allegedly providing balanced and objective expertise. Generating and sustaining expertise, not just in policy areas of a complex and "technical" nature (Barker and Peters 1992), requires substantial financial and organizational resources which most governments seem to lack these days. The rapidly growing number of think tanks and "policy institutes," for example, in Canada and the United States (Abelson and Carberry 1996; Lindquist 1996), is proof both of the market for policy advice and also of the potential influence which these institutions believe themselves to be able to exercise through policy advice. A third dilemma stems from the fact that the traditional models of institutionalized policy consultation which have characterized policy making in many Western European states during the postwar period seem to be losing some of their capabilities in terms of producing efficient public policy and generating support and legitimacy for those policies (Peters 1991; Therborn 1989). The logic of the corporatist model of policy making is that the inclusion of peak organizations representing distinct segments of society in the process of public policy making will guarantee a smooth policy implementation and help generate support and legitimacy for political institutions and the political process. As Lynn and McKeown (1988) show in their comparative analysis of the political roles of business organizations in Japan and the United States, one of the reasons Japanese industrial policy has been so effectively implemented is that representatives of major industrial conglomerates - the notorious keiretsu - have had significant input at an early stage of the policy-making process. Katzenstein (1984) makes a very similar argument with regard to the Austrian and Swiss models of corporatism.

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The downside to this arrangement is that it may produce a policy bias in favour of powerful organized interests and also that the process as such is less apt to accommodate change than the pluralist model of policy making (Olson 1982, but see Katzenstein 1984). In terms of policy advice, the corporatist model was a powerful system of catering to various social constituencies. At the same time, it reduced governability and the ability of government to impose losses on different segments of society. Thus, policy advice was deliberately biased in favour of those interests which were involved in the process of policy making. A fourth dilemma of policy advice is essentially a dilemma of representation. Resourceful, established and legitimate groups on the periphery of the policy process may come to enjoy more privileged access to policy makers and senior bureaucrats than other groups by virtue of their professional expertise on policy matters. A large share of the control of policy expertise, primarily in the United States, operates under the auspices of financially powerful institutions such as the Heritage Foundation and the Rand Corporation. Thus, to the extent that "knowledge is power" and "money is knowledge," modern policy advice seems to display the same potential bias as the traditional corporatist models of interest representation, only with the difference that in the latter case policy advice was provided by voluntary associations. In sum, the plight of most nation states is that, as a consequence of cutbacks in the civil service, they are becoming more and more dependent on external and increasingly biased policy advice. One of the main problems with current policy advice is that instrumental expertise (experts presenting the most feasible solution to a problem without questioning the normative foundations of the policy) is probably becoming more difficult to find, whereas political expertise (experts who will offer advice on what should be the instruments as well as the objectives of a given policy) seems to become more frequent. Several factors contribute to this development. Specialized policy expertise is expensive to develop and sustain, and hence to acquire, and tends to be currently available mainly in organizations that control significant financial resources and are willing to allocate large sums of money

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to sustain this expertise. These organizations often have a clear political objective; providing expertise is part of a strategy to enhance those objectives. Indeed, many of these resourceful organizations were created specifically in order to generate specialized expertise, albeit from an ideological vantage point, in various policy areas. Another type of extra-governmental source of knowledge and expertise can be found in the large interest organizations in Western Europe. There is an element of policy pressure objective present here as well, but much less so compared to the u.s. think tanks. Instead these organized interest groups tend to work through - or with - political parties with which they have historically strong bonds, such as between blue-collar unions and Social Democratic parties. POLICY ADVICE AND CITIZEN PARTICIPATION: THE LAY OF THE L A N D

The dilemmas of policy advice described above play out differently in different jurisdictions. Also, there are significant differences among different countries with regard to their interest in developing new forms of citizen participation. This section gives an overview of these developments in a limited number of democracies. Looking at the development of new models of citizen participation in different jurisdictions, the relationship between these experiments and the introduction of New Public Management discussed earlier seem to have empirical support. Thus, countries which have embarked on the NPM strategy of public sector management and service production also appear to be more interested in developing new forms of citizen participation. Moreover, the general pattern seems to be that customerization of public services and competitive models of service production and delivery precede citizen participation experiments. Certainly, one could argue that New Public Management and citizen participation experiments are both derived from and illustrations of an overarching change in perspective on the state, and as such they represent two sides of the same coin. However, there exists an important dif-

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ference with regard to these two roles; citizens acting as "consumers" are able to make an ex post facto evaluation of public services, whereas citizen participation stresses ex ante inputs into public policy. Let us start with some illustrations from countries where New Public Management has become a leading paradigm in public sector reform. Thus, in New Zealand, experiments with new models of citizen participation have been implemented, clearly as part of the larger public sector reform project. More specifically, the changes to parliamentary select committees in the mid-igSos have helped facilitate citizen input in the policy process. Most legislation goes to such select committees which, in turn, frequently organize orally given public submissions or public hearings. At the local level some councils have used citizens' panels as a complement to the normal cast of (elected) actors in debates over controversial issues. Policy advice in New Zealand has also been influenced by the New Public Management and the market-liberal paradigm. External advice today is increasingly commonly acquired on a competitive basis and is also becoming frequently evaluated and quality assessed. Indeed, some ministries have appointed special "purchase advisors," partly to advise ministers on how and from where to acquire policy advice (Boston et al. 1996:124). In the United States, policy advice is still to a large extent a matter of the federal civil service. However, private institutions such as the Heritage Foundation, AEI, the Rand Corporation, and the Hoover Institution host impressive expertise in a variety of areas and employ these resources to enhance their political interests and objectives. In jurisdictions which have not (yet?) embarked fully on the New Public Management bandwagon, citizen participation experiments are much more rare. Thus, in Japan, no such experiments have been considered. Policy advice is still conducted primarily at the ministerial level through advisory councils comprising representatives for private businesses and organized interests. Similarly in Germany, new forms of citizen participation have not

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been developed. However, in conjunction with the German reunification some attempts were made to facilitate direct citizen participation. In terms of policy advice, the ministerial bureaucracy remains the key source of policy expertise and advice; think tanks and other external sources of policy expertise do not play a very important role in the German context. The Scandinavian countries seem to fall in between these two groups. In Denmark, citizen participation is more developed at the local level than at the centre. Thus, citizen involvement is not primarily taking place at the pre-policy stages but more so in service delivery. A large number of boards of primary and secondary schools, day-care centres, and homes for the elderly today have citizen representation. In Denmark, as in Sweden, the corporatist tradition of policy making is still very much present. However, in both countries, but probably more so in Sweden, the corporatist model of interest representation has been challenged along with the financial crisis of the state. In both countries the Ministry of Finance seems to have become more influential not just on strict budgetary matters but also in terms of control over interest representation (Gronnegaard Christensen and Munch Christiansen 1992; Johansson 1992). Policy advice from external sources has not become very dominant; there is still a strong reliance on the expertise in the governmental apparatus. Also, expertise tends to be accumulated within the political parties and their organizations as well as within unions, employers' associations, and organizations representing private industry. Thus in these countries an emerging orientation toward New Public Management has not yet triggered new forms of citizen participation or policy advice. Introducing new instruments of civil society participation or policy advice is often conducted in conjunction with more overarching public sector reforms. Thus, in Mexico, where large-scale public sector reforms are about to be implemented, these issues have also entered the agenda. An important element of public sector modernization is the creation of an advisory council comprising representatives for organized interests, academia, professional

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organizations, and others. Similarly Spain, having built a welfare state, now increasingly pays attention to new forms of participation, primarily in the service delivery sector. TYPES OF P O L I C Y A D V I C E

Let us now look more closely at a couple of different models of current policy advice: advisory councils and think tanks. Where relevant we will also comment on changes in the representation of organized interests in the policy process. Advisory Councils

Advisory councils are created by the government as a means of getting access to specialized expertise in a particular policy area. They can also be "constitutive" arrangements created in order to indicate a political concern with a particular policy area or policy problem; by setting up an advisory council the government shows that it is taking problems within the policy sector in question seriously and is interested in opening up a dialogue with key players in that sector. Advisory councils are normally composed of representatives of civil society, for instance top business organizations or trade unions. Sometimes - as in Sweden after the 1994 general elections - a number of advisory councils were created in a wide range of policy areas. Council members were representatives of major interest organizations and private business, but there were also celebrities and others familiar with (and to) the media. Although the notion of a "council" usually connotes some degree of continuity and persistence, their level of institutionalization is normally fairly low; in most countries the system of advisory councils is frequently changed or abolished altogether. From the point of view of the state, a system with advisory councils and - to an even greater extent - the more institutionalized, corporatist arrangements of interest representation and mediation have evolved for two main reasons. First, these systems institutionalize interest representation vis-a-vis the state. For both

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types of interest representation, however, policy advice normally comes with a claim for input on public policy. For organized interests, the key purpose of being on an advisory board is to influence public policy, not to legitimize it. Second, both advisory councils and corporatist models serve in part to give legitimacy to public policy; by showing that those affected by a particular policy have had an input on the policy and perhaps also formally agreed on the policy suggested by the government - the government has enhanced the likelihood of support and approval of the policy. Obviously, there are huge differences between corporatist systems of interest representation and a system of advisory councils. Corporatist arrangements like the Austrian Proporzdemokmtie (Katzenstein 1984) or the Scandinavian tri-partite arrangements (Gronnegaard Christensen and Munch Christiansen 1992) are institutionalized in the political culture and cannot be reassessed or abolished overnight. A system of advisory councils, on the other hand, is in most countries a much more temporary phenomenon and the government is much more free to revise the model if it so chooses. One of the problems with advisory councils is, to put it bluntly, that sometimes they actually insist on giving advice; they are not content with merely serving as a sounding board for the government and legitimizing its policies unless they have some input on them as well. This puts the government in a slightly awkward position. On the one hand, rejecting the advice will question the raison d'etre of the advisory council; on the other hand, responding to the advice may lead to criticism for giving the council and its members privileged access to the government. One reason the industrial policy advisory council in Sweden was abolished after little more than a year (in 1995) was that private business representatives felt they had too little influence on the government's industrial policy and refused to act as political hostages by being on the council. Advisory councils are a common feature of most contemporary governments. In Japan they are linked to the agencies and seem to serve mainly to give support to policy decisions made elsewhere. In Sweden, as mentioned earlier, a number of advisory councils at

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the policy sector level were created in 1994, partly to give policy advice, partly for "constitutive" reasons. Many saw this as alien to the Swedish corporatist system of government and the advisory councils have come under attack for being elitist and not operating under democratic control. The Danish government does not seem to rely very heavily on either advisory councils or think tanks; instead, the Danish government uses its routine contacts with interest organizations. Think Tanks Think tanks are largely a phenomenon of the past twenty or so years. Before 1975 there were very few think tanks in the United States which, together with Canada, seem to be the countries with the most developed system of think tanks. Today there are some 1200 think tanks in the United States, depending on how you define the concept. There is a fairly distinct hierarchy among the think tanks in the U.S., with the Heritage Foundation, the Brookings Institution, AEI, the Rand Corporation, and the Hoover Institution as the most high-ranking organizations. There has been a similar rapid increase in the number of think tanks in Canada. In the environmental policy field alone, there are now some 250 such organizations in Canada (Abelson and Carberry 1996; Lindquist 1996). Most of these think tanks are non-governmental organizations, although many of them have long-term contracts with ministries or agencies. Some of them control huge economic resources and have built up a considerable policy expertise over time. However, for most think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institution, this expertise is primarily "political expertise"; these organizations do not just offer solutions to policy problems but also provide ideologically based definitions of what the real problem is and how it should be resolved. Think tanks seem to be primarily a North American phenomenon. Autonomous organizations engaged in policy advice and influencing public opinion appear to be less consistent with the European policy style. That said, a large number of organizations

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associated with corporate interests have taken a higher political profile during the past decade or so in several West European countries. For instance, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) has probably become a more legitimate voice of British private capital and a less suspect participant in the political debate during the past ten to fifteen years. We see similar developments in Germany and the Scandinavian countries. These trends can in large part be attributed to the swing towards pro-market ideologies in these countries. CONCLUSIONS Policy advice and expertise, broadly defined, have changed considerably during the past decade or so. Many of these changes are, directly or indirectly, attributable to the financial problems of the state. In the days of a more or less consistent growth economy and a growing public sector in most national contexts, policy advice was obtained from the civil service and/or, as was the case in corporatist systems, through institutionalized systems of interest representation. The 19905 show a very different picture. The previously dominant corporatist models in Western Europe have been weakened, partly because the state has little to offer in terms of redistribution, partly because the relationship between capital and labour has changed dramatically in most countries. Compared to the heyday of these models (Katzenstein 1984), organized interests which enjoyed a privileged position have seen much of their societal basis eroding. Instead, market-based actors have gained increased political influence, over both the political debate and the organization and management of the public sector. The public service of most states has been significantly reduced in order to curb budget deficits. As a result much of the expertise once harboured within the public bureaucracy is no longer immediately available to policy makers. In addition there are a rapidly growing number of issues that cannot today be resolved by individual nation states, either because the nature of the problem itself cannot be isolated within a particular country - as

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is the case with most issues in the environmental protection sector - or because the mechanisms developed to address these issues are transnational. In many countries this has created a new model of interest group participation and representation. The previous model linked mass-member organizations to political parties - corporatism through the political parties. The new model of corporatism is based less on mass membership and more on the control of qualified expertise. However, much of this expertise is provided as "political expertise," that is, as a package not just of policy solutions but also of definitions of policy problems and what should be the role of government in the solution to those problems. This is the background against which we should assess the changing nature of policy advice in the context of public sector reform. Coupled with a need to reduce public expenditures, objectives like increasing cost-effectiveness, facilitating consumer choice and promoting other New Public Management ideals have downplayed the public service's role as a reservoir of expertise and policy advice. Only those parts of the public service which have clearly identifiable functions can legitimize its existence in the eyes of the budget manager. Relying to a greater extent on consultants appears to be a useful strategy, partly because (normally) it accords a price to policy advice, and partly because (normally) you only pay for the advice you actually acquire, however sound or balanced it may or may not be. The negative consequence of the strategy, however, is that it further drains the public service of expertise and professionalism. At the same time, it also seems clear that the New Public Management style of public service production and delivery has prompted - or at least encouraged - experimentation with new models of citizen participation. As these market-liberal ideas of public sector management continue to spread across the world, therefore, we should expect reforms aiming at direct citizen involvement in policy making to follow suit. Finally, in line with the overall theme of this volume, we should ask more specifically how, and to what extent, such reform has facilitated new forms of policy advice and citizen participation.

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We can see three major conclusions pertaining to public sector reform coming out of this analysis. First, the public sector reforms that have been implemented throughout the Western world during the past decade or so have probably made the state more dependent on external sources of expertise. This is mainly because of the budgetary cutbacks in the civil service which have undermined the role of the civil service as a pool of expertise. While the civil service still remains the single most important source of policy advice in most countries, it seems clear that a continued retrenchment will exacerbate these problems. Second, reforms aiming at customer-attuning public services have, directly or indirectly, contributed to a disaggregation of policy input and have encouraged the development of various models of citizen participation. While the reports on the death of collective political participation and involvement are greatly exaggerated (at least in Western Europe), it seems clear that there is indeed a powerful relationship between customerization of public service and the atomization of policy input. Both speak to the individualistic culture which has spread across the Western world for the past ten to fifteen years; both ignore the imminent risk that these new models of state-individual relationships will generate or reinforce inequalities among citizens; and both portray the state and the civil service not as a unique locus of power, authority, and resources but rather as one of several regulatory mechanisms in society, and one which only comes into play when private or communitarian solutions are not feasible and hence some form of state action is required. Third, the leaner and - presumably - meaner state which the New Public Management advocates maintained that their philosophy would bring about is also a state which appears to be less geared to facilitate political representation and accountability according to the traditional, collective model. This is not so much by design as by the ideological perspective on the relationship between the state and the citizen which this model espouses. The experiments with new forms of citizen participation discussed in this chapter could be seen as attempts to alleviate this problem. But in the short term, at least, there seems to be a potential risk

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that these new forms of political representation will be at odds with the traditional, collective models of political participation and may further undercut the already weak position of political parties as representatives of the people. The key question at the end of the day is not to what extent these developments and prospects are desirable or "good"; nor does it appear very fruitful to discuss what the alternative strategies might have been, given the fiscal crisis of the Western democracies. Instead, one of the most pertinent and intriguing questions seems to be what challenges lie ahead in terms of ensuring democratic accountability in these emerging models of less collective policy input and customer-attuned policy output. More than anything else, we seem to be in need of a political theory of the partly new state model toward which we appear to be headed. NOTES 1 This chapter has benefited immensely from constructive criticism by the members of the Taking Stock project. Also, Chris Hunold has offered valuable comments on a previous draft. Evert Lindquist kindly let me use a conference paper on think tanks in Canada as a source for this research. Finally, the members of the Canadian Centre for Management Development (CCMD) International Network of Scholars have generously provided material on policy advice and citizen participation in their respective countries. 2 "Critical" in this context does not refer to the normative dimensions of policy advice. Instead, the concept of "critical" is used in the same way as organization theory uses it, for instance, "critical resources" refer to such resources which are indispensable to the organization. "Critical" policy advice is the provision of such expertise, facts, and analyses which could be seen as necessary to the formulation and implementation of public policy. Needless to say, different actors in the policy process will have different definitions of what is necessary or "critical" expertise. 3 That said, it remains an open question whether it is in fact the bureaucracy itself which defacto formulates the long-term goals for its

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own organization. When management by objective was introduced in Sweden in the late 19805 and early 19905, agencies themselves played a major role in formulating the goals. 4 In this context, we can distinguish between two different forms of such involvement by organized interests. One model was to delegate some regulatory authority to organized interest by leaving sections in the legislation open, indicating that labour market organizations were to negotiate the details of the legislation. The second form refers to organized interests serving as important sources of public policy; given the close relationship between some interest organizations and political parties, for example, the Confederation of Blue-Collar Unions (LO) and the Social Democratic Party (SAP) throughout the history of the two organizations, unions could push for legislation on matters where they could not reach an agreement with the Confederation of Employers (SAF). BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abelson, D., and C. Carberry. 1996. In search of policy advice: when presidential candidates turn to think tanks. Paper presented at the Political Studies Association's conference, Glasgow, Scotland, 10-12 April. Aberbach, J.D., and B.A. Rockman. 1996. Back to the future? the changing roles of senior federal executives in the United States. Paper presented at the ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops, Oslo, 29 March-3 April. Anderson, J.J. 1992. The Territorial Imperative: Pluralism, Corporatism, and Economic Crisis. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Aucoin, P. 1995. Politicians, public servants, and public management: getting government right. In Governance in a Changing Environment, ed. B.C. Peters, and D.J. Savoie, 113-37. Montreal and Kingston: Canadian Centre for Management Development and McGill-Queen's University Press. Barker, A., and B. G. Peters, eds. 1992. The Politics of Expert Advice. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bell, D. 1973. The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. New York: Basic Books.

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Birch, A.H. 1984. Overload, ungovernability and delegitimization: the theories and the British case. British Journal of Political Science 14:136-60. Boston, ].,}. Martin, J. Pallet, and P. Walsh. 1996. Public Management: The Neiv Zealand Model. Auckland: Oxford University Press. Butler, D., and A. Ranney, eds. 1994. Referendums Around the World: the Growing Use of Direct Democracy. London: Macmillan. Cawson, A., ed. 1985. Organized Interests and the State: Studies in Mesocorporatism. Beverly Hills and London: Sage Publications. Crozier, M., S. Huntington, and J. Watanuki. 1975. The Crisis of Democracy. New York: New York University Press. Dahl, R.A. 1994. A democratic dilemma: system effectiveness versus citizen participation. Political Science Quarterly 109,1:23-34. Dalton, R.J. 1996. Citizen Politics: Public Opinion and Political Parties in Advanced Industrial Democracies. Chatham, NJ: Chatham House Publishers. Gronnegaard Christensen, J., and P. Munch Christiansen. 1992. Forvaltning og Omgivelser. Herning: Systime. Halligan, J. 1995. Policy advice and the public service. In Governance in a Changing Environment, ed. E.G. Peters and D.J. Savoie, 138-72. Montreal and Kingston: Canadian Centre for Management Development and McGill-Queen's University Press. Hood, C. 1990. De-Sir Humphreying the Westminster model of bureaucracy: a new style of governance? Governance 3:205-14. Inglehart, R. 1977. The Silent Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. - 1990. Cultural Change. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Johansson,}. 1992. Det Statliga Kommittevasendet. Stockholm: Department of Political Science, University of Stockholm. Katzenstein, P.J. 1984. Corporatism and Change. Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press. Keating, M. 1996. Nations Against the State: The New Politics of Nationalism in Quebec, Catalonia and Scotland. London: Macmillan and New York: St Martin's Press. Kingdon, J.W. 1995. Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies, 2nd ed. New York: Harper Collins. Lehmbruch, G., and P.C. Schmitter, eds. 1982. Patterns of Corporatist Policy-making. Beverly Hills and London: Sage. Lindquist, E.A. 1996. A quarter-century of Canadian think tanks: reflections on evolving institutions, conditions and strategies. Paper

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presented at the Political Studies Association's conference, Glasgow, Scotland, 10-12 April. Lowi, T.J. 1979. The End of Liberalism, 2nd ed. New York: Norton. Lynn, L.H., and T.J. McKeown. 1988. Organizing Business: Trade Associations in America and Japan. Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. McLeay, E. 1995. The Cabinet: Political Power in New Zealand. Auckland: Oxford University Press. Mair, P. 1994. Party organizations: from civil society to the state. In How Parties Organize: Change and Adaptation in Party Organizations in Western Democracies, ed. R.S. Katz and P. Mair, 1-22. London and Thousand Oaks: Sage. March, J.G., and J.P. Olsen. 1995. Democratic Governance. New York: The Free Press. Markusen, A. 1987. Regions: The Economics and Politics of Territory. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield. Olson, M. 1982. The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities. New Haven: Yale University Press. Osborne, D., and T. Gaebler. 1993. Reinventing Government. New York: Plume. Peters, B.C. 1991. European Politics Reconsidered. New York and London: Holmes and Meier Publishers. - 1996. The Policy Capacity of Government. Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Management Development. Sadler, D. 1992. The Global Region: Production, State Policies and Uneven Development. Oxford and New York: Pergamon Press. Savoie, D.J. 1994. Thatcher, Reagan, Mulroney: In Search of a New Bureaucracy. Pittsburgh and London: University of Pittsburgh Press. Simon, H.A. 1960. The New Science of Management Decision. New York: Harper and Row. Suksi, M. 1993. Bringing in the People: A Comparison of Constitutional Forms and Practices of the Referenda. Dordrecht and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff. Therborn, G. 1989. "Pillarization" and "popular movements." Two variants of welfare state capitalism: the Netherlands and Sweden. In The Comparative History of Public Policy, ed. E.G. Castles, 192-241. Buckingham: Open University Press, van Deth, J.W., and E. Scarbrough, eds. 1995. The Impact of Values. Vol. 4, Beliefs in Government. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Making Public Policy: The Changing Role of the Higher Civil Service PATRICIA W. INGRAHAM

The past decade has seen major administrative reform in many nations. While the reforms have had many targets - the centralized, rigidly structured nature of most central governments, for example - the higher civil service has been one of the most common. Traditionally a consistent and major player in public policy processes, the higher civil service (now the senior executive service (SES) in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand) has seen its role changed by contract, performance pay, decentralization, privatization, and increasing "politicization," or demands for political responsiveness. The experience of the higher service has, of course, been different across the nations most involved in administrative reform efforts. In some nations, in which the higher service has long played a central advising role - France and Germany, for example - there have been virtually no reforms aimed at constraining that centrality. In other nations, however, the higher service has been cast in the dual role of being a problem in the old systems but a potential solution in the reformed states. How that transformation will occur is one the many conundrums of administrative reform. Clearly, the starting point will matter. The senior executive service in the United States, for example, was never held in as high regard as the mandarins of Europe; its competence and legitimacy have always been contested. In Aberbach and Rockman's 164

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terms, the United States SES "lacks the aura of indispensability" (Aberbach and Rockman 1995:11). In the UK, where quite a different situation held sway, Hood (1995) argues that while policy changes may have occurred, the impacts on the higher service itself are more cosmetic than real; Boston et al. (1996) assert that in New Zealand very real changes have taken place; Renfrew, Hede, and Lamond (forthcoming) note that, in Australia, the senior executive service reform produced real change in both the values and operation of the higher service; nonetheless, the SES is under increasing attack in the new political environment that followed the Howard election in 1996. Despite the range of opinion, it is fair to say that in most reformed nations, the foundation of the mandarins' pedestal has been shaken. In those nations such as the U.S., where the pedestal did not exist, the impact of subsequent waves of reform has been particularly destabilizing. For members of the senior services, the outcomes of reform thus far include a reconfigured policy role, new performance demands and skill requirements, and new accountability expectations and mechanisms. There are implications for the nature of the policy process; of equal significance, there are implications for the nature and composition of the service itself. Is a primary intent of administrative reform to create a set of skilled management specialists? Is it to better balance management skills with those of policy analysis and advising? Is it, rather, to ensure that whatever members of the senior service do, they do it more directly in response to political direction? The managerialist reform focus on management and executive skills, rather than the policy skills for which the higher service was generally noted, has raised the bar and changed the standards and rewards for performance. These management reforms were emphasized most strongly in the English-speaking democracies, but were notable in the Netherlands, Sweden, and - to a more limited extent - France as well. It is widely conceded that the policy capacity of the higher service in the Aaron Wildavsky sense of "speaking truth to power" suffered as nations turned to managerialist reforms and

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to more limited government. The most fundamental question, of course, is what happens to the policy advising function itself: if former policy advisors become managers, what is the source of policy advice? The United States anchors one end of the continuum in this regard. Since its senior service was always challenged for the role it played in policy, the post-reform sources are likely to be the same as before: think tanks, policy networks, and interest groups. In other nations, however, the shift has been palpable. In the Canadian case Peter Aucoin (1995) argues that, when the Chretien government turned to the bureaucracy for policy advice and guidance, it had to confront "diminished capacity," a legacy of the Mulroney years (69). The sharp focus on new coordinative mechanisms for better management also worked to the detriment of policy development. In many countries, the emphasis on horizontal coordination translated to management, rather than policy coordination. In Canada, an analysis of structural coordination mechanisms revealed that only one of thirteen had a policy focus; the other twelve not only focused on managerial (read efficiency) issues, but drew ADMS and others from previous policy roles into the new activity (CCMD 1996). The President's Management Council (PMC) in the U.S. (which, oddly enough, both emphasized better managerial coordination and excluded career managers) provides a different example, as does the Management Advisory Board (MAB) in Australia. The President's Management Council is intended to provide a policy and management coordinating mechanism for the many activities of reinventing government and other Clinton administration initiatives. The membership of the PMC is solely fairly highranking political appointees; the PMC has little link to the longterm organizational and managerial realities that many of their decisions are intended to impact. The Australian Management Advisory Board provides yet another kind of example, in that the activities of the MAB focus primarily on managing the executive resources of the Australian public service. Periodic assessments, recommendations for ob-

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taining or developing necessary skills and abilities, and evaluations of the general state of the Australian reforms have been the most frequent activities, with much less attention accorded the real or potential changes in the policy activities and role of the higher service. THE ISSUES FOR THE HIGHER CIVIL SERVICE

Although there are many perspectives from which to assess the outcomes of government reforms of the past decade, the higher service serves as a fulcrum. It has been changed in size, in role and responsibility, in reward and compensation, and in its relationships to elected and appointed officials. At least in part as a result of these changes, the nature of the higher services' involvement in the policy process has changed as well. Brief analyses of these dimensions are useful. Size

The higher civil service corps is now generally smaller than previously (although precise figures are difficult to come by) and sits at the top of a diminished, and significantly reconfigured, public service. In Canada and New Zealand, the size of the senior service has been consciously and substantially reduced. In Australia, reduction in the total size of the Commonwealth SES appears to be a part of the strategy of the newly elected government. In the U.S., some reduction of the SES has also occurred, but almost incidentally to broader reinvention and budget cuts. At the same time, the u.s. is headed for a 12 percent reduction in the overall size of the national public service in the next three years, New Zealand has already reduced by 50 percent, and the United Kingdom has eliminated more than one in five of the members of its civil service. With the exception of New Zealand, however, it must be noted that, while cuts to the higher service have occurred, they have been less substantial than those to the broader service. Perhaps more significant than actually reducing

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the size of the higher corps, the cuts have eroded the sense of longevity, stability, and security which characterized the higher services of many nations. While it is important to consider cuts in the senior service in combination with other components of administrative reforms, it is equally important that in some cases - New Zealand and the UK are the major examples - functional responsibilities of central departments and ministries were reduced substantially as well. The new structural arrangements of some reforms, such as the Next Steps agencies in Britain and the corporations in New Zealand, clearly create new demands on the members of the higher services who serve as their executives; the expectation is that those demands are managerial in nature, rather than policy focused. Conflicting signals are present even in these cases, however, since there is ample evidence that the clear separation of policy from administration and management is a pipe dream. The Clinton administration's reinvention initiatives, with their emphasis on "working better, costing less," but avoidance of fundamental changes in mission, structure, and method of service delivery, provides a different model. In this case, new demands and expectations - some of which are remarkably ambiguous - are layered onto those which already exist; the responsibility of members of the higher service is to sift through the signals and expectations and to choose those which are apparently the most appropriate. There is limited evidence in the U.S. senior executive service that, in such an atmosphere of reduced resources, overload, and uncertainty, confidence in personal ability is reinforced, but confidence in broader organizational and program goals is diminished. The response is characterized by a retreat into the "job" narrowly defined. At a result, attention to broader, more strategic policy issues declines because those issues are beyond control and unpredictable. Unfortunately, those strategic issues are the most significant in the times of change and uncertainty that are endemic in the implementation of administrative reforms. It is, therefore, possible that as overload and uncertainty increase, so does job-related insularity; overall capability - both for the organization and the individual - declines.

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These policy/mission/skills and resources linkages are somewhat difficult to disentangle in yet another respect. As activities and responsibilities are decentralized, the remaining role for the centre is necessarily altered. Neither traditional advising nor traditional control fits. Neither, however, does "management" as it is defined in many of the reforms. In this setting, what new competencies and relationships are needed? Trosa (1994) argues that the right role for the centre is "to monitor Agencies by helping them to implement their management tools, providing internal consultancy, following the experiences of others and drawing lessons from successes and failures" but also to "Have a vision of public policies," and to know "the important issues for the future years" (44-5). The transition to assisting in the better use of resources, rather than defining how they may be used, has proven difficult in a number of national contexts. It has been a major stumbling block to reinvention efforts in the U.S., as central offices, accustomed to and comfortable with their traditional policy role, struggle with the consequences of releasing it. In that context, one federal executive noted that "anything that is true reinvention is a threat to people within the Beltway" (Sanders and Thompson 1996:73). Political Responsiveness

The nature of the relationship between the higher service and elected officials has also changed or is changing in many nations. In most countries, it is safe to describe the intent of the changes as improved responsiveness to elected and appointed officials. Even in nations in which the centrality of the higher service to policy has long been accepted, the role is now questioned and has generally decreased. In the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, the era of Reagan, Thatcher, and Mulroney had a uniform message: the higher civil service was an obstacle to change, was unresponsive to political direction, and lacked the skills and expertise necessary to ensure efficient governmental performance (Savoie 1994). In New Zealand, a leading official noted that " 'Yes, Minister' is not a comedy; it is a documentary"

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(GAO 1995). In Australia, where the carefully staged reform, process was dependent on political support and leadership, debates "have recently become politicized, with ideology the apparent force behind calls for changes" (Renfrow, Hede, and Lamond, forthcoming: 15). The reforms that flowed from this essentially negative perspective reflected, in many ways, the re-emergence of the politicsadministration dichotomy. Despite the move toward decentralization in the delivery of services and to a lesser extent in policy advising, there continues to be a clear desire to improve hierarchical political direction of the career service. In the United States, this push never really left the agenda; in the parliamentary democracies, however, its emphasis suggested a significant redefinition of the appropriate role of the higher service. An important tension is now present because of the conflicting objectives of managerialist reforms and those of improved political responsiveness. The decentralized structures proposed and/or created by many reforms (Reinvention, Next Steps) necessitate greater authority and discretion for the members of the senior service who lead them; the desire for improved political direction is not necessarily served by these arrangements. If members of the higher service were under earlier attack for their insularity and seclusion, the newly decentralized arrangements do little to facilitate communication and direction. That, in theory, falls to new accountability structures. Those structures are most often provided by the performance contracts governing the assessment and compensation of many members of the reformed higher services. This discretion/responsiveness tension is relatively unexplored in relation to new accountability expectations and alternative procedures for their pursuit. The debate has been extensive and intense in the United States, but as Aberbach and Rockman (1995:8) observe, "The demand for responsive competence is by no means exclusively an American need." In fact, however, the practices for meshing responsiveness and accountability have differed rather markedly across nations. Certainly the performance contracts and external recruiting for chief executives to serve

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under the contracts is one method of achieving some level of congruence (or, at least, of shattering some of the older public service accountability processes). Performance contracts have included substantial financial incentives in some cases; in others, performance alone has been the focus. The United States has continued to pursue higher numbers of political appointees and has supplemented the appointment activity with the oversight of the Presidential Management Council (Ingraham, Thompson, and Eisenberg 1995). The UK has relied on external appointments, presumably of those who share the policy objectives of partisan leaders and who bring no allegiance to long-term public service values. In the British case, Terry (1995) reports that in 1995, nine of 35 permanent secretaries were not long-term members of the higher service (12). Australia also seems to be following this strategy. Noting that six department heads had "departed" since the Howard election, the Canberra Times observed: "In dispensing with many years of accumulated knowledge and talent, the Howard government has sent a clear message via its reshuffle of Secretaries that, regardless of how well someone performs, it may be irrelevant in the end" (20 March 1996:13). Relationships among Members of the Service

As the above comments would suggest, the relationships among members of the higher service have necessarily changed. There is greater variety in previous experience and in executive expertise: some members have primarily private sector expertise, while others have spent their careers in the public service; some members have retained a primary policy advising role, while others have moved into operations or delivery positions in decentralized organizations; some are responsible for retaining and/or redefining a role for central government and its agencies, while others' careers now hinge on demonstrating the validity of decentralization and devolved authority. In the United States, the directors of the reinvention laboratories tend to view themselves very differently from their peers who have not become involved with reinvention: the directors are "reinvention revolutionaries";

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the others are "bureaucrats" (Proceedings - First Reinvention Laboratory Conference 1996). These different backgrounds, responsibilities, incentives, career paths and perceptions of public service create distinct cadres within the higher service. One member of the Australian SES noted that the different responsibilities created two sets of SEsers: those who were willing to do the "heavy lifting," and those who preferred their "hidden world." For those who remain in policy advising at the centre, the advising responsibility has grown more complex and daunting. In the most fundamental sense - and the UK and Australia are good examples - the issues relate to defining the role of the centre, or of the ministry, as more and more services are decentralized or contracted out. As a new public service law was debated in Australia, the public service commissioner mused that, despite the relatively orderly nature of the Australian reforms, some fundamental questions had not been asked. What, for example, does "merit" mean in the context of the reformed states, and what central information and monitoring is necessary to ensure its existence (Ives 1994)? How are public service ethics upheld and reinforced? In an era that favours contracting out and contracting for performance, are there some services or some positions that are not amenable to these techniques? What are they? In terms of centralization/decentralization, how far is the central "policy net" cast? What demands can legitimately be made on the executives of decentralized agencies? Particularly in relation to effective policy advising, what kind of information is necessary to provide useful advising and to promote sound centre decisions? How is that information and other critical communication fostered and maintained? A Canadian official put this problem of decentralization succinctly: "What is the market for policy advice and under what circumstances is it valued?" Again, the u.s. experience with political appointees - the formal policy advisors in the system - the SES, and the discretion of the reinvention laboratories poses some fascinating dilemmas. Vice President Gore's top advisor on reinvention likens the activity to "guerrilla warfare": isolated, hidden, sometimes undercutting. What, in this context, is policy, and who does it? How do the SES

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members in the centre, who report most directly to the political appointees, account for the behaviour and decisions of the people in their ranks? If members of the SES never had the pedestal panache of their European colleagues, what happens to their position in the context of these new tensions and uncertainties? These are very important, but currently unaddressed, questions. The evidence in several countries also suggests the need for much greater interest and ability in horizontal coordination between ministries/departments and policy activities. In this era of more constrained resources, the opportunities for broad solutions and impacts lie most clearly with joint activities; such efforts have not been notably successful in the past. The new patterns of communication that they suggest and the sharing of authority and responsibility that they necessarily entail place still another level of skill demands on those who would manage policy effectively. The ability to broker information and resources is yet another dimension of change for members of the higher service. In one sense, of course, members of the higher service have always been information brokers, or, in many cases, filters. The new demands, however, require different and much broader skills: the ability to consider ecosystem policy, for example, rather than clean water programs and policy. The term "broker" is an apt description of the role that is emerging for members of the higher service in Western democracies as they balance competing demands and expectations, as well as competing and sometimes conflicting sources of information, both for policy advising and for policy assessment. These issues are examined more thoroughly in the following sections. Evaluation of Effectiveness is Both More Important and More Difficult

The combination of smaller governments and decentralization or devolution of structure and function creates a different and more transparent policy environment. Activities and results, or lack thereof, are increasingly visible. Participation and perspectives for

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evaluation are expanded to include citizens, customers, contractors, and others. Members of public organizations are more clearly in sight and provide more obvious targets. Some have argued that this combination will inhibit the giving of controversial advice; it will, they argue, reduce policy decisions to the simplest equations - the "dumbing down" of policy. Others argue that it forces more thoughtful and more accountable advice giving, forcing advisors and evaluators to temper their own opinions and ideas with those of other legitimate actors in the policy process. Assessing the effectiveness of policy ideas and government action has never been a strong suit of policy advising or of the other components of public decision making. Indeed, as Paul Light (1996) notes, it has been a consistent pattern of public sector reform to adopt new ones before those already in place have been evaluated and analysed. "The greatest challenge in making government work," he writes, "is not too little reform, but too much" (i). The reforms adopted in Australia deviate from this norm, in that they have been "staged," with each new set rather carefully assessed before the next set is added on (Management Advisory Board 1993). Even so, there is not consensus on the reforms' effectiveness. Individual Performance Is Examined More Carefully

The emphasis on government performance and means to assess that performance has important implications for senior executives. In the United States, the Government Performance and Results Act mandates that all organizations have firm performance measures in place by 1997. In other nations such as New Zealand and the UK, agency performance is already specified in business plans. Obviously, executive performance can be measured more easily in organizations that have useful performance measures in place. The link between individual performance and organizational performance is, therefore, coming front and centre. At the same time, problems with existing performance management systems and with the incentives they create - as well as with the motivations they assume to exist - are becoming more clear.

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A recent OECD survey of nearly a thousand public managers across five OECD member nations found that they attached little value to performance bonuses and merit pay (OECD 1996). The report concluded that pay for performance did not increase either motivation or productivity for public managers, nor did it make any difference in their levels of organizational commitment and loyalty. The report did note, as had earlier research, that the appraisalprocess is valued, suggesting the continuing relevance of open communication and a joint approach to goal setting. Contracting for performance, whatever may be the problems with the financial incentives sometimes attached to it, has become the accountability system of choice to replace the rules and regulations that characterized the old systems. The most obvious change that contracting has produced is the elimination - at least in theory - of the stability and insularity of the senior corps. Contract agreements generally range from three to five years and failure to perform according to the terms of the contract can indeed should if the system is to be effective - lead to dismissal or demotion. Cases of actual dismissal are isolated; the head of the prison service was let go following a scandal in the UK, and one chief executive was dismissed for financial improprieties in New Zealand. The latter case, however, is in the courts. Short-term contracts, in combination with performance awards based on performance goals and objectives created by a joint ministerial (or appointee) corps member decision, obviously increase responsiveness to political direction. Further, because the contracts more easily specify managerial or productivity outputs and results rather than policy advising or decision-framing activities, assessment of performance becomes somewhat unidimensional. The balancing and brokering functions discussed earlier are very difficult to factor into the performance equation, and the coordinating and integrative functions are equally problematic. New Zealand provides an obvious exception in this case, relying almost completely on performance contracts for the management of their senior executive service and clearly arguing that policy advising not only can be included in performance contracts, but

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also can be contracted out. Boston et al. (1996) provide an excellent summary of the reasons for this extensive reliance on market mechanisms in the New Zealand reforms, but conclude that there is something uniquely valuable in the higher service and its policy function: "It is in the public interest for governments to maintain an in-house advisory capacity across the full range of public policy issues" (Boston 1994:28). This argument also speaks to the earlier discussion of what must remain with government after the reform process has occurred. Clearly, then, some caveats to performance contracting as solution are necessary. Their careful design and administration is critical if contracts are to be the foundation of a more flexible public service with greater opportunity for personal and agency discretion. The impact of contracts on links between individual members of the senior service, between members and their organizations, and between members of the higher service and the public service values are likely to have been changed in ways that are not yet clear. What Motivates Members of This New Higher Service?

Long-term assumptions about the motivation of the higher service have been challenged, or need to be. Pay for performance has not been a stunning success in any national setting and is more often considered a failure. The assumptions on which it was built - the centrality of financial incentives in public settings, the ability to clearly link performance to reward, and so on - have been discredited, most recently by the OECD study cited earlier. At the same time, many of the base assumptions of contracting for performance are exactly those of pay for performance: money matters a lot, more money matters more. One apparent intention of such reforms is to lure into public management persons who are completely different from those who have entered in the past. Indeed, there is good indication in the New Zealand and UK reforms that such was exactly the point (GAO 1995; Next Steps Office 1988). The strategy both discredits and begs the value of public service commitment - the pro-

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fessional citizenship - for which members of many higher services have been noted (Perry and Wise 1994; PSC 1995). These broad values were one important component of the capacity to offer objective policy and other executive decision advising. Closely related is the motivation offered by being involved in an activity of broad public significance - "doing good." The higher service in several countries has reported that being involved in important policy processes and decisions is the most rewarding part of their job (Perry and Wise 1994; PSC 1995). As the policy role is diminished and as the political responsiveness dimension is increased, what happens to this dimension of motivation and job satisfaction of the higher service? Again, little information is available, but the issue deserves to be on the research agenda. How Should the Corps Itself Be Managed?

There are important questions about the best way to manage the higher service, but the management issue has rarely been specifically addressed. Should the service be viewed as a governmentwide resource, with concomitant generalist education, development, and training? How should recruiting occur in such a case? If the decision is to focus more tightly on the recruitment of persons with experience in the private sector, how far should such recruiting and placement go? Should the service be governed by a board of directors which is semi-autonomous and which works to preserve the concept of an elite and cohesive cadre? Alternatively, is it more practical and/or desirable to completely decentralize oversight and direction, with each minister deciding on development and incentive packages? What are important and necessary accountability mechanisms? Do contracts serve that purpose adequately? If they do not, what does? This issue of managing the cadre goes directly to the heart of many of the national reforms discussed here and elsewhere. That issue deals with the extent to which there are government-wide values and objectives that must be protected and strategically

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pursued; in other words, what, if anything, must remain at the centre in devolution and decentralization reforms? If there are centre values to be maintained, surely the higher service must embody them and must carry them through the various government activities and functions. In a very decentralized setting, it is difficult to recruit for and develop such commitments in a coherent way. To the extent to which some core values remain valued, a recruiting and corps management strategy that reflects them is necessary. Responsiveness to Citizens Is More Important

Finally, the nature of the relationship between the public service, its leaders, and the citizenry has also changed. The Citizen's Charter reforms in Britain, reinventing government in the United States, the structural reforms in New Zealand, and Total Quality Management (TQM) reforms everywhere have both broadened and limited the role of senior officials (Ingraham 19963). The role has been broadened in the sense that creating new channels for citizen voice and responding to the demands of that voice is now widely viewed as a legitimate activity of the public service as well as an appropriate criterion for evaluating performance. One of the first actions of President Clinton in support of reinventing government was the issuance, by executive order, of a mandate for customer service standards for each of the executive agencies. In their 1994 reports, a large majority of British Next Steps agencies reported the use of customer satisfaction surveys and other means of assessing levels of responsiveness to citizen concerns (Next Steps Office 1997). In fact, about one-half of the agencies or their subsidiaries had become charter mark organizations. In this setting, traditional expertise and discretion are to be leavened - if not overruled - by a newly expanded citizen voice and, in the case of TQM, by a newly empowered employee voice as well. The accountability tensions that the citizen voice reforms have introduced into the equation (are the voices of elected officials or those of citizens higher on the chain?) have not been directly addressed, but now constitute a very important part of

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the brokering activity that members of the senior service manage. Further, the precise place of citizen voice and opinion in organizational decision making is a matter of some debate. Jon Pierre (19953) has thoughtfully described the multiple roles into which the reforms cast citizens. The dual roles of citizen and customer sometimes - perhaps always - conflict. Presumably, it is the function of the public service to mediate these conflicts and to reconcile them in ways that achieve productivity and citizen and political satisfaction. In the United States, a director of a reinvention laboratory clearly defined how reform elements can interact in difficult ways, however. Discussing the crossfire of competing "customer" demands in which many managers find themselves, he argued, "The headquarters (central) mission is different from the field mission. Headquarters clients are not (state and local) housing agencies, they are Congress, OMB, the Secretary's Office, the Office of Administration" (Sanders and Thompson 1996:113). Much less explored is the role of citizenship among the members of the public service themselves. Public service has always been considered a kind of civic duty or responsibility for the mandarinate; how, as "professional citizens," they subjugate their expertise and their own view of "the good" to that of the broader citizenry is a topic about which we ought to know more. To the extent that the higher service has been viewed as an elite, the issue of "dumbing down" again rears its head. To the extent that elitism has not been present, the tradition of essentially penultimate bureaucratic expertise - however mauled by reality and reform - remains.

CONCLUSION: THE LESSONS AND THE SCENARIOS Are there lessons in these many reforms and their components? Reforms directed at the scope of government and reforms intended to change process and procedure have had multiple and frequently unintended impacts. The ability of the higher service to bridge these tensions and to adequately fill all its new roles has not always met expectations. This is due in part to the different

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environments and thresholds for success that the reforms have created. New Zealand has essentially started over. Its executives operate in the environment of the new flexibilities and accountability mechanisms that the new expectations demand. Australia simplified many base systems before creating performance contracts and awards for its senior executives on that simplified system. The United Kingdom simplified some, but not all, of its civil service procedures, and the "new flexibilities" operate in that context. The United States and Canada, on the other hand, have not reformed base systems to the extent of other nations, but have built new roles and expectations on the old foundation. A "refitting" of the public service and, most notably, the higher service, has not occurred. It is possible to discern alternative "models" for the higher service from these national experiences and choices, but it is most likely that the higher services of the future will represent some combination of them, rather than a set of tidily defined choices. The "menu" currently available includes these options: A. The Models 1 The traditional senior service, reformed incrementally. The u.s. senior executive service is a fine example. Although the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 altered the nature of the higher service, it did so in a standardized way across government; the newly defined "policy bridge" role never took hold (Huddleston 1987). The requisite authority and discretion was quickly replaced by increased political control in the Reagan administration; until the early 19905 the SES suffered through serious pay compression and constraints as it attempted to cope with the many problems of budget cuts, downsizing, increased contracting out, and restructuring. Although the SES ought to be front and centre in reinvention, its role has been, at best, tenuous, and the systemic legal and procedural changes necessary to clarify and legitimize that role in the new view of government have not occurred. 2 The Chief Executive. This model emerges from the private sector managerialist view of organizational leadership: the holder of

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substantial authority and discretion to be used in pursuit of a well-defined organizational mission, held to a clear bottom line, held accountable by performance contract, rewarded by substantial financial rewards if performance standards are met. New Zealand and the UK agency heads fall most clearly into this mode. As new agencies were created in both national settings, missions were limited and clarified. Budget and personnel authority was delegated. The business model was clearly specified and strategic business plans were created. Leadership here is business leadership; the public service values assumed to guide the higher services' role in traditional systems are not emphasized and, indeed, are considered a negative drag on overall performance. 3 The broker/facilitator. This model has had credence in Australia (Renfrow, Hede, and Lamond, forthcoming) and it is clearly the vision present for reinvention leaders in the United States. While the model obviously incorporates an organizational performance dimension, it also implicitly accommodates the particularly public demands placed on members of the higher service: the need to acknowledge and include elected and appointed officials, citizens, other agencies involved in similar activities, and employees. Communication and facilitation replaces unidimensional direction and leadership. Ambiguity - in task, in mission, and, to some extent, in authority - is a hallmark of the environment. Because this is not the old "coping" model, however, excellent abilities in strategic thinking and planning, in people skills, and in communication are emphasized. Is any of these models likely to emerge as the perfect solution for any one nation's needs? No. Different national circumstances, political and governmental arrangements, and resources mandate different approaches and very different comfort levels with each of the models proposed above. As they have with past reforms, nations are likely to pick and choose and to combine components of existing reforms in ways that they find most acceptable - and perhaps most likely to succeed. There are, however, some lessons from existing experience that may serve as guidelines. At a minimum, they would include the following:

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B. The Guiding Lessons 1 The only sin is to be dogmatic. The lesson is a direct quote from a high ranking member of the Canadian public service; it succinctly summarizes the ability to cope with ambiguity, to be flexible, and to understand the risks now endemic in public problem solving. Building walls may appear to be a short-term solution, but more limited resources and the need for greater coordination ensure that it will be a long-term problem. Building bridges assumes great significance. 2 Excellent interpersonal skills are of central significance. The insularity of the higher service, perceived to be a problem in so many cases, often extended to members of the same organization and even to personal staff. The visionary leader on a white horse is a noble example, but not one destined for success in the frequently turbulent environment in which members of the higher service now operate. Vision is critical; however, it must be shared and supported throughout the organization and by elected officials. 3 The ability and willingness to communicate clearly and well cannot be overlooked. This seems obvious, but again conflicts with many traditional cultures and values. Policy expertise has often been a tightly held resource; opening it to change, to discussion, and to others whose expertise is not so clear has been extraordinarily difficult for many members of the higher service. In the U.S., the tension is well demonstrated by the contrasting comments of two members of the SES, the first a leader of an agency encountering some real difficulty with implementing some of the team-based components of reinvention: "Why should I do that [work with teams]?" this leader asked. "That is not why I am here." In contrast, a member of the SES who is widely recognized for successfully implementing some very difficult changes in his organization, presented this formula: "I communicate, communicate, communicate. And when I can't bear to think about more communication, I communicate some more" (personal interviews).

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This ability must extend well beyond the organizational boundaries - to elected officials, to the media, to citizen groups, and increasingly, to anyone else who needs to understand organizational mission, expectations, and potential measures for assessing success. There are undoubtedly more lessons to be extracted, but the above should be a part of any final list. They are not purely private model based; of equal significance, they are not purely public either. They must, therefore, be carefully extracted and fit to the national demands and needs. Their successful application will require strategic choice, selective combination, and thoughtful preparation of the base from which they will proceed. These are not just problems of change for the higher service. They are, ultimately, problems of policy design and implementation for politics and for elected officials. That is the overarching lesson: a changed role for the higher service requires political understanding and support. The final safety net is not the acquisition of new skills and abilities; it is the provision of clear legitimacy for new roles and responsibilities. NOTE 1 The research reported in this chapter is preliminary; the full research project, supported in part by the OECD and by the Canadian Centre for Management Development, is not completed. The quotations and perspectives included in the chapter are from interviews and discussion groups in the United States, Canada, and Australia. The interviews and the discussions were conducted on a confidential and not for attribution basis. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aberbach, Joel D., and Bert A. Rockman. 1995. The role of senior civil servants in the United States. Paper presented at the Third National Public Management Research Conference. Lawrence, KS, 5-7 October.

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Aucoin, Peter. 1995. The New Public Management: Canada in Comparative Perspective. Montreal: Institute for Research on Public Policy. Australian Management Advisory Board. 1993. Building a Better Public Service. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service. Boston, Jonathan. 1994. Purchasing policy advice: the limits to contracting out. Governance 7,1:1-30. - John Martin, June Pallet, and Pat Walsh, eds. 1996. Public Management: The New Zealand Model. Melbourne: Oxford University Press Australia. Canadian Centre for Management Development. 1996, February. Notes from ADM discussion on the changing policy role of higher civil service. Unpublished. Hood, Christopher. 1995. Deprivileging the U.K. civil service in the 19803: dream or reality? In Bureaucracy in the Modern State, ed. Jon Pierre, 92-117. Aldershot: Edward Elgar. -1996. Exploring variations in public management reforms of the 19805. In Civil Service Systems in Comparative Perspective, ed. Hans Bekke, James Perry, and Theo Toonen, 268-87. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Huddleston, Mark K. 1987. The Government's Managers. New York: Twentieth Century Fund. Ingraham, Patricia W. 1995. Quality management in public organizations: prospects and dilemmas. In Governance in a Changing Environment, ed. B. Guy Peters and Donald J. Savoie, 239-59. Montreal and Kingston: Canadian Centre for Management Development and McGill-Queen's University Press. - 1993. Of pigs in pokes and policy diffusion: another look at pay for performance." Public Administration Review 53, 4 348-56. - 19963. The reform agenda for national civil service systems: external stress and internal strains. In Civil Service Systems in Comparative Perspective, eds. Hans Bekke, James Perry, and Theo Toonen, 247-67. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. - i996b. Evolving public service systems. In Handbook of Public Administration, ed. James Perry, 375-91. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. - James Thompson, and Elliot Eisenberg. 1995. Political management strategies and political/career relationships: where are we now in the federal government? Public Administration Review 55, 3:263-72. Ives, Dennis. 1994. Personal communication to author, July.

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Light, Paul. 1996. The Tides of Reform: Making Government Work, 194.51995. New Haven: Yale University Press. Next Steps Office. 1988. Improving Management in Government: The Next Steps. London: HMSO. - 1994. Next Steps Review. London: HMSO. - 1997. Briefing Note. London: Next Steps Office. OECD (PUMA). 1996. Pay for Performance: The Record in Four Countries. Paris: OECD. Perry, James, and Lois Wise. 1994. The motivational bases of public service. In Contemporary Public Administration, ed. David Rosenbloom, Deborah Goldman, and Patricia Ingraham, 251-61. New York: McGraw Hill. Pierre, Jon. 19953. The marketization of the state: citizens, consumers and the emergence of the public market. In Governance in a Changing Environment, ed. B. Guy Peters and Donald J. Savoie, 55-81. Montreal and Kingston: Canadian Centre for Management Development and McGill-Queen's University Press. - i995b. Administrative reform in Sweden: the decline of executive capacity. Paper presented at the Conference on Administrative Reform in Europe. Paris, 15-16 June. Pollitt, Christopher. 1995. Management techniques for the public sector: pulpit and practice. In Governance in a Changing Environment, ed. B. Guy Peters and Donald J. Savoie, 203-38. Montreal and Kingston: Canadian Centre for Management Development and McGill-Queen's University Press. Proceedings - First Reinvention Laboratory Conference. 1996. Washington, DC (March). Renfrew, Patty, Andrew Hede, and David Lamond. Forthcoming. A comparative analysis of senior executive services in Australia. International Journal of Public Administration. Sanders, Ronald, and James Thompson. 1996. Lessons from the reinvention laboratories. Government Executive (March):i-i2a. Savoie, Donald J. 1994. Thatcher, Reagan, Mulroney: In Search of a Neiv Bureaucracy. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Swift, Frank. 1993. Strategic Management in the Public Service: The Changing Role of the Deputy Minister. Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Management Development.

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Terry, Francis. 1995. Getting on in government: political priorities and professional public servants. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, 31 August-2 September. Thompson, James, and Patricia Ingraham. 1996. The reinvention game. Public Administration Review 56, 3 (May/June). Trosa, Sylvie. 1994, October. Next Steps: Moving On. London: HMSO. United States General Accounting Office (GAO). 1995, November. Learning from the Reform Experience. Washington, DC: u.s. Government Printing Office.

Assessing Past

and Current Personnel Reforms HAL G. R A I N E Y

This chapter assesses or "takes stock" of certain developments in reforms of public personnel systems. First, it discusses challenges in the process of taking stock of personnel reforms, challenges which have a bearing on conclusions that follow later. Then it discusses reform initiatives in the United States that have been intended to make public personnel systems more flexible, decentralized, and "deregulated," an objective of reform initiatives for personnel systems in many other nations (Halligan 1992; Campbell and Halligan 1993; Laegreid 1994; OECD 1990, 1993; Wise 1994). It describes the limited success of some of these reforms, such as some aspects of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 and of pay-for-performance programs in many governments in the U.S. and other countries. Then the discussion turns to the problem of assessing the ongoing human resource reform initiatives under the National Performance Review (NPR) in the U.S. that in certain ways are based on successes and failures of the earlier reforms. For assessing the NPR reform process, the chapter considers the many obstacles to the success of these reforms. Then it draws on the literature on organizational change and proposes a simple model of the effective management of organizational change. Holding the NPR human resource management reform proposals up to the elements of that model, the chapter then assesses apparent strengths and weaknesses of the NPR reforms. This exercise in assessing the NPR suggests dimensions of the manage187

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ment of reforms that we need to continue to assess in the process of taking stock. It also finds some indications of learning and development across successive reform initiatives that have optimistic implications, as well as common weaknesses in reform efforts for which we need to develop remedies. CHALLENGES IN ASSESSING PERSONNEL REFORM

Assessments of personnel reforms encounter challenges common to evaluation of reforms of all types. These problems need to be kept in mind because, as later sections will illustrate, they become part of the process of taking stock. Some of the important challenges include the following: • Planning of reforms and provisions for assessment of them often fall far short of the ideal. There are sometimes disincentives to assess reforms carefully, including the disincentive to pay for such assessments and the problems that weak results can cause. • Assessment of reforms can be controversial and subject to differences of opinion, including differences between official interpretations by people who have the incentive to defend the reform, and by independent critics or political opponents. For example, leaders of an effort to "reinvent" the personnel system of the state of Florida in the U.S., using principles drawn from Osborne and Gaebler's Reinventing Government, declared the reform a success. An academic analyst concluded that it failed badly (Wechsler 1994). • Experts on administrative reform repeatedly point to the multiple or ulterior agendas of reformers, who may promote a reform as an improvement in administrative efficiency or effectiveness, yet actually seek some other objective such as enhancing political control of administration, wresting control from some other part of the political system, dismantling administrative agencies, or firing government employees (Arnold 1995; Knott and Miller 1987; Peters and Savoie 1994; Savoie 1994; Seidman and Gilmour 1986). The divergence

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between the rhetoric and reality of reform can complicate assessment. Personnel issues typically overlap with many other parts of administrative systems, making it hard to isolate personnel reforms for assessment. For example, Total Quality Management (TQM) programs and the National Performance Review reforms in the U.S., mingle personnel issues with many related factors. Reforms spawned by the "new managerialism" movements in various nations have included personnel reforms that overlapped with other parts of a broader portfolio of reforms (e.g., Campbell and Halligan 1993). This often makes it hard to isolate the personnel reforms for independent assessment. Personnel reforms themselves are often multifaceted, and one aspect of the reform may impinge on another in ways that make it hard to assess them separately. The best assessments obviously should be long-term assessments, and as some important reforms are recent or ongoing, it is hard to assess their ultimate success. Personnel systems and their features vary among nations, obviously, with wide variations on such matters as pay determination (Marsden 1993). The variations complicate the effort to take stock of reforms in different nations. Time and again in administration, one sees that the manner of implementation of a reform or a new policy plays as great a role in its success or failure as the substance of the reform itself. The implementation can serve to define the same reform - or at least reforms with the same label - differently. That is, two governments or government agencies can implement a pay-for-performance program, implementing such schemes so differently that they become different reforms with the same label. For example, some of the pay-for-performance reforms adopted in the u.s. have not really been pay-forperformance reforms, because no funds were ever provided to allow substantial pay increases for good performance. Wise (1994) reports, on the other hand, that reformers in Sweden avoided this problem, apparently having learned

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from developments in other nations, and provided for significant bonuses for high performers. Over time, the early problems with inadequate funding for bonuses in the u.s. Senior Executive Service (SES) have been corrected (Harper 1992). In addition, as elaborated later in this paper, the design and management of the implementation process, involving such matters as the sustained commitment of leaders, heavily influences progress of the reform. Savoie (1994:275-6) describes the shifting, sometimes incoherent priorities and rhetoric behind managerialist reforms in the U.S., Canada, and Great Britain. This inconsistency and incoherence blurs the substance of the reforms and in turn impedes clear assessment of them. Halligan (1992) and Sanders (1994) describe somewhat similar weaknesses in implementation of the senior executive service reforms in the u.s. and Australia that make some aspects of the reforms different in substance from what reformers originally mandated. AN INTERNATIONAL THEME: FLEXIBILITY, DECENTRALIZATION, DEREGULATION

While these challenges are formidable, we need to take stock, and one important topic for assessment in personnel reforms pertains to changes many nations have attempted, intended to increase the flexibility and decentralization of personnel systems, and of specific aspects of them such as pay systems (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development [hereafter, OECD] 1990; 1993). In the u.s., both the National Performance Review of the Clinton administration (Gore 19933), and the Winter Commission on Revitalizing State and Local Public Service (Thompson 1993) have emphasized the need to "deregulate" public administration in general, and especially public personnel systems. The diverse movement in many nations, variously referred to as managerialism, new managerialism, or New Public Management, typically included emphasis on certain patterns of flexibility and decentralization. As mentioned earlier, expert observers point out that these reform movements varied in different nations. They often

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contained shifting, mutually contradictory priorities such as simultaneous concern for managerial efficiency and political responsiveness, or shifting emphasis on empowerment of employees and top-down controls. Still, observers point out that the reformers shared a veneration of private sector management practices, a denigration of the existing public sector, and an assumption that government must adopt the superior practices that purportedly exist in the private sector (Campbell and Halligan 1993; Hood 1991; Savoie 1994; Zifcak 1994). Some of the practices to be imported from a presumably superior private sector included providing more flexibility and decentralization in allowing managers to control the incentives of subordinates (especially their pay), to set objectives and performance standards for subordinates, and to control the selection and assignment of subordinates. In the U.S., the deregulation initiatives are part of a trend that has developed over at least two decades, dating back to the Carter administration and earlier. The Carter administration launched initiatives to reduce all forms of "red tape" in government. In part as an application of this emphasis in personnel administration, the administration also attained passage of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 (hereafter, CSRA). Looking back at CSRA is instructive, because we can examine some indications of its effectiveness in sections below, as part of "taking stock." Among other provisions, the CSRA involved various steps intended to increase flexibility and deregulation of the civil service. The creation of the SES aimed at increasing agency directors' authority to remove and transfer high-level assistant executives, and to establish for them more flexible and decentralized pay procedures involving bonuses and performance-based pay. The CSRA also intended to provide performance-based pay for middle-level executives, and to reduce and streamline the rules and procedures that constrained managers' ability to fire and discipline poor performers. As suggested above these developments bore many similarities to reform efforts in other nations. Halligan (1992), for example, depicts the Australian Senior Executive Service reforms as falling between a British and an American model, but also describes the efforts in the Australian reform to increase flexibility in the sense of

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openness, competitiveness, and mobility in the senior civil service ranks. Also similarly, neither the u.s. nor the Australian SES has met the mobility objectives (Halligan 1992; Sanders 1994). In the U.S., other contributions to this trend toward emphasis on flexibility and deregulation have included the Volcker Commission Report (Volcker Commission 1989), reports by the National Academy of Public Administration, and similar reports from commissions, associations, and foundations. In addition, at least since the 19605, the literature on theory and practice of business management has heavily emphasized the imperative for more flexible, less bureaucratized, more decentralized, more participative organizational designs. These designs are depicted as critical for organizations that confront more complexity and rapid change in technology and operating environments. This trend has gathered momentum to the point where prominent management authors, basing their arguments on observations of successful firms, are prescribing virtual "chaos" as characteristic of effective firms (Peters 1987). The general management literature now involves a flood of exhortations for team-based management, visionary and transformational leadership, and "learning organization" models. These and other currently popular approaches to management involve less hierarchical direction, fewer rigid rules and position descriptions, and more participative, flexible, decentralized designs. This trend appears to have influenced the National Performance Review, in that the main report of the NPR refers to the need for government to reinvent and reform itself as American industry has done. In addition, this general trend appears to have influenced Osborne and Gaebler's book, Reinventing Government, which clearly influenced the NPR. As with the CSRA, this trend in management literature and practice is reconsidered below in the assessment of the progress of and prospects for personnel reforms. This general trend toward flexibility, decentralization and deregulation provides one of the main themes of the National Performance Review, as reflected in the title of its main document (Gore 19933). The NPR'S accompanying report, Reinventing Human Resource Management (Gore 1993^, proposes numerous changes

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to provide more flexibility and decentralization. It calls for fewer centrally controlled rules and procedures, and more autonomy of agencies, in recruitment and hiring, position classification and pay systems, incentive awards and performance management, training and development, and managing problem employees. It contains some provisions for providing support for those elements of the personnel system, in addition to decentralization, yet also some countervailing proposals that potentially conflict with the deregulation theme, as described below. The trend has also influenced developments at other levels of government in the u.s. As noted, Florida sought to "reinvent" the state government personnel system, aiming at deregulation, as have other states and localities (Thompson 1993). Very recently the governor of Georgia proposed, and the legislature passed, legislation eliminating merit system protections for state employees. The legislation aimed especially at reducing the rules providing protection against dismissal. The governor also had developed and implemented a compensation and performance evaluation program entitled GeorgiaGain, that involves performance-based pay and bonus provisions. These trends illustrate that the emphasis on deregulation and flexibility is both somewhat old and very current. Observers and experts on public administration and on public personnel administration have been criticizing the rigid, constraining, cumbersome rules and procedures for several decades at least. Administrators in the civil service have been complaining about these conditions for years (Macy 1971) and they are still complaining (Ban 1995). Reforms have been attempted in the past - the CSRA - and continue, in the NPR, in state and local governments in the U.S., and in other nations. THE F A I L U R E , TO D A T E , TO D E R E G U L A T E AND E N H A N C E F L E X I B I L I T Y IN THE U . S .

This brings us immediately to one conclusion, in the process of taking stock. At least until very recent initiatives such as the NPR, the general efforts at decentralization and deregulation in

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public personnel administration in the United States have not worked very well. As discussed in more detail below, a fairly solid consensus exists about the failure of most pay-for-performance efforts, including such prominent ones as the provisions under CSRA for performance-based pay for middle managers, that became the Performance Management and Recognition System (PMRS) and that for years led a relatively hapless existence. Concerning more general deregulation and flexibility, Ban (1995) reports recent interviews and focus group observations with federal managers. Virtually unanimously, they express frustrations with the cumbersome personnel system and its elaborate, constraining, confusing rules, procedures, and structure. Among other results, she reports that the federal managers still find the process of removing a poorly performing employee very complicated and time consuming, and still have very limited control over the pay of their subordinates, in spite of the efforts at reform under the CSRA some fifteen years earlier. Rainey, Facer, and Bozeman (1995) report survey results comparing responses to questionnaire items from managers in government, business, and nonprofit organizations. The respondents represented all levels of government in the U.S., and many different types of organizations in all sectors. The results came from multiple surveys representing different years and different parts of the country. In response to questions about whether the personnel rules constrained pay raises, firing, and other personnel actions in their organizations, the differences between the public and private managers were in the direction one would predict, but of a size that is striking by the standards of the social sciences. For example, well over 80 percent of the public managers agreed with various statements about the rules making it hard to fire a poor performer and hard to raise the pay of a good performer. Among the business managers, well over 80 percent would disagree with such statements. Table i provides an example of results from surveys of managers in public and private organizations in New York and Ohio, with the public sector samples drawn from all levels of government.

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Sharp Differences Between Public and Private Managers' Perceptions of Personnel Rules Public

Private

Ohio Survey 2. If a manager is not pulling his or her weight, it is easy, as far as formal procedures are concerned, for his or her superiors to fire him or her.

83% False or Very False

26% False or Very False

Ohio Survey 8.* The formal pay structures and rules make it hard to reward a good manager with higher pay here.

81% True or Very True

20% True or Very True

89.5%

2nd New York Survey Even if a manager is a poor performer, formal rules make it hard to remove him or her from the organization.

Agree or Strongly Agree

91.3% Disagree or Strongly Disagree

2nd New York Survey The formal pay structures and rules make it hard to reward a good manager with higher pay here.

86.1% Agree or Strongly Agree

82.5% Disagree or Strongly Disagree

Adapted from Rainey, Facer, and Bozcman, 1995, 22-3.

The NPR report Reinventing Human Resource Management (Gore 19935) further suggests the continued existence of the circumstances that the CSRA and other efforts sought to change. The sections of the NPR human resources report repeatedly detail the elaborate, rigid, constraining rules and procedures that complicate hiring, discipline, firing, classification, pay, and performance management. Many of the actions proposed in the report involve authorizing agencies to establish their own programs for these personnel functions. The report proposes that agencies be authorized to establish their own recruitment and examining programs, their own programs for improving individual performance, and their own incentive and award programs. The report also proposes elimination of the entire Federal Personnel Manual and all agency implementing directives. Accordingly, in one of their more dramatic symbolic actions, leaders of the NPR threw out

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the manual. The NPR, then, amounts to a report on the continued existence of complicated, rigid rules and procedures in the u.s. federal personnel system. The discussion will return below to the question of whether the NPR and related actions at other levels of government will actually change the system. PERFORMANCE-BASED PAY REFORMS

A strong case has developed for another firm conclusion in the process of taking stock. As indicated earlier, the u.s. federal government, many other governments in the u.s., and the governments of many other nations, have attempted to implement pay-for-performance systems. These reforms have not worked out well. They have not clearly improved performance and morale, and they have not created a more flexible, satisfactory evaluation and compensation system (Ingraham 19933; Kellough and Lu 1993). The plans have apparently been ineffective because they have usually been implemented under conditions that pay experts would identify as discouraging for such programs. Typically, pay experts say that pay-for-performance systems require certain conditions, such as: (i) A high level of trust within the organization, especially between leaders, managers, and subordinates. (2) A performance rating system that employees consider fair and valid, often with relatively clear, accepted, and measurable performance indicators, and with the capacity to differentiate clearly between levels of performance. (3) Adequate funding to provide appreciable pay increases for those who receive higher performance evaluations. In addition, as mentioned above, one of the problems in evaluating a reform is that implementation often defines the nature of the reform as much as the label of the reform. There are many different versions of performance-based pay, and many conditions under which such plans are attempted. The plans that have received a good deal of evaluative attention in the professional literature, such as the PMRS for mid-level managers in the u.s. federal service, have been very simplistic plans in

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certain ways. For example, at one point PMRS involved having superiors rate subordinates on a five-point scale, with pay increases to be based on that simple rating. In other cases, the plans may involve more elaborate procedures, but then managers feel burdened by the procedures and feel a disincentive to go through them, especially given other problems with the plans. Other problems with the pay-for-performance systems have included lack of sufficient funding to provide significant pay increases for better performers. Performance evaluation procedures have not been good enough to provide convincing differentiations among individuals. Inflated performance ratings have often been a problem, with a high percentage of individuals getting high evaluations (Perry, Petrakis, and Miller 1989). This further complicates the problem of insufficient funding. The pay for performance plans have often been mandated for all agencies in a government, even though they may not apply as well to some of the agencies as to others. In some of the plans on which we have reports and evaluations, agencies have varied widely on such matters as the percentage of employees getting high performance ratings. Many governments appear to share similar problems in implementing pay-for-performance systems. For example, the Scandinavian countries are in some ways quite different from the u.s. and various other nations. Laegreid (1994) and Wise (1994) point out that Norway and Sweden have longstanding egalitarian traditions that influence government and public administration in a variety of ways. For a long time, strong labour unions negotiated with governmental entities over wages for government employees, with emphasis on wage equity or "solidarity," and a tradition of low salaries for high-level civil servants, relative to private sector counterparts and to civil servants in other nations (Hood and Peters 1994). Difficult economic conditions, and possibly evolving cultural values - such as diminishing egalitarianism led to reforms aimed at making pay more competitive with private sector pay levels, based more on economic market conditions, and administered more flexibly with less centralization and stronger connections between performance and pay. There has

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apparently been considerable movement in these directions in both Sweden and Norway. The reforms are rather popular, and may have had positive effects such as enhancing a performance orientation and communication among executives and their subordinates about performance (Laegreid 1994:142). Employees support some of the basic values of differentially rewarding employees (Wise and Gallupinstitutet 1996). Wise reports that the Swedish reforms originally avoided the mistake, made in other nations, of failing to provide adequate merit increases as part of the merit pay program. Sizeable merit increases were available in the early implementation of the reforms, although whether they continue to be available is currently difficult to determine due to the decentralization of the system. In both Sweden and Norway, however, implementation of payfor-performance reforms has been impeded by the problems of performance measurement common to many governments. Laegreid (1994) describes problems in basing pay for high-level managers on performance against standards specified in performance contracts. Executives found it extremely difficult to specify clear and measurable performance standards for high-level managers, and the standards in the contracts tended towards vague generalities. He concludes that as of 1993, the pay-forperformance element in the Norwegian reforms was essentially suspended in practice. Similarly, Wise (1994) says that in Sweden there has been little progress in productivity and performance measurement, and little training in performance appraisal, to support efforts at basing merit pay awards on performance. Merit awards have been based on subjective judgments. The assessments and observations described in the preceding paragraphs indicate that governments around the world have had, at best, mixed results with pay-for-performance systems. A remaining question concerns whether such systems are simply not feasible in general or whether they have not been properly implemented and given a reasonable chance of working. More important, however, reformers and experts appear to have learned from the disappointing experiences. Experts on compensation systems increasingly treat simple pay-for-performance schemes as

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dubious (Lawler 1990). They suggest alternatives and sometimes the careful blending of pay-for-performance features with other provisions. The NPR tends to reflect this evolution, since it notes the weak record of pay-for-performance programs and its proposals concentrate on other approaches. It proposes that agencies be authorized to establish broadbanding systems and to develop their own incentive systems and encourages employee participation in developing these systems. It also encourages agencies to establish gainsharing programs. The main question now concerns whether these initiatives will work. DEVELOPMENTS IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Among many developments underway simultaneously with the NPR reforms, and as part of the reforms, are rapid changes in information technology, including computers.and communications technology. A brief examination of some of these developments provides an excellent example of the point made earlier that personnel reforms intermingle with other reforms and changes. It also raises some points relevant to the effort in later sections to take stock of the ongoing NPR reforms. Changes in information technology are rapidly changing the workplace in ways that affect the nature of work and workgroups and the morale, skill requirements, and productivity of the work force. The most recent assessments of developments in information technology tend to emphasize that we cannot yet fully understand the implications of the rapid developments (Kraemer 1996). This uncertainty arises in part because the implications vary widely by industry and organization, and the developments can have contradictory implications. For example, while computers can increase independence and decentralization, they can also increase monitoring and control. In addition, the new technologies offer many opportunities for the development of new and interesting skills and roles and other ways of enhancing the working lives of employees. They also raise, however, the potential for certain types of drudgery and isolation, and continue the process of displacement of less skilled workers (Perry and Kraemer 1993).

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Nevertheless, some of the implications and apparent related successes deserve attention in the effort to take stock of reforms and changes in human resource management. One development with apparently favourable implications is the increased capacity to allow more flexible location of workers. Agencies in the United States have been reporting good results from telecommuting programs. For example, one large unit of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has completed a pilot program in which employees work at their homes, using computers issued to them by the agency. The pilot program was successful and is being extended. Some studies have found that people in such programs express increased work satisfaction (Perry and Kraemer 1993). Another promising development is the increased availability of computer software to support personnel functions. Agencies are reporting beneficial uses of computerized systems for designing and operating aspects of personnel management such as payroll systems. The rapid developments in information technology pose many serious challenges for personnel systems in government, discussed in a growing literature on the topic (Perry and Kraemer 1993). These two examples of changes or small-scale reforms within many agencies point to some of the promising aspects of advancing information technology. The examples are also relevant to consideration of successful patterns of reform and the prospects for current reform efforts, as discussed below. T A K I N G STOCK OF A C U R R E N T R E F O R M E F F O R T : THE C A S E OF THE N A T I O N A L P E R F O R M A N C E R E V I E W

One could summarize the stock-taking discussed in earlier sections as follows: certain important reforms, such as the efforts at deregulation and decentralization under the CSRA in the United States, and pay-for-performance programs, have produced very limited success. There have also been smaller-scale, less publicized changes that have shown promising results, such as telecommuting and flexiplace programs, and pilot projects in pay banding and flexible

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classification systems mentioned below. Some very current reform efforts, such as the NPR in the United States, actually appear to be drawing on some of this history - on both the good news and the bad news. As mentioned, taking stock of very current developments such as the NPR is quite difficult, but becomes one of the most important issues to face in assessing personnel reforms as well as other types of reforms. Impediments to Reform

Observers have already begun to discuss the obstacles NPR faces (Horner 1994; Ban 1995). The set of challenges actually amounts to a generic listing of obstacles to reform, many of which apply to any reform. In spite of the differences among nations, they appear to apply fairly generally across many countries (Gustafsson 1990). Elected officials have weak political incentives for "good government" administrative reforms. The political payoff for internal administrative reforms is relatively weak. As one example, a recent survey shows that a majority of respondents in a representative sample of Americans thinks either that employment in the federal government has increased in the last several years or that it has stayed the same. During this period, the Clinton administration removed over 160,000 employees (Gore 1995). This example shows how the voters tend to be inattentive to internal administrative reforms, and political officials usually have little incentive to spend political capital, time, and energy on them. In addition, existing administrative structures often benefit political officials in ways that make them resist changes. Experts on administrative reforms in the u.s. have argued that truly successful administrative reform will require reforms in the committee structure of the Congress (Seidman and Gilmour 1996:340). Congressional committees seek to maintain control over elements of the administrative branch, to use for political bargaining and exchange. Decentralizing authority to agencies usually threatens such arrangements. Unions can play a major role in reforms. They may oppose reforms aimed at increasing flexibility by increasing managerial

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authority over employees. They definitely seek influence over as many important decisions as possible, in ways that can impede the development of simplified and more flexible procedures (Horner 1994). As noted earlier, the tradition of unions negotiating compensation packages at central levels was a major factor in the pay flexibility reforms in Sweden and Norway (Gustafsson 1990; Laegreid 1994; Wise 1994). Reformers simply cannot control all these authorities, groups, and conditions that impinge on reforms. For example, Ban (1995) points out that the NPR calls for reducing the time it takes to fire poor performers, but the rules governing such actions are controlled by the courts, hearing officers, and the u.s. Merit Systems Protection Board. The courts may overturn any changes in rules that justices interpret as violations of due process protections. In the example mentioned earlier of the state of Georgia's removing employees' civil service protections, a legislator pointed out in the debate over the legislation that the employees of the state university system were not covered by the state's merit system, yet firing an employee in the university system nevertheless took a very long time. He illustrated the point by observing that even where the chief executive and the legislature agreed on a step to increase decentralization and flexibility, other forces could limit the effectiveness of that step. Still another complication is that large-scale reforms typically involve an array of objectives, some of which conflict with each other. For example, the NPR, after proposing many of the steps to decentralize, simplify, and make more flexible parts of the personnel system, expressed strong commitment to affirmative action and equal employment opportunity (EEO) goals. The objectives of these proposals may be laudable, but with strong demands for EEO goals and protections it seems likely that it will be more difficult to make the system more flexible, decentralized, and simplified. Reformers, then, face the challenge of providing incentives to attract the support of a diverse array of participants, and finding ways to balance multiple and conflicting objectives. They must

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also find ways to change circumstances that may be held in place by forces out of their control. In view of these challenges, can one make an optimistic case for reform in general, and for particular reforms such as the parts of NPR that focus on greater flexibility and decentralization? T A K I N G S T O C K O F N P R FROM A N O R G A N I Z A T I O N A L CHANGE PERSPECTIVE

One way to make a case for cautious optimism is to view the reforms from the perspective of the literature on the management of organizational change. Such an exercise raises issues and makes points about how we take stock of reforms currently underway, and how we will ultimately take stock of such reforms. It also offers points about leading change that appear simple and obvious, but that leaders often fail to heed. The literature on organizational change is complex, but we can draw selectively from it to suggest a simple model of successful organizational change. Tables 2 and 3 present summaries of statements from experts on organizational change. Table 2 summarizes a Harvard Business Review article in which Greiner (1967) stated generalizations about the characteristics of successful large-scale changes in a set of eighteen large organizations. Almost thirty years after Greiner, Kotter (1995) advanced a set of generalizations about the failure of organizational "transformation" efforts. Table 3 restates these generalizations in the obverse, as characteristics of successful large scale changes. Greiner's and Kotter's lists have some important differences, but the similarities are evident and striking. Rainey and Rainey (1984) found Greiner's depiction of the characteristics of successful organizational change very applicable to a successful large-scale change in the Social Security Administration. The summary in Table 4 of the characteristics of that change effort is worth looking at because it adds the simple point that the change process has to develop and pursue some good ideas that people see as feasible, reasonably clear, and valuable.

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TABLE 2

Patterns of Successful Organizational Change Phase i: Pressure and Arousal: 1. SIGNIFICANT EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL PRESSURE FOR CHANGE.

Widespread conviction of the need for change, and perception of performance gaps. Pressure on top management. Phase II: Intervention and Reorientation: 2. A NEW PERSON ENTERS AS CHANGE LEADER.

The person has a record as successful change agent. The person enters as leader of the organization or consultant working with the leader. 3. THE NEW PERSON LEADS A REEXAMINATION OF PAST PRACTICES AND CURRENT PROBLEMS.

Newcomer uses external/objective perspective to encourage examination of old views and rationalizations, attention to "real" problems. 4. TOP MANAGEMENT IS HEAVILY INVOLVED IN REEXAMINATION.

The head of the organization and immediate subordinates assume a direct, heavily involved role in the reexamination. Phase ill: Diagnosis and Recognition: 5. THE CHANGE LEADER ENGAGES MULTIPLE LEVELS IN DIAGNOSIS.

The change leader involves multiple levels and units in collaborative, factfinding, problem-solving discussions to identify and diagnose current problems. The diagnosis involves significant power-sharing. Phase IV: Invention and Commitment: 6. THE CHANGE LEADER STIMULATES WIDESPREAD SEARCHES FOR CREATIVE SOLUTIONS, INVOLVING MANY LEVELS.

Plwse v: Experimentation and Search: 7. SOLUTIONS ARE DEVELOPED, TESTED, AND PROVEN ON A SMALL SCALE.

Problems are worked out and solved. Experimentation is encouraged. Phase VI: Reinforcement and Acceptance: 8. SUCCESSES ARE REINFORCED AND DISSEMINATED, AND BREED SUCCESSES.

People are rewarded. Successes become accepted and institutionalized. Adapted from Larry E. Greincr, "Patterns of Organizational Change," Harvard Business Review, May-June, 1967, pp. 119-28. Source: Hal G. Rainey, Understanding and Managing Public Organizations, 2nd ed., San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997.

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TABLE 3

Steps for Successful Organizational Transformations 1. ESTABLISH A SENSE OF URGENCY.

Examine market and competitive realities. Identify crises and/or opportunities. 2. FORM A POWERFUL GUIDING COALITION.

Assemble a group with enough power to lead the change effort. Encourage the group to work as a team. 3. CREATE A VISION.

Create a vision to help direct the change effort. Develop strategies for achieving the vision. 4.

COMMUNICATE THE VISION.

Use all available means to communicate the new vision and strategy. Guiding coalition teaches new behaviours by example. 5. EMPOWER OTHERS TO ACT ON THE VISION.

Remove obstacles to change. Change systems or structures that present obstacles. 6. CREATE SHORT-TERM WINS.

Plan for visible performance improvements. Create those improvements. Recognize and reward employees involved in those improvements. 7. CONSOLIDATE IMPROVEMENTS AND PRODUCE FURTHER CHANGE.

Use increased credibility to change systems, structures, and policies to pursue vision. Hire and develop employees who can implement the vision. 8.

INSTITUTIONALIZE NEW APPROACHES.

Articulate the connections between the new behaviours and corporate success. Ensure leadership development and succession. Adapted from John P. Kotter, "Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail." Harvard Business Review, March-April, 1995, pp. 59-67. Source: Hal G. Rainey, Understanding and Managing Public Organizations, 2nd ed., Siin Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997.

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TABLE 4

Conditions of a Successful Change in a Federal Agency 1. A DURABLE POWER CENTRE, COMMITTED TO SUCCESSFUL CHANGE.

• Strong, stable leadership by career civil servants • An internal change agent (career agency executive) with authority and resources. • Active, creative bureau staff. 2. APPROPRIATE TIMING FOR COLLECTIVE SUPPORT.

• Political "window of opportunity." • Political overseers (Congressional committee heads) who were supportive but noninterventionist. • Political sophistication of agency leaders and staff - effective management of relations with Congress and oversight agencies (OPM, GSA). • Strategies blending sincere employee involvement with decisive exercise of authority. 3. A COMPREHENSIVE, CLEAR, REALISTIC ALTERNATIVE PROCESS.

• A long-term change strategy, using group processes to develop new structures. • A major structural reform, focused on measurable outputs, that decentralized operational responsibility. • Reasonable clarity about the nature and objectives of the new structure and process. Adapted from: Glenn W. Rainey and Hal G. Rainey. 1986. "Breaching the Hierarchical Imperative." In Bureaucratic and Governmental Reform, ed. D. Calista. Greenwich, CT, JAI Press. Glenn W. Rainey and Hal G. Rainey. 1986. "Structural Overhaul in A Government Agency." Public Administration Quarterly (Summer):206-23. Source: Hal G. Rainey, Understanding and Managing Public Organizations, 2nd ed., San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997.

Drawing on these analyses, one can summarize key points about conditions for successful large-scale organizational change as follows: • An acceptance of the need for change, and a sense of urgency for change, widely held by stakeholders inside and outside the organization. • Strong leadership and sustained commitment by top leaders and leadership teams.

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• Wide participation in the diagnosis of problems and proposals for solutions, involving decentralization and powersharing. • Good ideas. A coherent and persuasive "vision" and feasible alternatives. • Successes in experimental efforts of an incremental or limited scale, followed by sustained dissemination and institutionalization. This list amounts to a model of organizational change that is far too simplified in certain ways. The analyses summarized in the three tables draw on observations of corporate forms of organization, such as business firms or single government agencies, as opposed to more federated, fragmented, diverse organizations such as large governments. The Greiner and Kotter analyses pay virtually no attention to external politics and political institutions. The listing of challenges to reform, discussed above, actually provides an illustration of the limits of this simple model for analysing large-scale governmental administrative reforms. Yet the simplicity of the model focuses attention on certain points on which the NPR differs very sharply from other relatively recent reform efforts. In particular, one could cite the CSRA and the Grace Commission during the Reagan administration as reform efforts in the United States that contrast rather sharply with NPR in their impact on federal agencies. The Grace Commission, while not focused on personnel administration, serves as an illustration of an extreme case in its minimal impact on agency operations. If characterized in relation to the items on the list of large-scale change conditions above, the Grace Commission could be characterized as low or weak on all of them. The CSRA is more difficult to assess and classify, but can be characterized as intermediate in impact. Some aspects of the CSRA, such as the creation of the u.s. senior executive service and the Merit System Protection Board, certainly have had a lasting and substantial influence on personnel administration in the U.S. federal service. Harper (1992) points out that the senior executive service provisions of the CSRA have had some of the intended

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consequences, such as the increased use of bonus payments in the service. Demonstration projects created by the act are providing some of the important guidance for reforms under the NPR. On the other hand, the discussion in previous sections has made the case that the parts of the CSRA concerned with decentralization, flexibility, and the relaxing of constraints on such matters as firing and pay raises have had little effect. One can further question how complete the implementation of some of the lasting features, such as the senior executive service, has been (Sanders 1994). The CSRA can also be classified as involving intermediate or moderate levels of the factors in the list of change conditions. As compared to NPR, one can argue that CSRA had lower levels of top leadership support and commitment, of participation and empowerment, and of other factors on the list. In sharp contrast, the National Performance Review represents an interesting example of how to manage, or at least try to manage, large-scale organizational change, if we take our list of conditions as a model. One can debate the various characteristics of the NPR and its implementation endlessly, but one could give it relatively high marks on some of the factors on the list, as described in the following sections. Later, however, we return to weaknesses in the implementation of NPR that also provide lessons. The Need for Change and Urgency of Change

Critics charge that the NPR focuses on incremental administrative repairs rather than fundamental institutional issues, such as the effects of pluralistic politics. It simply displaces public concern about excessive and ineffective government by essentially blaming it on the bureaucracy and not the political forces surrounding it (Arnold 1995). The emphasis on poor performance of government agencies and programs, and the need for management techniques mimicking industry may well be another exercise in misdiagnosing the maladies of government that other reforms have represented (Peters and Savoie 1994). If one considers the problem of building support for change and

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the sense of urgency for change, however, the inflated and distorted references to bureaucratic malfunctions become more understandable. Faced with survey information and many other indications of widespread public disaffection with the federal government and the federal bureaucracy, it seems reasonable that a chief executive would attempt to harness those public sentiments, respond to them, and use them to fuel constructive changes. The president's ability to mobilize support from many external stakeholders, such as Congress, has been complicated by the electoral success of the opposing party and consequent dramatic shifts in the leadership of Congress. Still, the NPR has received considerable public attention and press coverage, and generally favourable support from external stakeholders, for a "good government" reform with limited potential for high political payoffs. The critics' concerns about the bureaucracy-blaming aspects of NPR are well taken, but the criticisms implicitly acknowledge the energetic efforts of the administration to generate support for the initiative. In addition, in rhetoric launching the NPR and in its first report, the administration did absolve government employees of the blame for the problems, and instead blamed the administrative "systems" that they worked in. The report announced the intention to get federal employees involved in solving the problems because they are the ones who best know how to do so. (Those of us who lament the "bureaucrat-bashing" in the U.S. and some other nations in recent decades need to remember that some of the most sustained criticisms of the administrative systems come from the "bureaucrats" themselves.) The vice president conducted meetings in agencies to further the symbolic emphasis on involving federal employees. The reinvention labs and many other features of the reform sought to encourage activities within the agencies. For these and other reasons, the NPR clearly has generated a great deal of activity in agencies, and many agencies obviously have taken the initiative very seriously. In spite of inevitable patterns of resistance, the initiative appears to have been effective in mobilizing considerable support from internal stakeholders.

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Leadership

The u.s. president has devoted considerable direct attention to the NPR. The vice president became the highest-ranking official to take direct charge of any of the recent administrative reform efforts. As suggested above, he has devoted considerable time and attention to the initiatives. One might question the leadership role of the ad hoc task force that purportedly provides central guidance for the NPR, but executive leadership has been reasonably strong and sustained for an initiative of this type. Participation and Power-Sharing

The rhetoric of the reform and its various reports may make overblown claims about empowerment, but many features of the NPR do emphasize increases in participation and the authorization of actions within the agencies. Some of the efforts to involve federal employees and enlist their support have been described above. The reinvention labs are another such feature. The strategy behind their creation was to encourage "bottom-up" innovation. Reports on them indicate that, in spite of formidable obstacles, some of them are quite successful in generating innovative procedures (Sanders and Thompson 1996). Sanders (1998) describes many "heroes of the revolution," who have worked enthusiastically and effectively in reinvention labs to streamline and improve procedures, to develop more open and innovative cultures in their agencies, and to bring about other beneficial changes. Sanders describes the valuable role of the vice president in providing general permission to innovators in agencies, working in the reinvention labs. Sanders relates exciting developments as the innovators engaged in "guerilla warfare," after being incited to revolution by the vice president. At least so far, the reinvention labs have stimulated a great deal of decentralized, relatively independent innovativeness in many agencies. Many of the proposals concerning personnel call for authorizing agencies to establish their own performance management systems, recruitment and hiring systems, and incentive and bonus

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systems. It also proposes the authorization or encouragement of agencies to adopt broadbanding systems, gainsharing programs, and other programs for which demonstration projects and other evidence have provided promising results. Good Ideas As these examples of ideas from demonstration projects suggest, the NPR draws on past experiences for relatively clear and feasible programs in human resource management. As noted above, many people in the agencies have evidently found the concept of the reinvention lab to be attractive and feasible. The broad vision of a more innovative, flexible, responsive government has evidently appealed to many people in the labs and elsewhere in the agencies. The ideas about decentralizing personnel functions are consistent with many proposals from commissions, associations, and experts in the past. Even those who see problems with NPR the discussion returns to the problems later - approve many of the basic objectives and ideas (Ink 1996). Institutionalization of Successes and Small Wins

As suggested in earlier descriptions of it, the NPR report on human resource management reads as if it were developed under the influence of the analyses of organizational change depicted in tables 2,3, and 4, and the simple model this discussion is following. The report acknowledges the limited successes of earlier programs such as pay-for-performance plans, and especially the need to avoid imposing such plans rigidly across all agencies, as previous reform efforts have sometimes attempted. In proposing adoption of ideas from demonstration projects, such as broadbanding, the report acknowledges the limits on the evidence provided by the demonstrations as to how widely applicable the programs might be. The proposals then emphasize authorizing and encouraging agencies to develop and shape the ideas in relation to their particular conditions. Obviously, this may be the point on which the reforms founder, in that gaining such authorization may be difficult. Even if gained, it may be ineffectual in the context of

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other forces described earlier. Nevertheless, the report and its proposals tend to follow the model one might draw from some of the research on the management of organizational change. That model discourages rigid, top-down, system-wide mandates, and prescribes more participative, experimental, bottom-up development and dissemination of reforms. While there are myriad complications, the NPR in many ways follows that model and this appears to bode well for success of at least some of its initiatives. Additional Trends Supporting Successful Reform

One can add to the case for optimism some points, drawn from earlier sections, about trends in management thought and information technology. As described earlier, decentralized and flexible organization is now an idea in good currency in management thought and practice. This can provide legitimacy for reforms aimed at developing such conditions in government. In addition, the literature on this trend has long treated it not as a matter of choice, but as an imperative - under conditions of complexity and rapid change, organizations must become more flexible. This raises the possibility that public officials and other participants will regard the need for reforms in this direction as imperative. Some of the developments in information technology, like examples given earlier, can provide support for such reforms. Shortcomings of the National Performance Review as an Organizational Change

In addition to the good aspects of the NPR, it has serious weaknesses as an exercise in the leadership and management of organizational change. These not-so-good features of the effort offer lessons, just as do the promising aspects emphasized in preceding sections. The Problem of Blurred Vision

From early on, critics worried that the NPR had a scattershot or patchwork quality (e.g., Kettl 1994). Ink (1996) says that some

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critics labelled it an incoherent mishmash. The book, Reinventing Government (Osborne and Gaebler 1992), which strongly influenced the NPR, had many virtues. That book, however, essentially offers a catalogue of varied bright ideas about underutilized ways of doing business in government, with some glib examples of these ideas in practice, but with virtually no attention to the challenges of implementing them. Reinventing Government in itself devotes virtually no attention to the management and implementation of change. This shopping list quality carried over into NPR, with its wide-ranging aims to develop customer service orientations and standards, decentralize management and reduce rules, reinvent the personnel system, sharply reduce federal employment, spawn reinvention labs, and foster many other initiatives. Multiple, diffuse objectives seem to characterize reform initiatives inspired by the book and the related reinventing government movement. Berry, Chackerian, and Wechsler (1996) describe a major reinvention effort in the state of Florida in the u.s. It involved an array of directions and initiatives - reforming the civil service system, adopting strategic management, adopting Total Quality Management, using performance measures and new budgeting procedures, restructuring agencies, reforming regulatory practices, and other efforts. Predictably, the results have been mixed. The authors see progress in some areas, such as strategic management, where agencies themselves can control the process of change. Reforms involving larger systemic and institutional issues, such as civil service reform, have shown little success. With striking similarity, expert observers, while lauding some of the ideas and objectives of NPR, see little success in the broader initiatives that involve broad systemic change, such as the decentralization and loosening-up of the personnel system. Recently, Ink asks, "Did NPR forget human resources?" (1996:29). He points out that previous reforms that aimed at decentralizing personnel systems by delegating authority to the agencies have foundered due to faulty implementation, leading to recentralization due to lack of accountability, confusion, and scandals. NPR appears headed on the same course. Ink points out that resources for training were sharply reduced even as the decentralizing steps

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were being urged. This seriously underestimates the capacity building in the agencies that must accompany their new authority, as well as the capacities that must be retained at central levels. He points out that agencies must develop the capacity to carry out the functions that are delegated to them, and the central personnel agency must have provisions for effective oversight and technical assistance. NPR not only involves few such provisions, but the cuts in training further undermine the process. He and other observers see - and expect - little progress on the broad intiatives to decentralize personnel functions. The framework for successful change developed in preceding sections emphasized the importance of vision and of good ideas and alternatives. The NPR and the reinventing government movement more generally offers little help with the full development of these matters and appears susceptible to, perhaps conducive to, not strategic but blurred vision. Its prescriptions raise many complex challenges of leading, motivating, designing, and strategizing for change, but it pays only limited attention to these matters. NPR has energized government officials and employees, and supports a general "vision" of a government that is more energetic, innovative, and responsive, through harnessing the ingenuity and creativity of its employees. Yet the basic premise that government needs reinvention along many dimensions, using a diverse array of strategies that remain loosely described and articulated, tends to blur the vision of what is to be accomplished, and how, and to offer a series of often-dubious alternatives, rather than attractive, persuasive ones. As Berry et al. point out, political leaders often have a strong incentive to overpromise about reforms. One can add that they feel the need for attractive ideas, for proposals that sound good and that they can tout to the public as bold, valuable steps they are taking. One lesson from NPR and other manifestations of the reinventing government movement is that leaders need to concentrate on developing a feasible, reasonable vision and set of alternatives that avoid the patchwork problem. The problem of conflicting, shifting, and incoherent priorities and objectives appears to be a common problem in governmental

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reform efforts in many nations (e.g., Halligan 1992; Savoie 1994:275)The Meaning of Sustained Leadership

As suggested earlier, NPR has the general outline of effective executive leadership. The initiative has received considerable support and attention from the top executives - the U.S. president and vice president. The NPR includes encouragement of the agencies to select from a variety of possible reforms, and to establish the reinvention labs. This approach conforms to the general outline of successful leadership of change described earlier. One can interpret the approach as involving executive encouragement and empowerment of the lower levels to experiment and innovate, under a broad vision of acheiving a more responsive, effective, flexible, less bureaucratic government. Then, presumably, the most effective alternatives could be recognized and disseminated. Yet this perspective also raises some nuances about leadership of organizational transformations. There must be some sustained support for innovations and innovators, and usually it must involve higher-level executives. The political top executives must find ways to provide sustained, substantial support, and not merely symbolic support. Symbolic support can be very important. As described above, Sanders (1994) notes the valuable role of the vice president in providing general permission to innovators working in the reinvention labs, and the energetic response in many of the labs. The hope, of course, is that the new, effective practices will build upon themselves. Their success will stimulate others to adopt them, more guerillas will join, and the revolution will spread. Symbolic "permission" has its limits, however. Sanders also describes disturbing instances in which the leaders who sought to be innovative and to press for change in the reinvention labs ultimately met with reprisals from their colleagues and superiors who had not joined the revolution. He describes complaints from people working with the reinvention labs about political appointees from the administration who were not

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supporting the efforts of the labs. Other than having the NPR task force staff act as a clearing house that provides publicity for some of the reinvention lab efforts, there is no strong executive or organizational arrangement for disseminating and institutionalizing promising developments from the labs. If the reinvenition labs, as well as other innovations and changes, are to have lasting success, the top leadership of the administration has to find ways to provide continuing support for the reformers in the system, and for the dissemination of the reforms. The executives must work against the impediments to reform described earlier. Against such impediments, what might top executives do? The president and vice president can devote more of their resources and attention to protection of innovators in the system. They can certainly make clear that encouragement and support for leaders and participants in reinvention labs is a very high priority for them, which they will back up in a variety of ways. Executive attention to individual cases can have a supporting effect in itself, especially if handled skilfully and positively in a way that shows benefits, such as good publicity, for the superiors of the individual to whom the vice president is paying attention. A stronger organizational base for supporting reforms can be considered, to translate executive leadership and support into organizational form. Obviously one wants to avoid creating still another bureaucracy in order to reform the bureaucracy. One possible alternative, however, is a nonpartisan standing commission, with an experienced executive leading it, a lean staff, sunset provisions, and a bipartisan board of directors or advisors. The commission could concentrate on identifying the most successful developments of reform and supporting them and their dissemination. In a case such as NPR, the commission's activities could focus on a more clearly defined set of initiatives, such as performance measurement, customer service standards, the reinvention labs, and carefully selected additions to this list. Halligan (1992) mentions a lack of follow-through as a problem in the implementation of the senior executive service reforms in Australia, and Sanders (1994) indicates a similar problem in the

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U.S. Inadequate preparation for implementation and inadequate follow-through during implementation phases appear to be very common problems with governmental reform efforts (Detsler 1981). That tendency underscores the importance of the challenges discussed here, of mounting sustained leadership, clarifying vision, strategy, and alternatives, and providing strong organization for implementation. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arnold, Peri E. 1995. Reform's changing role. Public Administration Review 55, 5:407-17. Ban, Carolyn. 1995. How do Public Managers Manage? San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Berry, Frances S., Richard Chackerian, and Barton Wechsler. 1996. Administrative Reform: Lessons from a State Capital. Paper presented at the National Conference of the American Society for Public Administration, Atlanta, Georgia, 2 July. Campbell, Colin, and John Halligan. 1993. Political Leadership in an Age of Constraint: The Australian Experience. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Detsler, I.M. 1981. Implementing reorganization. In Federal Reorganization: What Have We Learned? ed. P. Szanton, 114-30. Chatham, NJ: Chatham House. Gore, Al. 19933. From Red Tape to Results: Creating a Government That Works Better & Costs Less. Report of the National Performance Review. Washington, DC: u.s. Government Printing Office. - i993b. From Red Tape to Results: Creating a Government That Works Better & Costs Less. Reinventing Human Resource Management. Accompanying Report of the National Performance Review. Washington, DC: u.s. Government Printing Office. - 1995. Common Sense Government: Works Better and Costs Less. Third Report of the National Performance Review. Washington, DC: u.s. Government Printing Office. Greiner, Larry E. 1967. Patterns of organizational change. Harvard Business Review 45:119-28. Gustafsson, Lennart. 1990. Promoting flexibility through pay policy -

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experience from the Swedish National Administration. In Flexible Personnel Management in Government, OECD, 27-38. Paris: OECD. Halligan, John. 1992. A comparative lesson: the senior executive service in Australia. In The Promise and Paradox of Civil Service Reform, ed. Patricia W. Ingraham and David H. Rosenbloom, 283-302. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Harper, Kirke. 1992. The senior executive service after one decade. In The Promise and Paradox of Civil Service Reform, ed. Patricia W. Ingraham and David H. Rosenbloom, 267-82. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Hood, Christopher. 1991. A public management for all seasons? Public Administration 69,1:3-20. - and B. Guy Peters, eds. 1994. Rewards at the Top: A Comparative Study of High Public Office.London: Sage. Horner, Constance. 1994. Deregulating the federal service: is the time right? In Deregulating the Public Service, ed. John J. Dilulio, Jr, 85-101. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution. Ingraham, Patricia W. 19933. Of pigs in pokes and policy diffusion: another look at pay-for-performance. Public Administration Review 53, 4:348-56. - i993b. Flexible pay systems in the United States federal government. In Pay Flexiblity in the Public Sector, OECD, 147-62. Paris: OECD. Ink, Dwight. 1996. Does reinventing government have an Achilles heel? The Public Manager 24, 4:27-30. Kellough, J. Edward, and Haoran Lu. 1993. The paradox of merit pay in the public sector: persistence of a problematic concept. Review of Public Personnel Administration, 13, 2:45-64. Kettl, Donald F. 1994. Reinventing Government: Appraising the National Performance Review. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution (CPM Report 94-2). Knott, J.H., and G.J. Miller. 1987. Reforming Bureaucracy. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Kotter, John P. 1995. Leading change: why transformation efforts fail. Harvard Business Review 73 (March-April):59~67. Kraemer, Kenneth L. 1996. Managing information systems. In Handbook of Public Administration, 2nd ed., ed. James L. Perry, 574-89. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

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Laegreid, Per. 1994. Norway. In Rewards At the Top: A Comparative Study of High Public Office, ed. Christopher Hood and B. Guy Peters, 133-45. London: Sage. Lawler, Edward E. 1990. Strategic Pay. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Macy, John W. 1971. The Public Service. New York: Harper and Row. Marsden, David. 1993. Reforming public sector pay. In Pay Flexibility in the Public Sector, OECD, 19-42. Paris: OECD. OECD. 1990. Flexible Personnel Management in Government. Paris: OECD. - 1993. Pay Flexiblity in the Public Sector. Paris: OECD. Osborne, David, and Tom Gaebler. 1992. Reinventing Government. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Perry, James L., B.A. Petrakis, and T.K. Miller. 1989. Federal pay, round ii: an analysis of the performance management and recognition system. Public Administration Review 49,1:29-37. - and Kenneth L. Kra emer. 1993. The implications of changing technology. In Revitalizing State and Local Public Service, ed. Frank J. Thompson, 225-45. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Peters, B. Guy, and Donald Savoie. 1994. Civil service reform: misdiagnosing the patient. Public Administration Review 54, 5:418-25. Peters, Tom. 1987. Thriving on Chaos. New York: Knopf. Rainey, Glenn W., and Hal G. Rainey. 1984. Breaching the hierarchical imperative: the modularization of the social security claims process. In Bureaucratic and Governmental Reform. JAI Research Annual in Public Policy Analysis and Management, ed. D.J. Calista, 171-95. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Rainey, Hal G., Rex Facer, and Barry Bozeman. 1995. Repeated findings of sharp differences between public and private managers' perceptions of personnel rules. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, 31 August to 3 September. Sanders, Ronald P. 1994. Reinventing the senior executive service. In New Paradigms for Government, ed. Patricia W. Ingraham and Barbara S. Romzek, 215-38. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. - 1998. Heroes of the revolution: characteristics and strategies of reinvention leaders. In Transforming Government: The Realities of Managing Change in Public Organizations, P. W. Ingraham, R.P. Sanders, J.R. Thompson, and Associates, 29-57. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

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- and James Thompson. 1996. The reinvention revolution. Government Executive 28, 3 (March):i-i2. Savoie, Donald. 1994. Thatcher, Reagan, Mulroney: In Search of a New Bureaucracy. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Seidman, H., and R. Gilmour. 1986. Politics, Position and Power. Boston: Little, Brown. Thompson, Frank ]., ed. 1993. Revitalizing State and Local Public Service. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. U.S. General Accounting Office. 1996. Management Reform: Status of Agency Reinvention Lab Efforts.Washington, DC: u.s. General Accounting Office. Volcker Commission. 1989. Leadership for America: Rebuilding the Public Service. Lexington, MA: Heath. Wechsler, Barton. 1994. Reinventing Florida's civil service system: the failure of reform. Review of Public Personnel Administration 14,2:64-76. Wise, Lois R. 1994. Implementing pay reform in the public sector: different approaches to flexible pay in Sweden and the United States. International Journal of Public Administration 17,10:1937-59. - and Svenska Gallupinstitutet. 1996. Survey of central government employees: attitudes toward pay flexibility in central government. A report prepared for Arbetsgivarverket, Stockholm. Zifcak, Spencer. 1994. Neiu Managerialism. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Innovation in Public Sector Management MICHEL PAQUIN

Schumpeter has defined innovation as the process by which new products and techniques are introduced, and as such it is part of the entrepreneur's role (Gow 1994:2). The definition has gradually been broadened to include innovation in the realm of ideas (Schneider, Teske, and Mintrom 1995:7). Innovation can therefore be defined as the introduction of a new idea, product, service, method, or technique into a society. An innovation may be an invention (an entirely original idea) or it may be borrowed or adapted from another source. Public sector entrepreneurship is not an unusual phenomenon. In their study of a thousand American municipalities, Schneider, Teske and Mintrom found hundreds of entrepreneurs (1995:214). Public entrepreneurs are motivated by a combination of incentives such as power, the opportunity to influence policy, prestige, and service to the public. In the public sector, many entrepreneurs introduce innovations into the organizations for which they are responsible, whether as elected representatives or administrators. Successful innovations, especially those that increase efficiency in the delivery of services and improve receptiveness to public expectations, elicit a positive response. Innovations entail systemic changes insofar as they are adopted by others. Thus waves of reform appear and reach administrations at every level: local, state or provincial, and national (Schneider, Teske, and Mintrom 1995). Managers therefore have 221

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no choice but to change the way they operate. These changes take many forms: treating citizens as clients, motivating and mobilizing employees, restructuring, and privatizing. A study carried out by Gow (1994) on administrative innovation in Canadian governments indicates that the primary agents for innovative change are public servants and the central agencies, with other important agents being commissions, whether royal or other, interest groups, consultants, ministers, and members of Parliament. As for the dissemination process, it includes inventions and ideas borrowed from literature, followed by a large dose of emulation. According to Boston (1994:114), the mechanisms used for the international transfer of ideas on public management are the following: international organizations (seminars, publications, research, exchanges); international consulting firms; international professional or academic conferences; inter-governmental contacts; university and public service training and research programs; and publications including international journals, books, and government reports. There appear to be three sources of inspiration for innovation in the public sector. First, there are the administrative reforms, that is to say, major changes that are decreed by the nation states that influence other nations inspired by them, such as the Canadian special operating agencies (SOAS) that are modelled after British executive agencies. However, while there are similarities in the reforms being undertaken by certain countries, substantial differences remain as to the nature of the reforms, their importance, and the rate of implementation (Holmes and Shand 1995; Aucoin 1995). Second, studies on the best public sector practices have been based on specific case studies such as those reported by Osborne and Gaebler (1992), by Denhardt (1993), and by Barzelay (1992); or those reported by Borins (1992) and Savoie (1993), which focused on the participants in the Canadian Institute of Public Administration's innovative management competition (there are innovative management competitions in many countries).

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Third/ there are management practices introduced in certain public organizations that rapidly become fashionable. In most cases, these practices are already widespread in the private sector, where they become quasi-religions, such as Total Quality Management (TQM) and process reengineering. However practices can also be found that are unique to the public sector, such as quality standards for service to the public and program evaluation. Obviously, these sources of innovation are related. Some reforms are decreed because organizations have tried them and the reform then is a matter of imposing on everyone a practice followed by a few. Furthermore, the reinvention of management in some public organizations frequently draws on certain practices that are already fashionable in the private sector. For the purposes of this paper, we will examine the third trend, in which innovation in management is derived from the fashion of the day, whether in management approaches or systems. In this case, the innovation generally follows a pattern, as follows: • An experiment with a new approach that constitutes a major breakthrough for an organization is reported in a prestigious journal such as the Harvard Business Review. • This gives rise to other experiments that are documented in turn. • A guru (often the person who published the first article in the prestigious journal) publishes a work introducing and promoting the new approach. • Little by little, works proliferate and eventually some authors go on to write articles and books describing the specific characteristics of the public sector. • Managers who are trying to avoid being seen as dinosaurs feel they have no choice but to jump on the bandwagon. • The adoption of innovations quickly skyrockets, first in the private sector and then in the public sector. • After a few years, articles of a more critical nature begin to proliferate reflecting a certain disenchantment, mainly because the results do not match expectations, and a new guru

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appears on the scene with a new revolutionary approach, ready to displace whatever practice is currently in fashion. The studies carried out by Poister and Streib (1994) on American municipalities show us that a management technique can be adopted very quickly. In a few years, a substantial proportion of municipalities are following the new approaches, but usually a ceiling of about 75 percent is reached. Furthermore, traditional methods may still continue to be widely used. Thus, in 1993, 60 percent of American municipalities were still using program budgets. It should be noted, then, that management innovations result from inventions that can spread very rapidly. Those who adopt a new technique usually make more or less significant adaptations. We will see that when an innovation appears in the private sector and then spreads through the public sector, its success depends largely on the adaptations that are made to it to take into account the characteristics of the public sector. It should also be noted that if innovation in management is partly a matter of fashion, this means that many organizations are adopting a new approach without paying too much attention to its relevance to their particular needs. The introduction of a new approach that rapidly gains popularity does not necessarily mean that existing approaches will disappear, despite the "death certificates" some have issued. Denouncing previous approaches or pointing out their limitations is part of the effort to market a new idea without necessarily causing the disappearance of existing, well-established management systems. The essential elements or, failing that, their concepts usually remain. These "deaths" are therefore more apparent than real. The impression that a management approach is outdated is caused by the fact that people no longer talk about it, not that it has been abandoned. Indeed, management approaches must be seen as complementing one another rather than as being in competition, with those that are making breakthroughs being hailed as the approach of the hour.

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Introducing a new management approach as a panacea, if it contributes to a rapid breakthrough, is not accomplished without creating problems: first it discredits earlier efforts to improve management, and later it creates unreasonable expectations. The new approach is often poorly understood, and may be applied blindly. The numerous failures that result from poor implementation fuel cynicism toward attempts to improve management, which further complicates the management of change. This chapter will examine three management practices that have dominated the literature since the 19803: strategic management or planning; the quality movement, in particular TQM; and, finally, process reengineering. These practices are not the only ones to have enjoyed a certain vogue, but they are certainly the ones that have been adopted by the largest number of organizations, both public and private. We will present the special features of each of these practices, examine the extent to which they have been adopted by the public sector, discuss their limitations and the issues raised by their use, explain how these practices must be adapted when they are introduced in the public sector and, finally, see what lessons can be drawn from implementing these practices in the public sector. We have opted for an international perspective by studying the situation in five countries: the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and France. STRATEGIC

PLANNING

The Nature of Strategic Planning

During the 19803 strategic corporate planning, which had more or less fallen into disfavour, rose from its ashes under the name strategic management. Its authors then put more emphasis on strategy implementation, an aspect that had been neglected in the past, and which now would explain the failures experienced. In the public sector the two terms - strategic planning and strategic management - seem to be used interchangeably and both are currently in use. The strategic planning of the 19803 is distinguished

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from earlier practices in a number of ways. On the one hand the major role played by managers is emphasized over and above that of the experts, and on the other these managers are strongly influenced by the new management ideas that focus on excellence, the mobilization of employees around a common mission and corporate culture, and the need for bureaucratic culture to give way to a culture of serving the public. In a work that deals with the strategic performance of companies and governments, Summer (1980) provides a good illustration of the fact that public administrations, like private companies, carry out proactive strategic analyses that are intended to bring an organization's production of goods and services into line with the demands of clients, beneficiaries, and suppliers. The strategy thereby focuses on adapting to the external environment and stresses the organization's mission. There are a number of approaches to strategic planning, but according to available studies (Berry and Wechsler 1995; Charih and Paquin 1993; Ervin 1992), the most current model consists of identifying strategic issues by means of an analysis of the external risks and opportunities the organization is facing and an analysis of the organization's internal strengths and weaknesses. The strategies subsequently formulated aim at resolving the strategic issues thus identified. Strategic planning creates a vision of the organization's success and it proposes an action plan. The Use of Strategic Planning in the Public Sector

Strategic planning has become current practice in public administrations in the major developed countries. Inspired by new management ideas, it constitutes a new phenomenon that is different from previous planning methods. In the United States, strategic planning did not receive much attention from public administrations until the early 19805. Today, federal agencies, like those of states and towns, rely on strategic plans (Berry and Wechsler 1995; Poister and Streib 1994). In Canada, strategic planning is a current practice in the federal and provincial administrations. At the federal level, deputy

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ministers focus their leadership on, among other things, strategic planning, an exercise that involves a systematic and collective examination of the department's mission (Swift 1993). The system for managing expenditures introduced in 1995 gives a central role to strategic planning in general, and more specifically requires departments to prepare business plans (Aucoin 1995:187). Pollitt and Harrison (1993) report that strategic management was in vogue in the public sector in Great Britain at the end of the 19805. In a number of cases, however, the process of introducing strategic planning was just beginning. In Australia, the evaluation report on administrative reform, published in 1992, reached the conclusion that, with the exception of several small agencies, strategic planning (corporate planning) had been widely established. The approach taken by most agencies was to regard their corporate plan as comprising the program plans and a document defining strategic orientation or corporate values (Task Force on Management Improvement 1992). Launched in 1987, French policy on administrative modernization incorporates a number of tools, including "departmental statements" or projects. These projects must reflect departmental missions, define goals, announce strategies and implement action plans. A working group set up in December 1993 by the minister of the public service, under the leadership of Herve Serieyx, evaluated 594 departmental projects. From the studies carried out by this working group, it appears that 80 percent of France's senior executives said they had become involved in change initiatives and 40 percent were involved in service projects (Commissariat general du plan 1994). Public Sector Strategic Planning: Limitations and Issues

Although strategic planning is widely used, it is not without certain limitations, and its application in the public sector raises particular difficulties. A number of authors have noted that the differences between the private and public sectors explain why strategic planning is not applied in the same way in the two sectors (Bryson 1988; Bryson and Roering 1987; Crow and

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Bozeman 1988; Eldridge 1989; Halachmi 1986; Nutt and Backoff 1992, 1993, 1995; Paquin 1992; Ring and Perry 1985). The main differences have to do with legal frameworks, the nature of competition, the influence exerted by the client, political leadership, its public character and the managerial, and organizational systems currently used in the public sector. Public organizations (departments, local communities, and public institutions) exist within legal frameworks (laws and regulations) that determine the responsibilities or duties that are assigned to them, their methods of organization and financing, and the controls to which they are subject. A public organization cannot determine, of its own free will, the extent of its jurisdiction (its position within its environment) or even its organization and management systems. This framework of constraints substantially limits its room to manoeuvre and, as a result, strategic planning does not have the same meaning in the public sector as it does in the private sector. While the notion of competition is not totally absent from the public sector (public sector organizations are in a way competing for public funds), it does not have the same meaning as in the private sector and is generally less intense. This means that public organizations do not face the same issues as private companies, particularly concerning their chances of survival; it also means that strategic management does not have the same importance for them. Furthermore, it is generally thought that a public organization is only one element in a larger system (the health care system, the educational system, and so on) in which the various components are interdependent and must be coordinated. This coordination may be based on planning carried out by a central authority, or it may also be based on a strategy of collaboration among institutions. Public sector strategic planning models should therefore go beyond competitive approaches and allow for collaboration among partners. In the public sector the concept of the client and client service is often different from the situation that prevails in the private sector. Recent literature on management has stressed the import-

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ance of listening to one's client. In the public sector the concept of the client is now sometimes ambiguous. Further on we will develop this more fluid concept of the client and the limitations it places on the quality approach. Envisaging a strategy of improving the quality of service is difficult as well, in that this means increased costs without correspondingly increased revenues. Public organizations are often led by a political authority that is made up of elected representatives. The political leadership of public organizations has an impact on the process of strategic planning in several ways. First, time is an important variable for elected representatives, since the electoral cycle makes it difficult to consider actions that will have long-term effects only. Furthermore, changes in the political leadership may be frequent (following an election or a cabinet shuffle, for instance) and may lead to strategies that are just as changeable, as new representatives want to set themselves apart from their predecessors. There are other impacts of political leadership: the objectives pursued are more numerous, more ambiguous, and more difficult to quantify. Planned administrative goals are either replaced or overtaken by political objectives. Finally, the presence of a political leadership poses the problem of what role should be played by elected representatives in defining strategies. Traditionally, the role of designing strategies has been attributed to the political level and the responsibility for implementing them has been attributed to the administrative level. In practice, the administrative level usually plays a key role in formulating strategy, but it cannot proceed independently of the political level. The respective roles of elected representatives and public managers are therefore specific aspects of strategic management in the public sector that differentiate it from the private sector. Public sector organizations are public by nature, which means that their environment is more diversified, that they are accountable to a larger number of stakeholders, and that they must be more transparent. Consequently, public policies are often the result of compromises that are reached with difficulty, and the coalitions on which they are based can be unstable. This leads to

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strategies that are being continuously renegotiated. The management of interest groups is therefore a more critical variable for public organizations than it is for private companies. A final factor leading to differences between the way strategic management is practised in the public and private sectors relates to management systems and organizational structures. Public organizations are usually subject to greater constraints. They are part of a much more centralized system and the approvals required for implementation can be difficult to obtain, in particular because of political resistance at other levels or internal rigidity associated with current management policies and practices. Adapting Private Sector Models

The strategic planning models and approaches designed for private business must be modified significantly if they are to be applied to the public sector. The modifications required differ according to type of organization and sector of activity. Thus, fewer changes need to be made when public institutions are involved rather than government departments and agencies, where a certain competition exists and the client is free to choose. Designing approaches that are adapted to each type of organization is therefore a challenge for public managers and researchers. The question of whether strategic planning as practised in the private sector can be applied to the public sector is a complex one, particularly because there are a number of approaches to strategic planning. It should be noted, however, that strategic planning approaches are not all intended for the same purposes. Some propose models for planning processes, while others are oriented instead toward defining the content of strategies. This is why these approaches are complementary rather than contradictory. According to the analyses carried out by Bryson and Roering (1987) and by Nutt and Backoff (1992), the various approaches developed for the private sector are applicable to the public sector, but only under certain circumstances and only if they are adapted. For example, competition analysis is only applied to organizations that belong to clearly identified industries (for example, public

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hospitals) and on condition that the possibility of collaboration between institutions is considered. Bryson and Roering (1987), Bryson (1988), and Nutt and Backoff (1992) present a process of strategic planning adapted to the public sector that retains elements of various approaches; all these authors, however, warn readers against using their model in specific areas as the process used must be customized to each situation. Lessons Learned In the countries we have studied, strategic management seems to be a fairly widespread practice. The few surveys that have looked at the degree of satisfaction vis-a-vis this management practice leave the impression that it is considered useful in the majority of cases (Poister and Streib 1994; Task Force on Management Improvement 1992). However, strategic planning exercises vary in quality. In some cases there is a poor understanding of the concepts involved and the analyses performed are of questionable value. In other cases strategic planning is a ritual carried out to satisfy the requirements of other organizations and is not really useful. To be successful strategic planning must be applied in appropriate situations, that is to say, in situations that are not too turbulent. Public managers must also have a good understanding of what strategic planning is, and must make the necessary effort to design a process adapted to their organization. They must agree to invest the time and resources required. When these conditions are fulfilled we can hope for significant results, such as a better definition of priorities, reinforcement of the organization's culture, a greater mobilization of employees, better internal communication, better communication with citizens, and improved client services (Berry and Wechsler 1995:165; Charih and Paquin 1993). THE QUALITY MOVEMENT

In the 19805 the discourse on quality was on the political agenda in most developed countries. Thus, according to a report by the OECD (1987), the need for administrations to be more responsive

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is a major problem facing public authorities and almost all the member countries of the OECD have made a commitment to address this issue. The quality movement includes three facets. In the first part of the 19805 quality circles appeared in some countries; they offered a formula emphasizing the voluntary participation of employees in improvement teams. This formula was only moderately successful, mainly because of the leadership problems it raised. Then reference standards for service were key elements of administrative reforms in most countries. In some cases high impact documents were resorted to: the Charte de I'utilisateur des services publics [Public Service Users' Charter] in Belgium; the Charte des services publics [Public Service Charter] in France; the Charte de la qualite des services publics [Charter on the Quality of Public Services] in Portugal; the Citizen's Charter in the United Kingdom (OECD 1995:64-5). Finally, it is important to note the introduction into the public sector of a complete approach to quality management borrowed from the private sector, called Total Quality Management (TQM), also called the continuous improvement process. In some countries, TQM preceded the service standards approach,whereas in others it came later. The Nature of Quality Management The traditional definition of "quality" refers to the characteristics of a product or aspects of a service and their conformity to standards. A second dimension is added to substance or quantity, namely quality or characteristics. According to Trosa (1995), quality has three meanings: (i) the overall evaluation of a service through the eyes of citizens (for example, the quality of justice or postal services); (2) quality in the sense of the best response to one or more requirements, as in quality circles or Total Quality Management; (3) quality as a criterion that has been defined on the basis of a professional evaluation (corresponding to uniform technical standards). In TQM, the notion of quality affects all aspects of the transformation process: the quality of inputs (raw materials, orders, clients in some cases), employees, means of production (material

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and equipment), methods and procedures, the physical work environment, the characteristics of the goods produced or the services rendered to internal and external clients (Carr and Littman 1990). TQM is total in that it involves everyone in the organization and that this total management approach affects the culture and systems that influence all the internal processes. The Use of the Quality Approach in the Public Sector

The quality approach in its various forms has been widely used within the public administrations of the major developed countries. In terms of the use of TQM, the u.s. public sector is probably, according to Ingraham (1995), the most advanced. Most of the federal agencies and state governments, as well as a large number of municipalities, have adopted it. Since 1988 all federal agencies have been required to have programs designed to improve quality and productivity. On 11 September 1993 President Clinton issued a directive asking all departments working with the public to identify who their clients are or should be; to conduct a survey of these clients to identify the quality of service they desired and their opinion of the current quality; to post service standards and compare results to these standards; to benchmark themselves against the best in the field; to solicit the opinions of employees regarding problems and their solutions; to offer choices to clients as to sources of services, and the means of providing them; to make information, services, and a system for registering complaints easily accessible; and, finally, to provide the means for taking care of client complaints (Kettl 199^:35). In September 1995, Vice President Gore indicated that 98 percent of the agencies had developed service standards (Gore 1995:94). In Canada improving client service is a very important issue for all levels of government. At the federal level, improving service to the public is one of the key principles underlying the public service renewal initiative undertaken in 1989 (Canada 1990). The White Paper that came out of this exercise advocated replacing the

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bureaucratic culture by a service culture. The report of the Working Group on Service to the Public was highly influenced by the principles of quality management. It called for an evaluation of the public service culture to determine to what extent it was oriented toward service and toward the development of service standards that would be made public. The progress report published in 1992 indicates that the development of performance targets and service standards was very uneven (Seidle 1995:81). However in June 1995, the cabinet approved guidelines for an initiative called quality service. Working groups developed a series of manuals published in October 1995 at the same time as a brochure entitled Quality Services: An Overview in which the "Statement on the principles of the quality of service" appeared (Canada 1995). By 1996 most departments had published standards to serve as reference points, making it possible to measure the accessibility of services, their reliability, their relevance and the time required (Canada 1996:27). In the United Kingdom the Citizen's Charter, which was the subject of a White Paper in 1991, is a program for all public sector organizations, which are required to publish their own charters defining the services they offer to their clientele and the service standards they agree to uphold. In a recent study Seidle (1995:46) observes that the development of service standards and efforts to ensure that these standards are respected are some of the current activities of the organizations to which the charter is addressed. Seidle concludes that there have been real improvements in terms of delivering services. In Australia TQM has been adopted by many agencies. Using an approach that focuses on the client has been an important strategy for a number of agencies trying to motivate their employees towards continuous improvement. Measures were taken to speed up service delivery, to create single-window service so that the right person would be contacted, and to increase accessibility, for example, by lengthening business hours and improving telephone accessibility (Task Force on Management Improvement 1992). In France the first quality circles began appearing within the administration in 1985, and the support given after 1986 to the quality process by public authorities gave it a new impetus.

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Quality seemed to become the new dominant issue for the administration (Chevallier 1988). In 1991-92, a large-scale collaboration with user associations, undertaken as an initiative of the minister of the Fonction publique [public service department], brought about the drafting of a "charter for users." In France the user is at times the focus of the departmental "project" and largescale departments have often done surveys on user satisfaction (Commissariat general du plan 1994). The Quality Approach in the Public Sector: Limitations and Issues

The quality approach, when used in the public sector, has a number of limitations and creates considerable challenges. The problems raised are the following: the concept of the client is different in the public sector, and there is a conflict between maintaining uniformity and adapting the approach to particular needs. The nature of public services often makes it difficult to develop adequate measures and standards. There is a quality versus quantity dilemma. The culture of the public sector and some of its management systems constitute obstacles to TQM. Finally, the political nature of public administrations makes them environments that are hardly receptive to TQM. One problem often mentioned is that the concept of the client is different when applied to the public rather than the private sector. According to Schwartz, Currey, and Carlson (1995), the relationship between a company and its clients differs from the relationship between a government and its citizens. Citizens conceptualize the quality of a service differently than do clients of a business. In fact, research indicates that the two factors deemed most important to citizens in terms of the delivery of quality services are equal treatment of all clients and fiscal responsibility, two dimensions that are not present for the clients of a business. Other factors, however, apply alike to both the public and private sectors. In the public sector the client does not have the same central role as in the private sector. The quality of service is determined not only by the user and the service provider (often in place of the

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user), but by a number of third parties, such as the media, the members of certain professions, and others. It is impossible to please all of these stakeholders at the same time (Halachmi 19953). There is, however, real merit in a client-centred approach. While it is true that the concept of the client is more problematic in the public sector and that the government has to face conflicting demands, this situation should not be exaggerated because the principle of identifying client needs and trying to satisfy them is self-evident. Public administrations are required both to treat everyone equally and to adapt services to particular needs. The public sector has never resolved the conflict between the requirement to treat people uniformly and the desire of citizens not to be treated as numbers but as human beings. Proposed changes to the process might be contrary to ethics and the rules of law (Halachmi 19953). One of the unique challenges facing government is the need to balance individual discretion when dealing with a client against the demands of accountability and control that go hand in hand with a parliamentary government. Empowerment poses special challenges because it encourages managers and employers to innovate, assume responsibility for change, and be accountable in an environment that accepts risks (Rawson 1991). However, experience shows that the client service approach is not incompatible with political accountability. This approach offers enormous potential and is the most useful one in terms of managing bureaucratic discretion (Kettl 1994^). The nature of public services is such that the establishment of yardsticks and standards and the development of effective methods of control and quality assurance become difficult. Public services are intangible and cannot be warehoused; their production and consumption are not separated in time; the producer of the service is part of the product because receiving the service implies a personal relationship with the provider; and finally, the consumer is necessary to the provision of the service. Because of these characteristics, quality standards are difficult to establish and maintain because they will vary from one producer and user to another. In the area of services, clients are the ones who are warehoused by means of lists and line-ups (Walsh 1991).

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Thanks to the continuous improvement of processes, TQM frees up resources through rationalization. Rago (1994) thus stresses the existence of a quality-quantity dilemma: should we serve clients on the waiting list, or should we serve current clients better? If it is true that TQM does not automatically guarantee an improvement in the quality of services, it is nonetheless true that it can offer interesting possibilities, whether at the level of quality, coverage of services, or economies achieved. While the objective pursued is nevertheless the improvement of quality, it is important not to jeopardize the efforts undertaken by diverting them to other ends. A number of characteristics of public sector management are difficult to reconcile with the principles of TQM. While participatory management is one of the pillars of TQM in public organizations, the chain of command model continues to predominate. Overspecialization is one element in the systems for defining positions and recruiting personnel that works against the promotion of teamwork and cooperation. Finally, the annual budget process does not encourage departments to improve quality while reducing costs but rather encourages them to engage in practices and games intended to protect and extend their budgetary bases (Milakovich 1991). The fact that public administrations are directed by elected representatives poses various problems in introducing the quality approach. According to Kettl (1994^ the problem of performance in government is due in large part to hypersensitivity to the wishes of clients rather than to insensitivity to the demands of citizens; elected representatives are preoccupied with these demands and are not very interested in the issues of costs and quality. Furthermore, the objection is sometimes made that TQM is not very welcome in the public sector since public administrators are not as free to strive for performance as they would like to be because elected representatives meddle in operations (Morgan and Murgatroyd 1994). Finally, TQM requires continuous support from executives, whereas elected representatives have a mandate of limited duration and want short-term results (Halachmi 19953). Indeed, public administrations increasingly operate on the basis of new institutional arrangements, such as autonomous agencies,

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and elected representatives seem to be more and more in favour of the merits of empowerment insofar as they find satisfactory solutions to the question of accountability. An analysis of political discourse leaves the impression that elected representatives have become, in many cases, advocates of performance, and this is the kind of talk voters want to hear. Adapting Private Sector Models The concepts, tools, and applications forming the nucleus of TQM (those related to improving processes) are applicable to all organizational contexts, whereas other concepts developed for manufacturing purposes have to be adapted to public services, and the application of still other concepts is clearly problematic (Morgan and Murgatroyd 1994). TQM has a basic philosophy, key concepts, and tools that can be used universally. The key concepts are the necessity of relating TQM to the vision and strategy of the organization; translating the policy of quality into action plans; having indicators that make it possible to measure the attainment of goals; managing and coordinating efforts at improving quality; establishing improvement teams made up of employees who improve their processes continuously; systematically using information on the processes and needs of clients; having an implied direction for change; realigning the management of performance around the work teams and goals of the organization; satisfying the needs of priority stakeholders; and finally, training employees (Morgan and Murgatroyd 1994:185). The points on which adaptation focuses are zero defect (we have a specific interpretation that implies working according to regulations or codes of conduct defined by professionals and their clients); consumer satisfaction (users are not the only stakeholders who have to be taken into account); and empowerment of employees (the extent of the empowerment must be adapted to the context) (Morgan and Murgatroyd 1994:186). To this list can be added the need to conceptualize the quality of the service by taking into account the factors that citizens consider among the most

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important, such as equal treatment and fiscal responsibility, as well as factors that apply equally to both the public and private sectors. The problematic aspects are benchmarking (there are unique processes that are difficult to compare); zero defection (in the public sector, you do not necessarily want to keep the client and you therefore have to adapt this criterion); and daily reporting (this element is not always applicable) (Morgan and Murgatroyd 1994:188). Lessons Learned The countries studied have all made significant efforts to improve the quality of public services, either by adopting a charter on the quality of public services, insisting that agencies establish standards and systems for measuring quality, or encouraging improvement projects for services and turning to practices such as TQM. Little evaluative research has been carried out on the subject but the general idea that emerges from the published work is that these efforts have, to a certain point, borne fruit. Some, however, have noted the weakness of the models used, for example Kettl (1994^ in the case of the United States and Doern (1994) in the case of Canada. It is particularly clear that the impact of the TQM method has often led to hasty implementation, that the concepts were not always clearly understood and that the adaptations required by the unique character of the public sector have not generally been carried out. This may have considerably limited the usefulness of the new practices. PROCESS R E I N G I N E E R I N G

The Nature of Process Reengineering

Although some authors give the term "reengineering" a different meaning, it generally applies to an organization's processes. The most frequently cited definition of reengineering is that of Hammer and Champy (1993:32), who view reengineering as a fundamental reappraisal and radical redefinition of processes in

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order to achieve spectacular gains in today's critical performances of cost, quality, service, and speed. Although the prime object of reengineering is the process itself, reengineering is based on two pillars or enablers: technology and organizational (structural and cultural) variables (Davenport 1993). The basic idea of reengineering is as follows: given currently available technologies and new organizational ideas (for example, the concept of the self-managed team), what process would you choose if you were to start over from scratch? One must consider TQM and reengineering to be complementary approaches to process management: the innovation phase of the process (reengineering) is followed by a phase of continuous improvement. The Use of Reengineering in the Public Sector

Since the 1993 publication of Hammer and Champy's Reengineering the Corporation, reengineering has become a phenomenal success. A 1994 study of some u.s. and European companies reveals that 69 percent of the American firms and 75 percent of the European ones were engaged in one or more reengineering projects. Half of the remaining were considering using the process (Champy 1995:2). However, reengineering has advanced less quickly in the public sector than in the private sector, where it has given rise to more rhetoric than reality (Halachmi i995b; Mechling 1994). Examples of reengineering are nevertheless numerous. We will consider examples from two countries: the United States and Canada. Although no studies exist on the use of reengineering within the u.s. public sector, several authors have reported experiments which would lead one to believe that the trend is a rather popular one, as much within the federal government as at the state and municipal levels (Kettl 19943:247; Mechling 1994; Linden 1994; Borins 1995). The National Performance Review (NPR) report promises the reengineering of government activities, the elimination of obsolete structures and of redundancies, and the use of information technologies. The companion report to the NPR,

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Reengineering through Information Technology (Office of the Vice President 1993) notes the government has been slower than some private companies to adopt information technologies to reformulate the way business is done. What has therefore been proposed is electronic government, in the form of electronic payment of social benefits, integrated access to government services and information, the public security network, tax collection and payment, the international trade data system, environmental data, and, finally, government e-mail. In 1993 the position of chief informatics officer was created at the Treasury Board of Canada. It oversaw the publication of the Blueprint for Renewing Government Services Using Information Technology (Canada 1994), which emphasizes process reengineering by providing access to new information technologies. Several experiments are underway within the Public Service of Canada, notably at Citizenship and Immigration Canada, Human Resources Development Canada (income security programs), and Statistics Canada (Ingstrup 1995:19). The Blueprint stresses renewing government services from a global perspective. In its call for information technologies, it is trying to improve service performance for the benefit of clients and staff (Canada 1994). This reengineering fad is not limited to the federal level. The media have given considerable coverage to instances of reengineering in the ministries or organizations of several provinces, and in municipalities as well. Process Reengineering in the Public Sector. Limitations and Issues One of the issues related to process reengineering within the public sector is the time element for elected officials who oppose the concept as being an attempt to bring about long-term change. To make reengineering an acceptable option, one must demonstrate its short-term benefits to service performance (Caudle 1994). Furthermore, the goals set out in law are often ambiguous. Many objectives other than efficiency are sought, and consequently agreeing on how to measure performance becomes a

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difficult task (Caudle 1994). In fact, reengineering and TQM face the same measurement and client-evaluation problems. In the public sector, program administration can be spread out among numerous agencies and several levels of government. The government therefore has to look beyond the direct user (Caudle 1994) and must focus on opportunities which cross organizational boundaries (Mechling 1994). This multi-organizational aspect may make reengineering a more complex undertaking. The public sector is not risk oriented, so reengineering, being risky, is therefore not appropriate for all situations or organizations. In practice, its introduction is less revolutionary than would be indicated by the approach or objective targeted by reengineering; thus one might want to introduce it through more easily managed steps. Despite the risks, reengineering may be, in the current context, essential for government and must take a more prominent position in the political landscape (Mechling 1994). Another difficulty results from the legal restrictions and the procedures imposed by central agencies at a time when radical decentralization is required (Halachmi i995b; Caudle 1994). Centralized administrative rules and systems are much more difficult to change than those internal rules and systems over which an organization has direct control. The impact of reengineering can constitute a major obstacle in job classification, payroll, and training (Halachmi 199^). Reengineering often entails a major redefining of the jobs in question, without counting the problems related to the elimination of jobs that will henceforth be declared surplus, and to the reclassification of the affected employees. Job security, then, can represent a major issue when introducing reengineering into the public sector. Finally, the funds necessary for technology and employee training may not be available for process reengineering in the public sector. Financing methods must therefore be found (Halachmi i995b). One is thus faced with the paradox of lacking the money needed to save money. Budgets that are planned without making allowances for ties between operating and capital budgets are sometimes as much at fault as some practices associated with across-the-board budget cutbacks.

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Adapting Private Sector Models

While process reengineering concepts, principles, and tools generally apply to the public sector, some aspects must be adapted while others are problematic. As in quality management it must be recognized that the notion of client cannot be reduced to that of user - other stakeholders must be considered. It should also be remembered that the concept of service quality differs in certain respects within the public service. Among the problem areas is that of benchmarking processes for which there are no points of comparison. This is especially true in the case of unique operational processes. For example, a government usually has only one system for managing public lands. Comparison is therefore difficult since foreign countries operate under different legal and administrative conditions. Despite these limitations much can be learned from the study of practices followed elsewhere. Process reengineering is based on the clean-slate principle. That is, one must conceive a process by disregarding the existing process; one wants to invent something new rather than simply improve what already exists. However, wiping the slate clean can cause problems. Should the rules of the central agencies and the legal and regulatory provisions applicable to the process be ignored? If existing legislation and regulations are not taken as gospel, it might be wise to create more than one scenario, allowing for instances when one would and would not consider changes to existing laws and regulations. It is only by identifying the cost of current regulations that one may truly hope to modify them. One must therefore start as though with a clean slate in order eventually to introduce external constraints (Linden 1994:172). Lessons Learned Process reengineering is a recent management practice. It is timely given the financial restrictions faced by most governments, and is an approach which makes it possible to meet demands both for improved services and for significantly reduced costs. It is compatible with the move to quality and it is a natural complement to

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TQM. No one should be surprised then at the popularity of process reengineering. Our experience with process reengineering within the public sector, notably in the framework of case studies and training workshops, leads us to believe that in many cases this management approach holds great promise. However, its implementation is impeded by several difficulties and there have been many failures. It is particularly necessary to overcome the cynicism of those who have difficulty believing that costs can be reduced while services are improved. It must be noted that when put in practice, process reengineering is often misunderstood, and that preoccupation with costs is often a dominant factor. Process reengineering is popular, and is therefore often introduced without much thought as to its significance. It has even been observed that there is a tendency to label as process reengineering any type of organizational change which might have some link to structure or to technological change. For process reengineering to work, the concepts must be well understood and the models used must have been adapted to the distinctive features of the public sector. Process reengineering often includes radical change. A process that has been reinvented is generally accompanied by major technological changes, a new way of organizing work, and a new organizational structure. There is a lot at stake for the players, and resistance to change can present a major barrier. Change management is therefore critical to the success of process reengineering. Certain aspects of public sector management, indicated earlier, represent unique challenges which add to the complexity of the management of change. The successes, however, allow us to remain optimistic that these problems can be solved. CONCLUSION Management innovation is common in public sector organizations. Many public entrepreneurs invent, borrow, and adapt new ideas in matters of management practices. We have seen that strategic planning, the quality approach, and process reengineer-

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ing have all been fashionable at one time or another in the public sector. Furthermore, the key concepts associated with management practices developed initially for the private sector are generally transferable to the public sector. We have also seen that these approaches can be quickly and universally adopted. The international market for management ideas is therefore very active. We should note, however, the different paths taken by innovation and the different forms that a particular management approach can take over time. An innovation can be suggested or imposed by a central authority just as it can be the result of a public administrator's innovation. Taking, for instance, the Canadian example, we see that the strategic planning undertaken at the beginning of the nineties came at the initiative of certain deputy ministers wanting their departments to go in a certain direction, and in some cases aiming to modify the departmental culture accordingly. This approach differs greatly from the longterm planning previously undertaken under the direction of the central agencies. Furthermore, the business plans required as part of the expenditure management system introduced in 1995 are related to the government's resource-allocation process. They are therefore mandatory and subject to uniform procedures, and are not very different from the plans which might have been requested in the past. We see, then, that even in the absence of creativity from the government in matters of administrative reform, the impetus for management change comes from the initiative of public administrators. The latter identify with a larger community of managers and are on the lookout for anything that might improve their organization's management. The changes in public management are therefore much greater than a mere examination of government-decreed administrative reforms would lead us to believe. They are not, however, useless in that they legitimize the actions of entrepreneurial managers and encourage others to do likewise. Nevertheless, they sometimes result in a ritual in which no one really believes. Several adaptations are necessary if the public sector management approaches initially conceived for the private sector are to be

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implemented. Public administrators are not always aware of this need and often seek the help of consultants whose models relate to their own specific cases. It must be made clear that strategic planning, TQM, and process reengineering are management approaches in which numerous models coexist. Policy approaches and methodologies abound beneath a general idea which reflects the legitimate concerns of managers. In the case of strategic management, the idea is to define strategies for action in light of the challenges that have been identified; in the case of TQM, the idea is one of continuous improvement to the point of Total Quality Management; in the case of process reengineering, the notion is one of reinventing by taking advantage of the opportunities offered by new technologies and new organizational models. Every approach is backed by several gurus, each promoting a particular model. The firms of consultants tend for their part to use their own standardized and specific methodologies. The gauntlet has therefore been thrown to public administrators to come up with their own models. On-site research allowed us to determine that an in-house model is sometimes used, but that an understanding of the concepts was somewhat lacking and that the approaches used were generally rather unsophisticated. In this chapter I have tried to suggest some paths relative to certain aspects that should be improved. Even though the mere act of making the changes required by the nature of public services and the operational context of public organizations improves the chances for success, the fact remains that public administrators face specific difficulties related to political leadership, to management culture and systems currently in place within the public sector, and to satisfying the interests of multiple stakeholders. These difficulties should be viewed simply as challenges, not as reasons for discouragement. Even if the imperfect results obtained in many cases serve to fuel the fires of scepticism, we must be mindful that the approaches presented offer real possibilities to improve public management.

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Aucoin, P. 1995. The New Public Management. Canada in Comparative Perspective. Montreal: Institute for Research on Public Policy. Barzelay, M. 1992. Breaking through Bureaucracy: A New Vision for Managing in Government. Berkeley: University of California Press. Berry, F.S., and B. Wechsler. 1995. State agencies experience with strategic planning: findings from a national survey. Public Administration Review 55, 2:159-68. Borins, S.F. 1992. Public management innovation in Canada: evidence from the IPAC competition. Optimum 22,3:5-17. - 1995. Public sector innovation: the implications of new forms of organization and work. In Governance in a Changing Environment, ed. B.G. Peters and D.J. Savoie, 260-87. Montreal and Kingston: Canadian Centre for Management Development and McGill-Queen's University Press. Boston, J. 1994. Origins and Destinations: New Zealand's Model of Public Management and the International Transfer of Ideas. Proceedings. Fulbright Conference. Brisbane, Australia, June, 99-125. Bryson, J.M. 1988. Strategic Planningfor Public and Nonprofit Organizations. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. - and W.D. Roering. 1987. Applying private-sector strategic planning in the public sector. Journal of the American Planning Association 53, 1:9-22. Canada. 1990. Public Service 2000: The Renewal of the Public Service of Canada. Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services. - 1994. Treasury Board Secretariat. Blueprint for Renewing Government Services Using Information Technology. Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services. - 1995. Treasury Board Secretariat. Quality Services: An Overview. Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services. - 1996. Getting Government Right: A Progress Report. Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services. Carr, O.K., and I.D. Litrman. 1990. Excellence in Government. Total Quality Management in the 19905. Arlington, VA: Coopers & Lybrand. Caudle, S.L. 1994. Reengineering strategies and issues. Public Productivity & Management Review 18, 2:149-62.

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Champy, James. 1995. Reengineering Management: The Mandate for New Leadership. New York: Harper Business. Charih, M., and M. Paquin.1993. Strategic Planning in Government Administration: A Comparison between Ottawa and Quebec. Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Management Development. Chevallier, J. 1988. Le discours de la qualite administrative. Revue frangaise d'administration publique 46:121-43. Commissariat general du plan. 1994. L'etat dans tons ses projets: un bilan des projets de service dans I'administration (rapport du Groupe preside par Herve Serieyx). Paris: La documentation franchise. Crow, M., and B. Bozeman. 1988. Strategic public management. In Strategic Planning. Threats and Opportunities for Planners, ed. J.M. Bryson and R.C. Einsweiler, 51-68. Chicago: Planners Press. Davenport, T.H. 1993. Process Innovation. Reengineering Work through Information Technology. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Denhardt, R. 1993. The Pursuit of Significance: Strategies for Managerial Success in Public Organizations. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Doern, G.B. 1994. The Road to Better Public Services: Progress Contraints in Five Canadian Federal Agencies. Montreal: Institute for Research on Public Policy. Eldridge, W.H. 1989. Why angels fear to tread: a practitioner's observations and solutions on introducing strategic management to a government culture. In Handbook of Strategic Management, ed. J. Rabin, GJ. Miller, and W.B. Hildreth, 319-38. New York: Marcel Dekker. Ervin, O.L. 1992. Administration et changement: I'exemple americain de la planification strategique. International Review of Administrative Sciences 58, 4: 469-85. Gore, Al. 1995. Common Sense Government: Works Better and Costs Less. New York: Random House. Gow, J.I. 1994. Learning from Others. Administrative Innovations among Canadian Governments. Toronto: Institute of Public Administration of Canada. Halachmi, A. 1986. Strategic planning and management? Not necessarily. Public Productivity Review 40:35-50. - 19953. Is TQM ready for the public sector? In Public Productivity Through Quality and Strategic Management, ed. A. Halachmi and G.

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Bouckaert, 257-70. Bruxelles: International Institute of Administrative Sciences. - i995b. Rationalisation and administration publique: quelques questions and reflexions. International Review of Administrative Sciences 61,3:379-93Hammer, M., and J. Champy. 1993. Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution. New York: Harper Business. Holmes, M., and D. Shand. 1995. Management reform: some practitioner perspectives on the past ten years. Governance 8, 4:551-78. Ingraham, P.W. 1995. Quality management in public organizations: prospects and dilemmas. In Governance in a Changing Environment, ed. B.C. Peters and DJ. Savoie, 239-59. Montreal and Kingston: Canadian Centre for Management Develoment and McGill-Queen's University Press. Ingstrup, O. 1995. Reengineering in the Public Service: Promise or Peril? Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Management Development. Kettl, D.F. 19943. The Three Faces of Management Reform. Proceedings, Fulbright Conference. Brisbane, Australia, 240-58. - i994b. Reinventing Government? Appraising the National Performance Review. Washington: The Brookings Institution. Linden, R.M. 1994. Seamless Government. A Practical Guide to Re-Engineering in the Public Sector. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Mechling, J. 1994. Reengineering government: is there a "there" there? Public Productivity & Management Review 18, 2:189-97. Milakovich, M.E. 1991. Total quality management in the public sector. National Productivity Review 10, 2:195-213. Morgan, C, and S. Murgatroyd. 1994. Total Quality Management in the Public Sector. Philadelphia: Open University Press. Nutt, P.C., and R.W. Backoff. 1992. Strategic Management of Public and Third Sector Organizations, A Handbook for Leaders. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. - 1993. Organizational publicness and its implications for strategic management. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 3, 2:209-31. - 1995. Strategy for public and third-sector organizations. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 5, 2:189-211.

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OECD. 1987. L'administration au service du public. Paris: OECD. - 1995. Governance in Transition: Public Management Reforms in OECD Countries. Paris: OECD. Office of the Vice President. 1993. Reengineering through Information Technology (Accompanying Report of the National Performance Review). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Osborne, D., and T. Gaebler. 1992. Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Paquin, M. 1992. La planification strategique dans le secteur public. In Management public, R. Parenteau (sous la direction de), 389-402. Sillery: Presses de 1'Universite du Quebec. Poister, T.H., and G. Streib. 1994. Municipal management tools from 1976 to 1993: an overview and update. Public Productivity & Management Reviezv 18, 2:115-25. Pollitt, C, and S. Harrison. 1993. Handbook of Public Service Management. Cambridge: Blackwell. Rago, W.V. 1994. Adapting Total Quality Management (TQM) to government: another point of view. Public Administration Review 54, 1:61-4. Rawson, B. 1991. Public Service 2000. Service to the public task force: findings and implications. Canadian Public Administration 34, 3:490500. Ring, P.S., and J.L. Perry. 1985. Strategic management in public and private organizations: implications of distinctive contexts and contraints. Academy of Management Review 10, 2:276-86. Savoie, D.J. 1993. Looking to managerialism to do better with less. Optimum 24, 3:12-18. Schneider, M., P. Teske, and M. Mintrom. 1995. Public Entrepreneurs. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Schwartz, R.M., D.P. Currey, and M.S. Carlson. 1995. Measuring and Improving Service Quality in the Public Sector: Developing a Citizen and Employee Survey. Academy of Management Meeting, Vancouver, 6-9 August. Seidle, F.L. 1995. Rethinking the Delivery of Public Services to Citizens. Montreal: Institute for Research on Public Policy.

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Summer, C.E. 1980. Strategic Behavior in Business and Government. Boston: Little, Brown. Swift, F. 1993. Strategic Management in the Public Service: The Changing Role of the Deputy Minister. Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Management Development. Task Force on Management Improvement. 1992. The Australian Public Service Reformed. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service. Trosa, S. 1995. The search for quality in France. In Public Productivity Through Quality and Strategic Management, ed. A. Halachmi and G. Bouckaert, 139-53. Bruxelles: International Institute of Administrative Sciences. Walsh, K. 1991. Quality and public services, Public Administration 69, 4:503-14.

A New Generation of Budget Reform NAOMI CAIDEN

Over the past fifteen years a number of countries have embarked on a new wave of budget reforms. The previous generation of budget reform, associated with program and performance budgeting and their variants, was essentially analytical and neutral in approach. The current reform efforts have clear political and ideological goals. They are intended to bring public resources and public spending into line, and to curb government expenditures as a means of cutting back the role of government. The purpose of this paper is to explain these reforms and to assess their usefulness for today's and tomorrow's world. In order to understand the nature of the reforms, it is first necessary to examine their context and purpose. THE C O N T E X T OF THE R E F O R M S

By the early 1970s industrialized countries could no longer rely on economic stability and growth to finance public expenditures and facilitate budgetary decision making. In the expansive post-war years, a rising share of national output had been allocated to public programs. But by the beginning of the 1980s stagnation, inflation, unemployment, and weakening productivity and investment had severely affected budgets, resulting in large and persistent deficits. Unwilling to raise taxes, both for political reasons and for fear of depressing their economies even further, 252

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governments were forced to examine the expenditure side of their budgets, and to consider how they might limit the seemingly inexorable growth of public spending. Accompanying this predicament was the theoretical and philosophical revolution brought about by the waning influence of Keynesian macroeconomic doctrine. The capability of government fiscal policy to maintain full employment, economic growth, and stable prices was challenged by economic stagnation, persistent inflation, unmanageable deficits, and growing public resentment of taxation. More conservative ideas of neo-classical economics suggested that government was part of the problem, not the solution; that rising government expenditures without any perceived limit posed a threat to economic productivity; and that revenues and expenditures should be balanced. In the absence of adequate revenues, or preferably with lowered taxation, it would be necessary to rearrange priorities and cut programs. From the perceived necessity of doing something about persistent budget deficits arose a new vision of government. Its first premise was that the private sector would be the defining force in the economy. Private markets would determine the generation of wealth, the distribution of income, the momentum of growth, choices about investment and production, and the provision of employment. Governments, while withdrawing from their productive and welfare state functions, would nevertheless have an important role, including the provision of public goods, the maintenance of secure property rights, a social safety net, public investment, economic services, human services, safeguarding the environment, and macroeconomic guidance of the economy. The exact frontiers of government functions, and how they differed from their previous activities, might be hazy. Much was subsumed (and glossed over) in such fashionable concepts as liberalization, privatization, deregulation and structural adjustment. Further, the major focus of the reforms was limited to only a few countries, particularly Australia, Britain, Canada, the United States, New Zealand, Sweden, and Singapore. Other countries, such as Spain and the Netherlands, have undertaken some reforms, but serious reform efforts have been limited to Western

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industrialized countries, and little if any impact appears to have been felt in previously communist countries where it has been necessary to reconstruct the machinery of government as well as create the private sector, or in an increasingly chaotic developing world where formal processes bear little or no relationship to reality. The new generation of budget reforms involved a searching examination of what governments really did, how expenditures were decided and carried out, and how existing processes could be made more efficient and effective to accord with constrained resources and changing priorities. These reforms fell roughly into six areas: 1 Reforms capping expenditures 2 Reforms to enhance performance evaluation and productivity 3 Reforms decentralizing management 4 Reforms setting up quasi-markets 5 Reforms improving financial management 6 Reforms integrating budgetary management. In order to appreciate the need for these reforms, we need first to consider why budgets and budget processes were seen as problems. THE B U D G E T AS A P R O B L E M

There was a long list of criticisms. 1 Broadening and persistent deficits were blamed in large part for the economic malaise and as symptomatic of an overambitious role for government, which was largely responsible for inadequate savings, crowding out of investment, lack of incentives, and overbureaucratization and regulation. As people turned more and more to the administrative state to satisfy their demands, there appeared to be no limit to the growth of government expenditures.

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2 Budgets were becoming increasingly difficult to control or predict, as a greater proportion of expenditures was taken up by legislated entitlements. These were no longer the simple budgets of yesterday, where the vast majority of expenditures went on direct government purchases of goods and personnel. In the welfare-warfare state, public expenditures were dominated by entrenched claims: pensions, grants, subsidies, interest payments, contracts, and entitlements of all kinds. Such legislated payments might be indexed to the rate of inflation; they might depend on third-party actions, require complex determinations of eligibility, involve detailed reimbursement formulas; they posed new problems of administration to prevent fraud and abuse. These entitlements, which might amount to as much as 70 percent of expenditures, both outmanoeuvred and threatened budgets. As legislation, representing stable government commitments, they could not easily be abrogated. They were automatic payments, triggered not by annual deliberate decisions, but by individuals' circumstances and eligibility, or economic events or trends, external to government action or often even to national borders. But the resources entitlements consumed were the same public revenues that paid for other government expenditures, and their upward pressure squeezed those expenditures, even as their unpredictability in a volatile and sluggish economy turned budgets into a series of assumptions, whose validity could be verified only after the event. 3 Traditional budget making was often incremental in nature. Budgets were built on estimates by units of government ministries, departments, agencies - of their needs for the year ahead, in turn based on their expenditures in previous years. The central budget agency (ministry of finance or treasury) would take those estimates and by pushing and pulling and negotiating with departments, would bring them within the framework of a macroeconomic policy. Sometimes the process worked well; guidelines and ceilings were adhered to, and the budget was controlled and spent as envisaged. But unplanned deficits and the upward trend of expenditures

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indicated the difficulties of meshing macro-budgeting at the centre and micro-budgeting in the departments, as well as the heavy pressure of claims on the budget from all directions - health, education, welfare, environment, transportation, law and order, defence. The capability to sort out those claims and evaluate current programs and to relate them to an overall budget framework and strategy seemed weak. Despite repeated efforts in many countries to implement program and performance budgeting, emphasis in decision making was still on inputs rather than outputs or outcomes. Where budgets were divided into programs, or performance data were available, program evaluation played at best a minor part in annual resource allocation decisions. Although many budget decisions were long term in nature, budget making was essentially annual. Contract obligations, particularly in the defence or capital areas, stretched over a number of years. Entitlements, once created, continued as indefinite payments. Even decisions made annually (e.g., staffing and purchasing) in practice involved future commitments. An exclusively annual perspective precluded planning for adequate resources, or managing expenditures now to fit future predicted resource levels. Line item annual budgets, constructed for purposes of accountability, were often responsible for rigidity and waste. They provided no incentives for saving money, since failure to spend an annual allocation would usually result in cuts for the next year. Managers lacked flexibility to allocate resources across line items, and were held responsible for the use of inputs rather than efficient achievement of outputs. Financial management in government did not accord with prevailing business practices. Transactions were usually accounted for on a cash basis, blurring the true financial position as funds obligated but not paid did not show up in accounts. Asset management was weak, and many business concepts such as depreciation were rarely employed. Cash flow was not managed effectively and systematically. The costs of services were often not known.

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8 There were complaints that the flow of information was inadequate for budgetary decision making at all levels. Decision makers needed information about program costs, outputs and outcomes; about organizational administrative costs, unit costs and comparisons; and about cash flow and projected resources. Budgets needed to be readable documents that could be used for policy choices and follow-up. 9 Like government itself, budgeting seemed insufficiently responsive to the public, and particularly to elected representatives. At a time when government was affecting the lives of individuals to an unprecedented extent, accountability was felt to be weak. In brief, while governments were being called on to guide the economy, manage diverse activities, cure social ills, and provide stability to a large part of the population, their budget systems were perceived as inadequate. In addition, as governments sought to change their role, it appeared necessary also to adapt their budget systems. THE A I M S OF I N N O V A T I O N

The start of the international trend of innovation summarized here may be traced back to the Canadian Policy and Expenditure Management System (PEMS), which was introduced in 1979. It was followed by the 1982 Financial Management Initiative (FMI) in Britain, the 1985 Australian Financial Management Improvement Program, and the 1986 Big Efficiency Operation in the Netherlands. At the end of the 1980s New Zealand made radical changes in its budgeting and administrative systems, Singapore introduced its Block Vote Budget Allocation System, and Sweden moved toward a three-year budget system. The United States passed the Chief Financial Officers Act and the Government Performance and Results Act. The countries which had undertaken reforms at the beginning of the decade continued to develop them: Canada introduced an Expenditure Management System, and Britain embarked on Next Steps and market testing.

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Each of these initiatives had its own aims and objectives, but there were clear similarities in the vision they jointly held of a different kind of budget system. Their common elements may be summarized as follows: 1 There was a clear commitment to reduce and control deficits by reducing expenditures. Most of the initiatives were concerned to diminish the role of government and to privatize many of its functions. The government of the future was perceived as smaller - doing less and influencing more. It would have a more positive relationship with the private sector, providing it with services and an environment conducive to conducting business. 2 Government would be more flexible and responsive. In order to implement its changed role, it would be necessary to change priorities, which would also mean changing decisionmaking processes to review and cut entrenched programs, organizations and expenditures. In the longer term, there would need to be means for continuing to sort out priorities in response to changing needs. 3 Policy making would be strengthened and centralized. The aim was a streamlined policy system, in which budget policy made at the centre would be implemented as intended throughout the system. This concept implied accurate, timely and relevant information upon which budget policy could be based and updated. 4 The government bureaucracy would be responsive to policy makers, and responsible for carrying out assigned functions. To do so, it would require reorganization and restructuring. There would be a definite line between policy making and administration, which would enable the latter to work on decentralized lines within the framework of designated policies. 5 There would be a clear view of the objectives of government organizations, and an emphasis on ensuring results in the most efficient manner. Thus, there would be a link between resources and activities to ensure that all programs were effective, and were carried out efficiently.

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6 Budgeting would be a transparent process that would emphasize public accountability and facilitate agreement among a broad constituency. How could this vision be put into practice? REFORMS CAPPING EXPENDITURES: UNITED STATES AND S W E D E N

The simplest way to control expenditures is to set a cap or ceiling above which they will not be allowed to rise. The situation in modern budgets has complicated this formula because of the existence of many government payments that are not determined by annual budgetary decision making, such as interest payments, entitlements, contract commitments. There are further political problems in making limits stick. In any case budgets are essentially predictions, which may or may not be realized, and calculation of actual spending is subject to accounting whims and legerdemain. A further problem lies in conventions relating to "baselines," which by projecting what current services would cost in the future, impart an upward bias to budgets. It is thus remarkable that the United States federal government has had considerable success in implementing caps on discretionary expenditures and a measure of restraint through a PAYGO (pay-as-you-go) system for entitlements and revenue reductions.1 United States By 1990 it was clear that the existing legislation set in place to eliminate the federal deficit was not working. The Balanced Budget and Deficit Reduction Act of 1985 (Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act) had been amended in 1987 to attempt to cure a constitutional defect and to revise its original deficit reduction targets. Briefly it had mandated elimination of the federal deficit within five years by setting maximum deficit figures for each year. If these target deficits were not adhered to, the administration was compelled to make across-the-board cuts (sequestrations) equally from domestic and defence expenditures. While on occasion sequestrations

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were made, the act failed because it exempted large areas of expenditure (notably entitlements), because it was subject to gimmicks or "smoke and mirror" tactics, and because of difficulties in actually predicting expenditures in volatile economic conditions. Ultimately it was clear that the amount of deficit reduction required to meet the target was totally unattainable. The Budget Enforcement Act (BEA) of 1990, born of bipartisan agreement between the parties, took an entirely different approach. In effect it ignored the deficit and concentrated on controlling spending. Expenditures were first divided into discretionary and nondiscretionary categories. The discretionary category was further divided into three: defence, domestic and international. Each of these areas was subject to a separate cap or limit for the next two years, subject to a "mini-sequester" if this was exceeded. The purpose of these "firewalls" was to assure defence advocates that any savings they agreed to would actually go to deficit reduction rather than be swallowed up by proponents of domestic spending. After two years the separate caps would be replaced by a single cap for discretionary spending for the next three years. In 1993, as part of a large deficit reduction package in President Clinton's first budget, the cap was renewed for a further five years. The caps were subject to adjustment each year according to stipulated rules. Nondiscretionary expenditures (entitlements) and revenue reductions were not subject to the caps. But any proposal to increase an entitlement or reduce a revenue had to be counterbalanced by a cut elsewhere or a revenue increase. This formula was labelled PAYGO. It has since been adopted by the Swedish legislature, and essentially operationalizes a zero-sum game. The BEA may be judged a success. The caps have been adhered to, and PAYGO is a reality. There are a number of reasons for its success. First, the cap for domestic discretionary expenditures was originally set quite high, and in the first two years allowed domestic expenditures to grow by as much as 15 percent. It was only in 1993 that the caps began to "bite" and restrict expenditures to below the rate of inflation. Second, the limits on spending and PAYGO were clear, unambiguous measures, unlike deficit estimates

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that were subject to all kinds of assumptions about revenues and expenditures related to economic performance. Third, the political situation favoured the limits as more acceptable than radical proposals for reductions in expenditure, receiving bipartisan support in Congress. Fourth, the caps enabled politicians to claim a measure of deficit reduction against future baselines, without really having to justify specific measures. The BEA may also be judged as necessary but not sufficient. While it has prevented new entitlement initiatives and totally irresponsible tax cut proposals, it has not curbed growth in existing entitlements or made provision for future needs in this area, particularly in health programs and social security. The caps have contributed to deficit reduction, but the deficit was not eliminated. The act may also be criticized as placing too much emphasis for deficit reduction on discretionary expenditures and insufficient emphasis on entitlements. In any event, the change in the political composition of Congress has resulted in much stronger policy initiatives aspiring to bring about a balanced budget in 2002. The results remain to be seen. While the United States may appear exceptional because of the unparalleled power of Congress, the ideas of spending caps and PAYGO may be translated into situations where the executive dominates budgeting, and may serve the same purpose of containing political pressures through clearly understood rules.

REFORMS TO ENHANCE PERFORMANCE EVALUATION AND PRODUCTIVITY: UNITED KINGDOM AND UNITED STATES Efforts to evaluate the performance of government organizations and to incorporate these measures into budgetary decision making are not new. But "in recent years performance measurement has risen to the top of the agenda of public sector management issues and is now at the heart of significant management reforms taking place in a number of countries." Despite the long history of formal performance measurement, "there are very few countries that could justly claim to use performance measurement consistently" for budget purposes (United Kingdom 1992:3).

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One objective of performance measurement is to provide information to improve resource allocation. Theoretically, the size of an organization's budget should be tied directly to the achievement of precise targets. Ideally only those agencies which could demonstrate a measurable improvement in economy, efficiency, or effectiveness would receive increases, and unjustified variance from targets would be penalized. Performance information should be used to improve accountability and encourage employees to think more clearly about the results of their work and their responsibility to deliver government programs economically, efficiently, and effectively. It should also aid audit offices in determining the propriety of expenditures and whether value for money is being achieved. United Kingdom In the United Kingdom, the objectives of the FMI were that departments should have a a clear view of their objectives and the means to assess and wherever possible measure outputs or performance in relation to these objectives; b a well-defined responsibility for making the best use of their resources including a critical scrutiny of output and value for money; c the information (particularly about costs) which they need to exercise their responsibilities effectively. Problems in implementing the FMI led to further reform efforts (see Zifcak 1994). The Next Steps initiative, whose main aim was to deliver services more efficiently and effectively, within available resources, for the benefit of tax-payers, customers and staff involved the monitoring of performance to ensure agencies progressively improved. It was an essential part of the delegation of day-to-day operations to executive agencies which had a broad measure of autonomy to carry out their functions. There are now over 90 agencies, covering about half the civil service. Perform-

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ance indicators show an increasing emphasis on improving quality of service as well as the more usual economy and efficiency measures. Performance indicators are also used in salary determination. An example of the use of performance measures may be seen in customs and excise. About 80 percent (22,500) of the staff are involved in value added tax (VAT) and customs functions. The use of performance measurement dates back to a 1983 plan which aimed to link planning, budgeting and accounting systems and integrate them with the routine production of performance measures and indicators. Operational planning systems have since been developed to bring together information by activity, on resources (running costs and staff deployment), workloads, results, outputs, and performance indicators. Each system compares outturn against plans and targets. The department's published management plan sets out 11 key results areas supported by 42 specific objectives and 124 targets and/or performance indicators for three years ahead. The targets comprise eight economy, 59 efficiency, and 57 effectiveness measures, including 14 for quality of service. The planning systems produce monthly quarterly and annual reports. These systems make extensive use of computers allowing for direct input of data at widespread locations, and providing exception reports for immediate discussion of problem areas. United States In 1993 the Government Performance and Results Act (sec. 2[a] 1-6) was passed to 1. improve the confidence of the American people in the capability of the Federal Government, by systematically holding Federal agencies accountable for achieving program results. 2. initiate program performance reform with a series of pilot projects in setting program goals, measuring program performance against those goals, and reporting publicly on their progress;

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3. improve Federal program effectiveness and public accountability by promoting a new focus on results, service quality, and customer satisfaction; 4. help Federal managers improve service delivery, by requiring that they plan for meeting program objectives and by providing them with information about program results and service quality; 5. improve congressional decisionmaking by providing more objective information on achieving statutory objectives, and on the relative effectiveness and efficiency of Federal programs and spending; and 6. improve internal management of the Federal government. The act went on to state that in September 1997, each agency head must submit to the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and to Congress a five-year strategic plan for program activities, including a comprehensive mission statement, general goals and objectives for the major functions and operations of the agency, the means of meeting those goals, and the relationship of performance goals to the general goals and objectives. This plan should be updated at least every three years. From 1999 the federal government will produce a performance plan for the overall budget. Each agency will be required to prepare an annual performance plan covering each program activity in the budget. The performance plan should, according to

sec. 4(b) 1. establish performance goals to define the level of performance to be achieved by a program activity; 2. express such goals in an objective, quantifiable, and measurable form; 3. briefly describe the operational processes, skills and technology, and the human, capital, information, or other resources required to meet the performance goals; 4. establish performance indicators to be used in measuring or assessing the relevant outputs, service levels, and outcomes of each program activity;

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5. provide a basis for comparing actual program results with the established performance goals; and 6. describe the means to be used to verify and validate measured values.

By the year 2000, agency heads will also prepare and submit to the president and Congress reports on program performance for the previous year, using the indicators of the performance plan, comparing actual performance with goals, and explaining variances. A further provision mandates OMB to designate agencies as pilot projects. It is of course too soon to evaluate the results of this legislation. The widespread introduction of performance measures underlines an emphasis on productivity in government organizations. The major difficulties still relate to the appropriateness of measures and their linkage with financial decision making. Performance measurement is closely linked with reforms increasing management decentralization. REFORMS I N C R E A S I N G M A N A G E M E N T DECENTRALIZATION: AUSTRALIA, SWEDEN, UNITED KINGDOM, SINGAPORE Traditionally, budgeting is organized according to strict controls which designate resources to be used in specific ways, often tied to a fairly rigid personnel system. During the 1980s several countries initiated changes in budgetary management that attempted to combine accountability with efficient resource mobilization and allocation, while dissolving traditional bureaucratic control systems. United Kingdom

The 1982 Financial Management Initiative mandated structural reform of government organization in which a small core of policy-making ministries would set out objectives, priorities, targets and resources, and managers of agencies would be

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responsible for carrying these out, measuring their performance against set objectives, including budgetary targets. Budget control systems would be decentralized in departments and agencies conceptualized as cost centres, making use of performance indicators, and managers would have relative freedom to achieve set objectives with the resources they were allocated (see Caiden 1991; Likierman 1991). Australia

The 1984 Financial Management Improvement Program was initiated to improve accountability and to reverse persistent deficits. It aimed "to improve the productivity of the government sector by giving departmental managers greater freedom and responsibility for developing services within a clear framework of resources and policies" (Preston-Stanley 1990). The primary directive tool was the forward budget used to assess the financial impact of policy changes and the effects of the incremental costs of investment expenditures. The forward budget was a rolling three-year current services budget, constantly revised on the basis of an economic forecasting model. This tight central control was matched with flexibility in the departments. Managers had greater freedom to determine staffing levels and composition and more flexibility in procurement. They might carry forward unspent balances up to a limit and also borrow. They could also negotiate retention of part of the proceeds of asset sales. But they were required to return a 1.25 percent efficiency dividend each year. Sweden

In Sweden the basic structure of central government is characterized by small policy-making ministries and a large number of agencies operating relatively autonomously within their own spheres according to written directives. At the beginning of the 1990s a new budget process was established focusing on in-depth reports and analyses by agencies every three years on a rolling

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three-year schedule. Each agency receives its general orientation and financial limits for the next three years together with an annual appropriation for the next year. Each agency presents a special report on results and preliminary annual accounts each year. Funds are made available to agencies as general appropriations which allow them flexibility to utilize resources to achieve their goals in the most efficient and effective way. They may also transfer funds from one year to another over the three-year period Qonsson 1991). Canada A similar attempt was made in Canada to gain more flexibility in financial administration as part of a broad attempt to transform public administration. It was launched by a White Paper, Public Service 2000: The Renewal of the Public Service in Canada (PS 2000), which set out the goals for development of a New Public Management culture. Among the themes addressed were resource management and budget controls. PS 2000 aimed to create greater flexibility in financial management through single operating budgets, carry forward of funds, and more use of common services. The White Paper did not recommend or allocate any resources to carry out the reform, neither did it define performance indicators to measure progress or results. By the time it was ready for implementation, Canada was in the midst of economic recession, requiring freezing of budgets and retrenchment. These conditions were inimical to a more decentralized "people-first" managerial culture. While there were some changes in procedures, including administrative initiatives to strengthen the ability of agencies to manage resources, implementation varied greatly among agencies. According to recent observers, "In effect, by late 1993 PS 2000 was no longer a coherent government-wide programme of reform" (Caiden, Halley, and Maltais 1995:94). My own inquiries in Ottawa at the end of 1995 met with little response, and officials seemed to think that PS 2000 had little to do with budgeting or resource management.

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Singapore

In 1989 Singapore moved to decentralize its budget system through the Block Vote Budget Allocation System, designed to contain expenditures, provide greater flexibility, and improve efficiency and effectiveness (see Doh 1996). Heads of departments are given complete discretion in deciding the detailed distribution of their departments' annual recurrent expenditure among programs, as long as they do not exceed the total provision. They may plan and allocate financial and personnel resources on the basis of their own organizational priorities. This flexibility is matched by five-year reviews by the Auditor General's Office, and each year the budget division of the Ministry of Finance selectively reviews a number of policies and programs. All these approaches are similar in nature. They involve managers in actively controlling their budgets and taking responsibility for their own finances. However, there have been few if any objective evaluations of these schemes, so it is difficult to judge their effectiveness. But it is clear that they will depend on the confidence of all involved that their real aims are being implemented, and that the whole reform is not merely an exercise in cost cutting and budget slashing. There is an obvious danger that managers may perceive that they are being given more responsibility with less authority and fewer resources. If this perception is accurate it is unlikely the goals of reforms will be realized. This is particularly the case where managerial decentralization is linked with or is a precursor to the setting up of quasi-markets. R E F O R M S SETTING UP Q U A S I - M A R K E T S : UNITED KINGDOM, NEW ZEALAND

An ultimate goal of the recent reforms is not merely to improve the performance of government agencies, but to shrink government by returning functions to the private sector. Where this does not appear feasible, efforts are being made to achieve efficiency. The aim is to achieve not only productive efficiency but market efficiency by making government organizations or parts of them

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compete in the marketplace. Examples are drawn from the United Kingdom and New Zealand. United Kingdom

In 1988 a report by the Efficiency Unit, Improving Management in Government: The Next Steps, recommended that "agencies should be established to carry out the executive functions of government within a policy and resources framework set by a department" (United Kingdom 1993:6). First it was necessary to consider whether government should be involved in an activity or function at all. For those functions essential and appropriate to government, organizations should be matched to the tasks by setting up agencies within departments. Each agency has a clear mission and objectives, and performance standards and targets are set to ensure effective and efficient delivery, backed by improved management and information systems. Provision was made for the systematic reporting of achievement and periodic review of how functions could best be delivered. By 1993 there were 92 agencies employing 60 percent of the civil service. According to the Next Steps Review (United Kingdom 1993:7), more information is now available about the working of the government machine through publication of agency annual reports and accounts. Performance is now assessed against key targets. Financial control has been strengthened and all agencies have clear financial targets. In 1992-93 agencies overall met around 77 percent of key performance targets. Twelve of these agencies are now operating as trading funds. "This allows them to exercise considerable freedom and discretion in the management of their own funds. They are not subject to detailed advance approval by Parliament of their income and expenditure... but are required to break even taking one year with another to meet any other targets Ministers may set, and are subject to many of the disciplines which apply to private sector companies" (United Kingdom 1993:7). All agencies are subject to systematic continuing review by departments in consultation with Office of Public Service and

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Science (OPSS) and Treasury. This review includes an evaluation of performance and reconsideration of "prior options." These options constitute a series of tests: Should the function be performed at all? Should it be privatized? Should it be contracted out? Or should it be market tested, for example, the current agency competes on "a level playing field" with outside suppliers to determine who is best able to provide a particular service on the basis of best long-term value for money? Market testing has been carried out for a variety of services including office management and VAT debt management. Even more far-reaching reforms are being carried out to structure public health and education systems as quasi-markets. Units of these systems (hospitals, doctors, ambulance systems, schools) are being encouraged to opt out of existing arrangements and to act as public corporate trusts offering services. These entities continue to be public, and to be financed almost entirely by general taxation. But they are placed in a more competitive situation, competing to provide services to clients. New Zealand

In a radical reform of government and budgeting, New Zealand decentralized its government finances in the Public Finance Act of 1989. In this reform, the government is seen as a purchaser, owner, and funder of transfer payments. As purchaser the government tries to get the lowest price for a given output. It appropriates money to a department for the purchase of outputs without specifying the appropriate mix of inputs. The new structure moves away from appropriations for inputs toward appropriations for classes of outputs. Conceptually, the change is from costbased to "price" based charges for government purchases. Chief executives are responsible for choosing the mix of inputs, such as labour and capital, to produce a given output at least cost. Government is concerned only with the "price" charged for outputs. Chief executives work on contract, and no longer have civil service tenure. The restructuring of government activities as quasi-markets is not simply a management device. In quasi-markets, accountability

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is supposed to be achieved not by bureaucratic mechanisms (for example, oversight, performance measures) but by direct client satisfaction or dissatisfaction, in the same way as the private sector. Quasi-markets allow greater choice. But they also share out resources in different ways from non-market arrangements. They replace the multiple values of the public sector with the single value of efficiency, which may or may not be acceptable. The introduction of quasi-markets thus lies at the heart of the resource allocation issue. REFORMS IMPROVING FINANCIAL

MANAGEMENT:

U N I T E D STATES, S W E D E N , N E W Z E A L A N D

Less dramatic than the reforms analyzed above is the improvement of government financial management. Financial management includes the mundane activities that relate financial resources to results: apportionment of funds, accounting and reporting, cash flow management, asset management, debt management, internal controls, financial statements. Financial management reform is an ongoing activity in many countries. Examples here are from United States, Sweden, and New Zealand. United States

The Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 was enacted to respond to perceived deficiencies in financial management in the United States federal government. Its aims are to provide "accounting, financial management, and internal controls to assure the issuance of reliable financial information to deter fraud, waste and abuse of Government resources" (Jones and McCaffery 1992:82). Its provisions include: 1 A chief financial officer (CFO) within the Office of Management and Budget. 2 Chief financial officers in twenty-three federal departments and agencies. 3 A CFO council to advise and assist in implementation of the act.

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4 A requirement for agencies to submit a proposal for consolidating accounting, budgeting and other financial management functions. 5 A requirement for agencies to submit five-year plans for implementation of the act. 6 Annual agency audited financial statements. 7 Annual agency management reports, including an overview and narrative discussion and analysis of the agency's financial operations, including statements of financial position, operations, cash flow, and reconciliation to budget (see ibid.). To accomplish these goals OMB has set up a five-year plan focusing on eight critical areas of financial management performance: financial management organization, financial management personnel, accounting standards, financial systems, internal controls, asset management, and communication with state and local governments and private contractors. In addition, in the same year the federal government set up a Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board to recommend standards for financial information, and passed the Federal Credit Reform Act (see Bramlett 1991; United States Congressional Budget Office 1992). Sweden

Individual agencies are responsible for their own accounting and financial management but are subject to basic and fairly uniform rules. At the end of the 1970s, a budget handbook was introduced containing regulations and advice on planning and budget, stipulating budget format and content, as well as detailed rules concerning utilization of funds. At the same time an accounting ordinance defined agencies' obligations to keep accounting records, to record transactions continuously, to prepare annual accounts, and to value assets and liabilities. The system is similar to that of the private sector. There are also other rules applying to receipts and disbursements, purchasing, sales of property and fees and charges. The whole system is supervised by the National Audit Bureau, which is also responsible for monthly and annual

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aggregate accounting of the whole central administration. It also provides a general computerized accounting system, System S, which most government agencies use. There is a central payments system, coordinated through the Bank of Sweden every day. The general result is a highly reliable and well-organized system of accounting and financial management, which may, however, be somewhat inflexible for future needs (see Jonsson 1991). New Zealand

The reforms at the beginning of the 1990s aimed to place the commercial activities of government on a business-like basis, and to ensure adequate information and better performance assessment. Departments were required to move from cash to accrual accounting. The Public Finance Act of 1989 applied a corporate accounting framework to government finances in order to match inputs and outputs more closely and provide more timely data. The budget for each department has to include an operating statement with proposed expenditures and expected revenues by output class; balance sheets for the beginning and end of the year; estimated cash flow; and overall measures of financial performance for the year. Departments are expected to depreciate capital and pay a capital charge, calculated as a rate of return times the value of net departmental assets. They are also charged and paid interest on cash balances. The aim is to improve cash management and asset management, both to increase efficiency and to gain a more accurate and honest understanding of the costs of government activities (see Goldman and Brashares 1991). REFORMS TO INTEGRATE BUDGET MANAGEMENT: A U S T R A L I A , F R A N C E , U N I T E D STATES, A N D C A N A D A

Because of pressure on resources, governments have found it necessary to reorganize their budget processes so that they can set policies to restrain expenditures. In most OECD countries budget processes have been adapted to enforce fiscal norms such as diminishing deficits or aggregate spending targets. These political

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aims have to be disaggregated into specific targets and guidelines, and many governments have sought to enhance their capacity to reconcile spending demands and financial policy. Typically measures have included transmission of financial ceilings and targets at the beginning of the budget process; the projection of future costs through baselines, that is, current policies adjusted for workload and inflation; and some efforts at multi-year budgeting. "Pre-preparation" of the budget has become more common, involving the front loading of key decisions, a longer budget cycle, explicit rationing of resources, greater centralization, and more planning (see Schick 1986). By the beginning of the 1980s most industrialized countries had highly developed central budget institutions, advised by sophisticated information agencies. Those countries such as Australia which had adopted some measures of budgetary decentralization had also to develop equivalent central policy making and management capacity to maintain macro-goals. The United States, with its sprawling byzantine bureaucracy, is still making efforts to contain its expenditures. Meanwhile it is worth noting that while it does not fall under the heading of reform, France has pursued a different approach to policy making and control of budgetary decisions. Australia

The primary decisions about the budget are made by cabinet. Strategy is the province of the Expenditure Review Committee, a group of the big spending ministers chaired by the prime minister. The Expenditure Review Committee plays a decisive role in the formulation and adaptation of over-arching government strategy and review of every significant departmental initiative; it operates year round and is involved in all contentious issues between the ministry of finance and the other ministries. In addition the Treasury handles economic policy and advises on fiscal and budget policy strategy. The Structural Adjustment Committee focuses on economic development. The finance ministry serves as the main source of advice about financial analysis and budgetary

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expenditures. It is a central coordinating department providing an overall perspective on the budget. France The Direction du Budget of the ministry of finance is in charge of the budget. In the first phase of the process it develops an outline of the budget framework, and the ministry of finance and prime minister decide on broad proposals which are communicated to the ministries. In the second phase ministries negotiate with the ministry of finance, and later, as revenue estimates become clearer, ceilings are set, and further discussions take place. Once the budget has been passed by parliament, however, the ministry of finance does not relinquish control. Each department has one or more officials of the ministry of finance, financial controllers, in charge of approving or pre-auditing expenditures before they are made. This enables continuous central control of spending. United States

At the beginning of 1994, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) carried out an extensive self-study. Known as OMB 2000, the review was partly in response to the Clinton Administration's National Performance Review, which undertook to cut the federal work force by 252,000 employees (see Gore 1993). The major proposal was for creation of new research management offices within OMB to be responsible for budget formulation, analysis and execution; program effectiveness and efficiency; annual, mid- and long-range policy and program analysis; implementation of government-wide management policy; and program evaluation. These responsibilities integrate management, budget and policy aspects, substituting policy analysts for the traditional budget examiners or management experts. The five research management offices will cover national security and international affairs; resources, energy, and science; health and personnel; human resources; and general government. These organizational reforms are expected to integrate tax and spending

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policy, enhance cross-cutting and interagency policy development, conduct more long-term and mid-range analyses, increase agency involvement in the budget process, and improve strategic policy thinking and policy making. Canada

Canada's Expenditure Management System (EMS) was introduced in 1994 in conjunction with the 1995 budget process. It was primarily designed to further the government's objective of reducing the deficit to 3 percent of GDP by 1996-97. In order to do so, it was felt necessary to change the existing system to improve strategic planning, critical review of existing programs and spending, and reallocate priorities (Canada 1995:59-66).2 There were two key features that differentiated EMS from previous attempts to gain reforms in Canadian budgeting. First, EMS used the procedures of the annual budget process to gain change. The budget process was to be used as a decision-forcing mechanism to move agencies to carry out strategic planning (through formal business plans) and rearrange priorities. There were other objectives including greater flexibility in resource management, improved information on program performance and greater political accountability. But these appeared subordinate to the more immediate goals of budget deficit reduction and reallocation of expenditures. The budget process for FY 1995 incorporated Round 1 of EMS, and the following year a further exercise, Round 2, was carried out. The second differentiating feature of EMS was that it was carried out as a zero-sum game. EMS specifically emphasized that program reviews would be undertaken "within available resources through reallocation" (Canada 1995:1). Deficit reduction was paramount. The central policy reserves - which had provided a loophole in previous budgetary reform initiatives - would be eliminated. EMS was necessarily centralized, with the cabinet setting the targets, and the Treasury Board implementing them through the budget process (Canada 1995:3). Reallocation may have been made somewhat easier by the preceding reorganization

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of government departments, which regrouped agencies into much larger department units, allowing greater scope for reallocation of priorities. EMS assumed a reciprocal process in which cabinet set the overall strategy and targets, and departments and agencies prepared plans for how they would handle the cutbacks the targets demanded. These were supposed to be multi-year plans, but it appeared that the primary approach at this stage was a single year-at-a-time focus (Canada 1995:7). Then the Treasury Board would review the department plans and determine allocations. The centralized focus of the EMS required institution building at the centre. Primary responsibility fell on the Program Branch of the Treasury Board, which saw its functions as "meeting Secretariat responsibilities for the Expenditure Management System; providing program and policy advice to the Treasury Board, the Minister of Finance and to Cabinet; assisting government with structural and program change; and creating a policy framework to promote innovation and affordable government" (Canada. Treasury Board 1995:5). The Program Branch viewed its role as strategic and facilitative, with a focused responsibility for ensuring that EMS worked. It would be "a partner in change management" (Canada. Treasury Board 1995:6), forging long-term cooperative relationships to gain revision of the estimates (improving accountability); implementation of department business plans (improving department capacity for planning); and comprehensive program analysis (improving cost-effectiveness). To these ends, the Treasury Board Program Branch set up its own three-year planning process. Within the budget cycle, the program branch carried out structured reviews of department budget submissions, culminating in meetings with department heads and their senior staffs. In carrying out these reviews, programs were examined in the light of the following criteria: • Do the program areas continue to serve a public interest? • Is there a legitimate and necessary role for government in this program area?

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• Is the current role of the federal government appropriate, or is the program a candidate for realignment with the provinces? • What programs should or could be transferred in whole or in part to the private/voluntary sector? • If the program continues, how could its efficiency be improved? • Is the resultant package of programs affordable? (personal communication, Program Division, Treasury Board) EMS was designed to be more than a simple budget-cutting exercise. It was to be a primary vehicle for reallocation of priorities and a different way of doing business. It was therefore essential to gain the cooperation of departments and to ensure that they understood how the rules of the budget game had changed. As might be expected, initial reception was mixed. Reports suggest that in the first round, about one-third of agencies cooperated enthusiastically, another third were somewhat cooperative, and another third tried to carry on budgeting in the old way. Many departments saw EMS as an invitation to make changes toward more rational and efficient ways of doing business. Those departments which did not cooperate met budget cuts enforced by the Treasury Board unilaterally. Program spending, as a result of program review decisions, was forecast to decrease by 5.7 percent ($3.4 billion) in 1995-96 (Canada 1995:15). In the second round of EMS, for the 1996-97 budget, a similar effort was made to gain reductions. Departments which had fully cooperated in the first round felt themselves penalized by being required to come up with more cuts, while those that had not faced smaller across-the-board reductions. There appeared at this point some exhaustion with EMS, and doubt whether it could realistically be expected to continue as a permanent feature of the budget process. The Canadian reform is well within the mainstream of the current trend of budget innovation. Within the context of rapid deficit reduction, it seeks to reorient priorities at the same time as transforming organizational culture and entrenched ways of doing business. It is too early to judge its success at this point. But

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like other similar budget innovations, it raises a number of questions. Is EMS a viable way to gain political changes through the bureaucracy, and particularly redirection of resources? Do the apparently "neutral" techniques of EMS mask real political choices not open to public debate? T A K I N G STOCK

There has clearly been a considerable amount of reform activity over the past fifteen years, and its general direction is not difficult to summarize. Governments have sought to contain expenditures largely through management processes. They have looked to performance measurement, planning, organizational streamlining, decentralization, privatization, policy analysis, and improved financial management. But the over-arching financial exigency prevails. Budget deficits have in some cases been temporarily stemmed, but their underlying causes - distrust of government and refusal to pay more for collective or community needs, large dependent populations, the failure of economies to generate sufficient resources for public and private needs, a widespread underground economy and persistent scandals, growing resentment by the have-nots flaring into racism and xenophobia, huge military commitments - have not been cured. Reforms that enhance transparency in government, improve financial forecasting, tighten up the handling of funds, integrate central and departmental decisions, encourage greater responsibility and more intelligent decision making, and improve value for money are undoubtedly worthy in their own right. Many of the reforms described here are intended to achieve these aims. But there has been remarkably little objective and systematic research and investigation of their accomplishments and failures. We are still to a large extent left wondering whether the new generation of budget reform will be any more substantial than its predecessors. Has it initiated sustained improvements as opposed to the mere espousing of fashionable but poorly thought-out panaceas? It has to be admitted, however, that the task of evaluation is a complex one. There are practical difficulties. The sheer scope of reforms taking place in so many different forms over such huge

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and varied organizations in itself presents a puzzle to the researcher. Where to begin? How much to cover? At the outset in any comparative study there are differences in terminology, nuances in organizational cultures, critical contextual determinants. These affect even the basic subject matter of studies, as well as the criteria for evaluation. One might think, for example, that audit was a sufficiently similar activity all over the world. It is carried out by individuals with similar training and for similar objectives. But in a study of budgeting, auditing, and evaluation across seven governments, Andrew Gray, Bill Jenkins, and Bob Segsworth found that the meaning and interpretation of these terms "reflected important differences in professional and political cultures" and that it would be misleading to try to define them narrowly and uniformly (Gray, Jenkins, and Segsworth 1993:5). These are difficulties which affect assessment of management reforms in general, but in the case of budgeting, the practical and terminological research problems are even more acute. They reflect conceptual problems, which may be skirted or even resolved in some fashion in discussing broad (and narrow) issues of management, but confront both researcher and manager headon in the case of resource decision making. We may look at these problems on two levels. The first level, with which every researcher grapples, is criteria of success. Are the reforms successful? That depends what you call successful. Since budget systems have many functions, they require multiple criteria for assessment. A good example of trying to deal with multiple, and sometimes conflicting, criteria may be seen in Donald Kettl's discussion of the results of the National Performance Review in the United States (Kettl 1995:9-83). His attempt to assess this wide-ranging reform included a very large number of criteria, including savings, improved performance, increased capacity, redefining civil service careers, technology support, training, providing central steering, downsizing, reengineering, and continuous improvement - each of which demands further breakdown to make it operational. Significantly Kettl does not really do more than touch on budgeting and

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financial management issues. Yet I would submit that financing mechanisms and decisions are critical to management reforms. The reason for the centrality of budgetary decisions is obvious to the manager in practice, and to anyone else for that matter. They involve money. Words - whether mission statements, strategic plans, citizens' charters, or empowerment - are one thing; money is another. Budgets, at highest or lowest levels, are concrete declarations of priorities that speak much louder than words. Popular sayings - "put your money where your mouth is"; "who pays the piper plays the tune" - reflect the truism that money is power. Budgets determine who benefits and who pays. Why then have researchers fought shy of evaluating financial reforms in government? The answer, in Vaclav Havel's phrase, is that budgets are part of the political architecture (Havel 1996:41). The processes and institutions relating to budgets and financial management are the rules of the game within which "money" decisions are made. We are not referring here only to the "grand" decisions and policies, but also to the interstices of mundane and often obscure financial management. Let us take so apparently technical a subject as cash flow management - the matching of inflow and outflow of a government organization's funds. Why did Orange County, one of the largest and most prosperous counties in California, go bankrupt? Among the reasons: lack of oversight mechanisms; weakening of state regulations concerning local government investments; the combining of accounting and audit functions in a single official; structural imbalance of tax revenues and expenditures requiring entrepreneurship in handling of funds to enable budget balance; regulations requiring pooling of funds by a number of public entities; the position of treasurer as an elected official. Perhaps some of the reforms in some of the countries surveyed here might have addressed some of these problems, but they would not have targeted the political issue of local government responsibilities and how they are to be matched by equivalent resources. The current wave of management reform is - like its predecessors - determinedly apolitical in tone. The dominant ideas are

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greater efficiency, greater responsibility, flexibility, responsiveness, tightening of financial management, and so on. They speak to ideals that everyone seems to want. But the new wave of budget reform efforts has, as I pointed out at the beginning of the chapter, clear political and ideological goals. In the budgetary context, concepts such as decentralization, downsizing, or quasimarkets have important implications for allocation and distribution of societal wealth. They set the rules for who benefits and who pays. How then should we evaluate budgetary reforms? The political criteria cannot be ignored, but will vary among conservatives and liberals, egalitarians, and individualists (see Wildavsky and Caiden 1996:xxi). It may be possible to agree on a more modest set of standards, such as those put forward by Roy Meyers (Meyers 1995:17). He suggests that a budget process should be comprehensive, honest, perceptive, constrained, judgmental, cooperative, timely, accessible, accountable, and responsive. Reformers could very well look to this checklist in counting their achievements. .

NOTES 1 "The basic rule is that legislation increasing direct spending or decreasing revenues must be fully offset so that the deficit is not increased. Direct spending consists mostly of entitlement programs that have either annual or permanent appropriations, but it also includes other budgetary resources (such as control authority for the highway trust fund) provided outside the appropriations process. PAYGO does not require any offsetting action when the change in revenue or spending occurs pursuant to existing law, such as a drop in revenue caused by a weakening economy or an increase in medicare payments caused by inflation in health costs" (Schick 1995:41). 2 This section is largely based on interviews with officials from the Treasury Board and other Canadian public servants in September 1995. Thanks are due to the Canadian Centre for Management Development for hosting me and arranging the interviews.

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Bramlett, Robert. 1991. The federal accounting standards advisory board: An introduction for non-accountants. Public Budgeting and Finance 11, 4:75-85. Caiden, Gerald.1991. Administrative Reform Comes of Age. Berlin: De Gruyter. - Alexis A. Halley, and Daniel Maltais. 1995. Results and lessons from Canada's PS 2000. Public Administration and Development 15:85-102. Canada. 1990. Public Service 2000: The Renewal of the Public Service of Canada (White Paper). Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services. - 1995. Estimates for 1995-96, Part 1: The Government Expenditure Plan. Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services. - 1995. The Expenditure Management System of the Government of Canada. Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services. - Treasury Board. 1995. Program Branch Priorities 1995-1996: Making Government Better. Ottawa: Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat. Doh, Joon Chien. 1996. Budget management and budgeting: the Singapore approach. In Budgeting and Financial Administration in Developing Countries, ed. Naomi Caiden, 153-74. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Goldman, Frances, and Edith Brashares. 1991. Performance and accountability: budget reform in New Zealand. Public Budgeting and Finance 11,4:75-85. Gore, Al. 1993. Creating a Government That Works Better and Costs Less: The Report of the National Performance Review. New York: Penguin. Gray, Andrew, Bill Jenkins, and Bob Segsworth 1993. Perspectives on budgeting, auditing and evaluation: an introduction. In Budgeting, Auditing, and Evaluation: Functions and Integration in Seven Governments, ed. Andrew Gray, Bill Jenkins, and Bob Segsworth, 1-18 New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Havel, Vaclav. 1996. The hope for Europe. New York Review of Books 43, 8:39-42. Jones, L.R., and Jerry L. McCaffery. 1992. Federal financial reform and the Chief Financial Officers Act. Public Budgeting and Finance, 12, 2:75-86.

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Jonsson, Gert. 1991. Government accounting in Sweden. In Government Financial Management: Issues and Country Studies, ed. A. Premchand, 275-91. Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund. Kettl, Donald F. 1995. Building lasting reform: enduring questions, missing answers. In Inside the Reinvention Machine: Appraising Governmental Reform, ed. Donald F. Kettl and John J. Dilulio, 9-83. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution. Likierman, Andrew. 1991. Government accounting in the United Kingdom. In Government Financial Management: Issues and Country Studies, ed. A. Premchand, 307-25. Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund. Meyers, Roy. 1996. Is there a key to the normative budgeting lock? Policy Sciences 29:171-88. Preston-Stanley, Tony. Public expenditure management in Australia. Unpublished manuscript. Schick, Allen. 1986. Macro-budgetary adaptations to fiscal stress in industrialized democracies. Public Administration Review (March/April):124-34. - 1995. The Federal Budget: Politics, Policy, Process. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, p. 41. United Kingdom. 1988. Improving Management in Government: The Next Steps. Efficiency Unit. - 1992. Performance Measurement in the Public Sector: A Draft Discussion Paper. Prepared for the World Bank, National Audit Office (June). - 1993. Next Steps Review. London: HMSO, Cm 2430. United States. 1985. Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act (Gram-Rudman-Hollings Act). - 1990. Chief Financial Officers Act. - 1990. Federal Credit Reform Act. - 1990. Omnibus Reconciliation Act. Title xm (Budget Enforcement Act). - 1992. Budgeting for Administrative Costs under Credit Reform. Washington, DC: Congressional Budget Office. - 1993. Government Performance and Results Act. Wildavsky, Aaron, and Naomi Caiden. 1996. The New Politics of the Budgetary Process, 3rd ed. New York: Addison Wesley Longman. Zifcak, Spencer M. 1994. New Managerialism: Administrative Reform in Whitehall and Canberra. Philadelphia and London: Taylor and Francis.

Central Agencies and Departments: Empowerment and Coordination JOHN HART

While there may be differences and argument over what constitutes the New Public Management (NPM), no one disputes that decentralization of managerial authority was an essential element of the public sector managerial revolution of the 19805. A significant component of the new managerialism is, in the words of a recent OECD (19953) report on the subject, "the replacement of highly centralised, hierarchical organisational structures by decentralised management environments where decisions on resource allocation and service delivery are made closer to the point of delivery, and which provide scope for feedback from clients and other interest groups" (8). In Christopher Hood's (1991) formulation of the seven "doctrinal components" of New Public Management, "hands-on professional management" which allowed for "active, visible, discretionary control of organisations" by persons who are "free to manage" was listed first (4). Moreover, according to Gray and Jenkins (1995:91), "The literature of the new management, both public and private, extols the virtue of systems where rules are relaxed and opportunities given for organisational members to take the initiative in the interests of providing quality service." Decentralization, in the context of New Public Management, involves a significant reallocation of organizational authority in government bureaucracies. Above all, it posits a major change in the relationship between central agencies and line departments. 285

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In NPM theory decentralization liberates line managers from rigid central control and coordination. It allows for more flexibility on the part of line managers, it devolves responsibility from central agencies, it encourages innovation and entrepreneurship further down the hierarchy, and it seeks to empower officials to take decisions and accept responsibility in areas where, previously, decisions were made higher up the line. As Peters and Savoie have noted (1995:6), "An emphasis on entrepreneurial behaviour by administrative leaders is likely to make central coordination and control more difficult." Coordination and control by central bodies are almost antithetical to NPM ideas about decentralization of responsibility, but that very decentralization, and consequent fragmentation, creates a need for greater coordination in order to ensure policy coherence in government (Peters and Savoie 1995:17). The literature of New Public Management has little to say about this conundrum, and at present there are many more questions than answers. How does government ensure administrative and policy coordination in the environment of the New Public Management? What becomes of the central agencies whose very raison d'etre was the exercise of oversight, coordination, and ultimately control over line departments? What effect has NPM had on the functions of central agencies? Have NPM reforms substantially weakened central agencies and consequently weakened coordination and coherence in government? The logic of NPM is that central agencies ought to play a reduced role in the administration of government, certainly after the reforms have been put into effect, but the theory of NPM says little about the new role, if any, of central agencies in the reformed system. Among the OECD countries that have pioneered NPM reform, there has now been at least a decade of experiment and experience that ought to provide the answers to these and other questions about the changed relationship between central agencies and line departments. But experience alone does not necessarily provide clear-cut evidence about the impact of the decentralization phenomenon on government bureaucracies. The progress and consequence of NPM decentralization is clouded, in the first

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instance, by terminological difficulties and inherent problems of evaluation. THE VOCABULARY OF DECENTRALIZATION

Decentralization has been a common phenomenon among those OECD countries that have taken a lead in public sector management reform, but in the course of its development it has unfortunately acquired a variety of guises and labels. The glossary appended to the OECD'S Governance in Transition (19953) report opts for the word "devolution," which it defines as "a catch-all term for the granting of greater decision-making authority and autonomy (a) by central management bodies to line departments and agencies; (b) by departments and agencies to their subordinate bodies; (c) within departments and agencies to lower levels of management and to regional/local offices of central government; and (d) by central government to lower levels of government." "Devolution" was preferred by the OECD Public Management Committee because it was thought to be less precise (and, therefore, more analytically flexible) than alternatives such as "decentralisation," "deconcentration," or "delegation" - terms "that are used differently in different Member countries and can be a source of confusion in an international context" (OECD 19953:157). The terminology can even be a source of confusion within member countries. The Australian government's Task Force on Management Improvement, for example, went to great lengths in its 1992 report to make a sharp distinction between "devolution" and "decentralization." "Devolution," it said, "is the transfer of decision-making capacity from higher levels in the organisation to lower levels, i.e. it is about who is best placed in an organisation to make decisions." "Decentralization," on the other hand, "is the redistribution of functions or tasks from central units in the organisation to more widely dispersed units, i.e. it is about where in an organisation functions are best carried out" (Task Force on Management Improvement 1992:89). Such a distinction was necessary because, as a result of its evaluation of a decade of

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management reform in Australia, the task force found that "confusion between devolution and decentralisation" was the source of many problems relating to the implementation of reform (Task Force on Management Improvement 1992:105). The problem of what to call this particular doctrinal component of the New Public Management is further compounded when the concept of "empowerment" is added to the list of synonyms for "decentralization" or "devolution." Even though the term "empowerment" seems to have been deliberately omitted from the lexicon of the OECD'S Public Management Committee, and even though many advocates for empowerment would prefer that it not be confused with "decentralization" or "devolution" (see, e.g., Kernaghan 1992:197), it has inevitably become linked with them, and sometimes even melded into one single concept, as in the introductory chapter of Vice President Gore's National Performance Review report: Effective, entrepreneurial governments transform their cultures by decentralizing authority. They empower those who work on the front lines to make more of their own decisions and solve more of their own problems. They embrace labor-management cooperation, provide training and other tools employees need to be effective, and humanize the workplace. While stripping away layers and empowering front-line employees, they hold organizations accountable for producing results. (National Performance Review 1993:7)

Empowerment, as a component of the new managerialism, was certainly enhanced and given a higher public profile by the publication of the Gore report in 1993, but its oversimplification in that document obscured a complex concept with a variety of meanings. As Kernaghan has pointed out (1992:195), the term is used in a quite different and much broader sense by political theorists contributing to the new social movements literature. Even when applied to organization and management, it can mean the empowerment of clients and customers - what Kernaghan calls its external dimension - or it can relate to managers and employees inside organizations where it becomes "a synthesis of

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several theories and practices in organizational behaviour and human resource management." Even then, notes Kernaghan, "empowerment is interpreted in different ways" (1992:196). Empowerment is much more than delegation. In the words of the Public Service 2000 task force report, it "encourages managers, supervisors and employees to try new ways of achieving goals, motivating them to be creative and innovative in improving the service they deliver. Empowerment asks employees to assume responsibility for change and to be accountable for their actions within an environment which accepts a degree of risk-taking and acknowledges intent as well as results" (cited in Kernaghan 1992:197). Empowerment, more than any other of the doctrinal components of New Public Management, reaches deep into managerial psychology. The difference between mere delegation of power and empowerment, Kernaghan suggests, is that the latter enhances employees' "feelings of self-efficacy" (1992:197). Empowerment "invites more of a person's heart and mind into the workplace," according to Spice and Gilburg, and "requires a new psychological contract between manager and employee" (1992:29). It is not the purpose of this preamble to extend the debate about the meanings of decentralization, devolution, deconcentration, or empowerment. They are already too refined and too dense to be user-friendly. It is merely to make the point that there is not a sufficient degree of definitional consensus or commonality of usage to enable observers of the New Public Management to use any of these terms in a general or catch-all way. And when it comes to evaluating the impact of these doctrinal components of the new managerialism, then one needs to be quite specific about the meaning of terms. P R O B L E M S OF EVALUATION

In general, the literature on the New Public Management seems to have accepted and accommodated the differences in the way these terms are used by different analysts and in different countries. In any case, concern over what constitutes NPM has now given way to an interest in evaluating the managerial revolution,

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and recent literature has addressed both the impact of specific changes in particular countries and the general methodological problems of evaluating the kind of macro-reform that comes under the umbrella of NPM. One common theme running through the evaluation literature is the significant absence of data on which to base any systematic evaluation of managerial reform. The OECD Public Management Developments survey, published in 1993, expressed disappointment that "even while recognising the difficulties associated with evaluation, many Member countries continue to report no formal or systematic monitoring or evaluation of their public sector reform exercises" (OECD 1993:16). Two former Australian senior officials made a similar point: "The issue of the impact of the reforms of course ought to be an empirical question. But empirical work is largely lacking" (Holmes and Shand 1995:574). The 1995 OECD Public Management Developments Update reported that "evaluations of progress in public management reform are becoming less of an exception" (1995^8), but the Governance in Transition report, published by the same body in the same year, noted that "much work remains to be done to improve evaluation methods including the development of quantitative and objective measures and indicators." That report, rather optimistically, also calls for "the construction of internationally comparative performance indicators" (OECD 19953:85). The absence of quantitative data on the impact of public sector reform certainly limits what can be said about any change in the relationship between central agencies and departments because the nature of that change will be determined, in part, by the extent to which decentralization, devolution, deconcentration or empowerment have been implemented successfully. Evaluation is further constrained by inherent and serious methodological problems for which, in some cases, there are no apparent solutions. A number of the methodological difficulties identified by Pollitt (1995:139-49) are particularly pertinent to discussion about the impact of reform on central agencies and line departments. Pollitt points out that NPM reforms are usually multifaceted so that it is difficult identifying the specific reform component that

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produced a particular effect. Moreover, managerial reform is often accompanied by other political or administrative changes (such as budget cuts). Consequently, evaluators are faced with the problem of attributing the cause of reform. Pollitt also emphasizes "the absence of clear benchmarks" against which NPM reforms can be measured (1995:143). He is primarily concerned with the lack of a baseline performance standard prior to the introduction of managerial reform against which the impact of reform can be assessed. What worries Pollitt is whether or not a pre-reform organization's performance would have changed anyway, irrespective of the implementation of reform. But his concern about the absence of benchmarks can be broadened, particularly in the context of the subject matter of this chapter. Because there were so few systematic studies of how government departments and agencies actually worked in the prereform period, current discussion about decentralization, devolution, and empowerment and the relationship between central agencies and line departments takes place within almost unchallenged assumptions and assertions about highly centralized, rigid hierarchies of command and control. Yet it is worth remembering that, when Heclo and Wildavsky took the lid off the pre-NPM British Treasury, they found an organization that turned out to be quite different from the conventional bureaucratic stereotype - an organization in which "informal, non-hierarchical arrangements predominate" and where "the flux of circulating papers and crisscrossing conversations, not cast-iron directives" was responsible for the development of any particular Treasury view (Heclo and Wildavsky 1974:68). There are not enough empirical studies of the Heclo and Wildavsky type to provide an adequate baseline from which to measure the real impact of the movement toward decentralization, devolution, and empowerment in public sector organizations. We can only compare the New Public Management with the old conventional wisdom, knowing that the essence of that conventional wisdom was often assumption and assertion. Pollitt raises other important methodological questions. There is a need to theorize the political-organizational context, he says, in order to break away from the assumption that the NPM recipe

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can be applied in all situations. Different organizational purposes and cultures ought to be taken into account, argues Pollitt (1995:145). Again, with respect to devolution, decentralization, and empowerment, this point is critical. Why should we assume, for example, that decentralization of decision-making authority is as appropriate, or will work as successfully, in a department or agency that is predominantly focused on policy development rather than program management? At the root of this problem is the political (as opposed to the managerial) theory underpinning the New Public Management - a theory which essentially revives what was until recently considered to be a redundant politicsadministration dichotomy. With some exceptions (see, particularly, Carroll 1995), this aspect of the public sector managerial revolution has not had much prominence in the literature, but it does impinge significantly on how some components of the NPM are evaluated. One further methodological difficulty is triggered by a particular question raised in Pollitt's article, but not specifically treated as an inherent methodological issue. He asks whether it is too soon to evaluate the NPM reforms and concludes that it is probably too soon to come to any firm conclusions, but that "it is not too early to begin to assess progress and to look for results" (Pollitt 1995:138). However, this might be seen as a particularly critical problem with respect to the impact of decentralization, devolution, and empowerment on central agencies and line departments. There are no standards, tests, or criteria in the literature of NPM which tell us how long any particular reform needs to be in effect before it is ripe for evaluation. How long should it take a line department to adjust to a new function devolved on it from a central agency? Would it vary according to the particular culture of the department receiving the new function? Should we take into account the resources made available for managing the new function, so that we allow a longer period of probation when functions are transferred, as they sometime are, with insufficient resources? Some NPM reforms can be observed almost immediately. For example, the devolution of budget and spending authority to line managers is something that is quite visible and even measurable

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over a relatively short period of time, particularly when it is tied to an efficiency dividend as it was in the United Kingdom and Australia. On the other hand, reform and change in the area of accountability are less tangible, more difficult to implement, and subject to numerous external forces. None of the OECD countries has yet managed to revolutionize public sector accountability in the short term. And what do we do about empowerment - a doctrinal component of the New Public Management that seeks to change radically the fundamental culture of public sector organizations? If the goals of empowerment are to enhance "feelings of self-efficacy," and if empowerment does require "a new psychological contract between manager and employee," then one might be looking at a time span in terms of a generation before any substantial change is detectable. THE EXTENT OF DECENTRALIZATION, DEVOLUTION AND EMPOWERMENT

Within the context of the New Public Management paradigm, one would expect that any recent changes in the character of central agencies, line departments, and the relationship between them would be conditioned, in large measure, by the extent and success of decentralization, devolution, and empowerment reform initiatives.1 In the 1994 Public Management Survey Update, the OECD reported that "decentralisation to sub-national government and deconcentration within central government, if taken together, represent the most significant structural change reported by Member countries during 1993" (8).2 Most OECD countries are now following the lead that the UK and New Zealand set in the 19803 and implementing, albeit in different degrees, forms of decentralization. It is more difficult to generalize about the extent of devolution initiatives because there is a great deal of variation between OECD countries on this measure. Some countries, like Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, are pursuing fundamental reforms in this area which, the OECD claims, "are

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transforming the nature of public service employment" (OECD 199512:25), but changes are also under way in other countries and some specific reforms are being introduced in countries like Japan, France, and Germany which have generally been less enthusiastic about adopting the new managerialism. There are, however, more qualifications attached to accounts of the success of devolution than is the case with decentralization. The various OECD reports highlight a number of problems such as insufficient flexibility, inadequate preparation for line managers, cynicism and fear on the part of line managers, and the constraint of accountability (see OECD 1995^26). A survey of management reform in the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, conducted by the United States General Accounting Office (GAO), reported that problems with devolution occurred within departments themselves. "A common theme in the countries we selected was that some departments failed to supply or eliminate self-imposed rules or were slow to devolve authority because they feared the risks associated with devolved decisionmaking" (GAO 1995:55). But notwithstanding these kinds of qualifications, the OECD and GAO surveys do present a positive picture about the extent and benefits of devolution, particularly in the area of human resource management. The fact that they do identify problems and weaknesses is testimony to the extent and range of devolution initiatives to date. If empowerment does mean more than just devolution of responsibility, then very little can be said at this juncture about the success of empowerment initiatives. Indeed, that is reflected in most of the official literature reviewing the progress of NPM, like the OECD annual overviews, the GAO report, or the Australian Government's Task Force on Management Improvement (1992) survey, where the word "empowerment" is never used and empowerment (as distinct from devolution) initiatives are not specifically addressed. Empowerment, at least in the way that it has been defined by Kernaghan (1992) and Spice and Gilburg (1992), is the most ambitious of all NPM reforms because it requires radical change in organizational and management culture. One might also say that

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it necessitates at dramatic change in human nature. It is also a complex multi-stage process in which, according to Kernaghan, there is a "progression from little to very substantial implementation of its main component" (1992:198). Kernaghan provides not only a convenient checklist for assessing the degree to which an organization and its employees have been empowered, but also an implicit reason why OECD and other surveys fail to register empowerment initiatives. In a truly empowered organization - Management uses innovative, effective approaches to increase employee involvement and teamwork; a high level of trust and respect exists between and among managers and employees. - Cross-functional team cooperation occurs across the organization to meet customer/client needs more effectively. - Trends toward team participation and other forms of employee participation include more employee suggestions being made and accepted. - Employees have a strong feeling of empowerment; there is team ownership of work processes, employees exhibit personal pride in the quality of work, and union and management cooperate to achieve quality improvement. - Power, rewards, information and knowledge are moved to the lowest feasible levels; employee empowerment leads to a substantial flattening of the organization. - Improvements resulting from employee participation are clearly evident in systems, processes, products and services. - A regular formal survey process determines levels of employee satisfaction, follow-up actions are taken to improve human resource practices, and future plans address how to sustain momentum and enthusiasm. (Kernaghan 1992:198-9)

Kernaghan, writing in 1992, reported on empowerment developments in Canada, but noted that "few organizations have approached the middle stages, let alone the final stage, of the empowerment process" (1992:200). Indeed, there is little evidence, from either Canada or elsewhere, that any significant public sector organization had progressed to the "final stage" of empowerment as of 1996.

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The evaluation of management reform conducted by the Australian Task Force on Management Improvement in 1992 did survey staff attitudes on some dimensions of public sector reform that could be seen as steps on the road to empowerment, but the results did not, on the whole, present a picture of a civil service that felt itself empowered. For example, 58 percent of administrative service officer (ASO) grades 1-4 and 44 percent of ASO grades 5-6 could not agree with the proposition that they were given a real opportunity to improve their skills in their agencies (Task Force on Management Improvement 1992:131). Similarly, 58 percent of all staff questioned could not agree with the statement that changes are made as a result of their suggestions (Task Force on Management Improvement 1992:146). When asked whether they believed that there was a high degree of trust and openness in their agencies, over 60 percent of respondents felt unable to say yes (Task Force on Management Improvement 1992:148). On the question measuring overall job satisfaction, 40 percent of respondents could not say they were satisfied and 21 percent said they were either dissatisfied or very dissatisfied, a response which the Task Force noted was proportionately equivalent to 26,000 Australian Public Service officers (Task Force on Management Improvement 1992:434). It may, however, be a little unfair to measure the progress of empowerment in this way, that is, by seeking responses from lower-level employees. One of the problems with empowerment theory is that it rarely says anything about how far down the line empowerment should go. Saying that it should go as far as possible, as some theorists do, is just not specific enough for the purposes of evaluation. Virtually all the hard evidence provided in the Australian task force report shows that top managers (SES officers) were much more positive toward the various NPM reforms than were those lower down the staff hierarchy. Moreover, assessing the extent of empowerment initiatives in public sector bureaucracies is complicated not only by the problems of determining the reach and the scope of empowerment, but also because, as Joel Handler (1996:115) has pointed out, "empowerment is usually discussed in a zero-sum

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framework" and it is not always the case that what one agency gains another loses. Indeed, one of Handler's important contributions to the literature is his emphasis on empowerment as power sharing, where both sides gain as a result of reform. Nevertheless, the complexity of the empowerment process and its goals and targets are reasons why progress on this front has been difficult to document and quantify. Equally, the immense obstacles to empowerment implementation are also a significant reason why so little has been achieved. In this respect, empowerment can be closely aligned with devolution for it appears that the reluctance of middle managers to devolve or empower is a major stumbling block (Kernaghan 1992:206). Moreover, as Kernaghan makes very clear, organizations need to have extraordinarily talented, capable, innovative, and creative managers in order to implement empowerment successfully (1992:207), and it might just be that the standards required for this process to be successful will mean that empowerment managers are likely to be the exception rather than the rule. Finally, one ought not to forget that some countries have been simultaneously attempting to empower public sector employees while the public sector and those who work in it have been subject to a barrage of sustained attacks by politicians voicing antigovernment and anti-bureaucratic rhetoric in the quest for electoral success. In particular the determination of conservative governments to reduce the size of government bureaucracy for essentially ideological reasons seriously affects morale and runs counter to theories of empowerment, particularly when those theories emphasize the importance of feelings of self-efficacy, responsibility, trust, and respect. It is unfortunate that the proponents of new managerial reform in the public sector have been nowhere nearly as successful in selling their reformism to the public as conservative politicians have sold their anti-big government agenda, a fact that also serves to remind public administration theorists that NPM reforms have been driven by political concerns far more than administrative ones. The success of empowerment, as the empowerment enthusiasts would understand the term, has not been obviously apparent. The

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cultural revolution in the mind-set of public bureaucracies that empowerment requires has yet to occur, and no survey has been able to demonstrate that public sector employees actually feel themselves to be empowered in their workplace to the extent that empowerment enthusiasts would recognize as genuine empowerment, not merely devolution of responsibility. It may be still be much too early to assess empowerment initiatives, particularly when we think of them in terms of power sharing rather than a zero-sum transfer of power, and in either case they may be too difficult to measure given the absence of any clear benchmarks against which measurement might be made. But it may also be the case that empowerment is a much less attainable goal than other NPM reforms. CENTRAL AGENCIES AND DEPARTMENTS

Perfectly empowered public sector organizations ought logically, at least, to make redundant most of the managerial, and perhaps many of the coordination functions, of central agencies. But of course perfectly empowered organizations do not exist. Nevertheless, if empowerment is defined in its loosest and most limited sense, that is as a synonym for devolution, then one might still expect central agencies of government to become relatively disempowered as the movement toward decentralization, devolution and empowerment gathers pace in line departments and agencies. And given that the values of efficiency and cost cutting are at the core of the NPM agenda, then one might also expect to see a reduction in the size and the budget of central agencies as a result of devolution/empowerment initiatives. As Peters has noted (this volume), most central agencies appear to have been increasing in size under the NPM regime, although the pattern is not entirely consistent in those countries that have been at the cutting edge of NPM reform. In Canada, for example, central agencies have grown. Between 1980 and 1991, the Privy Council Office expanded its staff from 258 to 408 and the Department of Finance went up from 623 to 911 (OECD 1993:49). Similarly, in Australia the departments of Treasury, Finance, and Prime

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Minister and Cabinet all increased in size during the 19803 (McAllister et al. 1990:182-3). The United States seems to be in steady state. The Office of Management and Budget has remained more or less constant in size over the last decade. In New Zealand, however, the principal central agencies, the State Services Commission and the Department of the Treasury, have been shrunk quite dramatically, although the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet has almost doubled in size (see OECD 1994: H2).3 What is clear from the reform experience to date is that central agencies are not necessarily downsized as a consequence of devolution or decentralization initiatives. This may suggest that the extent of decentralization has been less substantial than is frequently suggested, or it may be an indicator that decentralization has been more significant in terms of signals and symbols than the actual amount of devolved authority and responsibility that has resulted from NPM reforms. The symbolism of decentralization is important, particularly when NPM is viewed as a politically driven movement, but it would be hard to deny that the extent of decentralization has been overstated. In Britain, for example, the Next Steps initiative had by April 1994 resulted in the creation of 109 decentralized agencies employing 67 percent of the civil service work force (Rhodes 1996:8-9). A more satisfactory explanation for at least some central agencies' continuing to maintain pre-NPM levels of personnel and budgets is that central agencies take on new functions, or a different mix of functions, under NPM reforms. For a start, the central agencies are usually the guardians of the reform process. Part of their new role is to facilitate reform and train line managers to implement the new approaches to management. The New Public Management also places a significant emphasis on monitoring and evaluating the progress of reform, and that too has generally been established as a central agency function. The place of evaluation in NPM also implies that the reform process is ongoing, experimental, and subject to adjustment. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the United States where the National Performance Review generated numerous "reinvention labora-

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tories" - more than one hundred throughout the government (Kettl 1995:10) and thirteen in the Department of Agriculture alone (Radin 1995:110) - that have created a very real need for central agency responsibility to collate and evaluate the results of experiments being undertaken in these labs.4 Central agencies have also taken on new oversight responsibilities due to the "new" elements of managerialism, such as accountability, decentralized budget management, and performance appraisal, which by and large require centrally established standards and central monitoring. The reform of the budget process in Australia provides a good example of how central agencies can emerge from the NPM reform process with new functions and even an enhanced role. The Financial Management Improvement Program, introduced progressively by the Hawke government in the 19803, was a classic case of decentralization on the one hand, through the introduction of portfolio budgeting and the "running costs" system, and enhanced central agency coordination and control on the other, through reform of forward estimates in which responsibility for determining the estimates was transferred up from the line departments to the Department of Finance (see Zifcak 1994:112-13). Allowing line managers the freedom to manage and giving greater operational flexibility to line departments and agencies is not, as the OECD'S Governance in Transition (19953) report points out, an abdication of power at the centre (73). The need for coordination and control is not necessarily reduced because of devolution and decentralization initiatives. To the contrary, the OECD report highlights the freedom that devolution/decentralization reforms present to central agencies to focus much more on strategic policy initiatives: Freed of many of the detailed tasks involved in input control, the centre can devote more resources to strategic policy issues and evaluation. Reforms can also help strengthen the centre's capacity to provide a longterm perspective and satisfy the need for government to be pro-active as well as reactive. Strategic policy development does not imply "state planning." It reflects a recognition that solving the problems confronting

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government requires coherent policies within a strategic framework. Although the responsibility for sectoral strategies rests primarily with line departments, the need has increased for a strategic overview at the centre. (OECD 19953:74)

The literature is now beginning to focus on the new opportunities for central agencies under the new managerialism. In the Australian case, Weller claims, the benefits for central agencies have been substantial (1993:233). New managerialism has given central agencies a broader set of controls and a more coherent leadership group in relation to line departmental secretaries. The experience of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in the United States provides a good example of the new opportunities for central agencies when managerial reform gets on the agenda. Traditionally the Office of Management and Budget and its predecessor, the Bureau of the Budget, has been weak in developing its management credentials. The culture inside OMB has been focused on the budget function and the reform, indeed the change of name in 1970 during the Nixon administration was primarily designed to enhance the agency's management capacity (see Hart 1995:82-6). A major congressional review of OMB in the mid-igSos suggested that not much had changed (see U.S. Senate 1986) and that OMB was still a reluctant managerial agency. Bat the implementation of Vice President Gore's National Performance Review has changed all that and enhanced the power of OMB by placing it at the centre of the reform process. James Carroll argues that OMB has become more powerful as a result of the National Performance Review for three reasons: (a) the costreduction focus of NPR, (b) OMB'S role in enforcing the Federal Workforce Restructuring Act of 1994 which is the vehicle for downsizing the federal civilian work force, and (c) the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 which established a strategic planning and performance budgeting system for the federal government which OMB was charged to develop and administer (Carroll 1995:305-6). While stressing the opportunities for central agencies under NPM, and highlighting examples of central agencies that have

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emerged from NPM reforms with new roles and enhanced authority, it ought also to be pointed out that some central agencies have clearly lost out in the reform process. As a broad generalization, it would appear that the emphasis in NPM on decentralizing personnel management has made central personnel management agencies particularly vulnerable to a diminished role. In Britain, the Civil Service Department was an early casualty of Mrs Thatcher's reforming zeal, although many of its functions were assigned to the Treasury and the Cabinet Office and a scaled-down personnel unit was re-established as the Management and Personnel Office within the Cabinet Office (Rhodes 1996:8). In Australia, the Public Service Board was reformed out of existence in 1987 and replaced by a much smaller Public Service Commission with reduced status, resources, and responsibilities (see Campbell and Halligan 1992:187). In the United States, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) spearheaded the implementation of the National Performance Review with the dramatic dumping of the io,ooo-page Federal Personnel Manual and the infamous government job application form SF-171 and became an enthusiastic catalyst for its own demise. However, unlike the British and Australian experience where central personnel functions were transferred to other central agencies, no other central agency in the United States has picked up what OPM gave away. The u.s. government now has a highly decentralized and fragmented personnel management system with minimal central coordination. Consequently, some observers are urging a major redefinition of OPM to establish a strategically thinking central personnel agency that the u.s. government so badly needs (see Kettl, Ingraham, Sanders, and Horner 1996:64). While it is difficult to generalize about the relative roles of central agencies and line departments, the reform experience does tend to suggest that decentralization and devolution are not necessarily incompatible with greater central coordination and even control. The very nature of the New Public Management requires a considerable degree of top-down leadership and direction and decentralization creates a greater not a lesser need for central coordination. Yet it is difficult, if not impossible, to

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generalize about the new relationship between central agencies and line departments or about the changing nature of central agencies because, within the broad parameters of NPM reforms, the actual experience and consequences of reform has by no means been uniform. Some central agencies have gained and some have lost out. Not all line departments are going to be affected in the same way by the imperative toward decentralization, and where decentralization does occur, the experience is likely to produce mixed results. Indeed, in order to make sense of the effect of decentralization on central agencies and vice versa, a microlevel approach may be necessary. While recognizing the difficulties in generalizing about the effects of decentralization and empowerment initiatives in public sector management, it can be said with some certainty that central agencies have not lost out in the reform revolution. For a start, central agencies are perfectly placed to control the reform initiative in its formulation stages. For example, the British Treasury's opposition to the original Next Steps proposals appears to have been instrumental in diluting some of the recommendations (see Flynn, Gray, and Jenkins 1990:163). In Australia the major debate about budgetary devolution and the Financial Management Improvement Program took place within the Department of Finance, the department that had custody of the reform process, rather than between departments. Moreover the leadership for the reform and the substantial decentralization that resulted also came from within the department and it would have been inconceivable that the reforms could have been implemented without the positive backing of the department. Secondly, the fundamental nature of the NPM reform requires a significant input from central agencies in order to maintain the integrity of reform. Finally, the reform process, which almost all NPM advocates say is a continuous one, requires leadership, resources, support, and training which most obviously falls on the shoulders of central agencies. The role of central agencies may also be enhanced by a concurrent, but analytically separate development in government bureaucracies - the trend toward what Terry Moe calls "responsive competence" (Moe 1985:239). Political leaders have not only

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been sceptical about the traditional values of neutral competence in government bureaucracy, but since the late 19705 they have been much more determined to exert control and make the civil service work for them. The growth of responsive competence was triggered by the passage of the Civil Service Reform Act in the U.S.A. in 1978, where President Carter set up the new machinery which his successor used reasonably effectively to politicize the civil service (see Rector and Sanera 1987). So impressed was Australian prime minister Bob Hawke with the new framework for American civil servants that he imported the model during his first year in office. At the same time Margaret Thatcher in Britain was inducing Whitehall to be more responsive to her, although in a somewhat different way than the Reagan or Hawke approach (see Hennessy 1989). As a generalization, it would probably be fair to say that the pressures driving politicians in government are pulling in a somewhat different direction than NPM reforms. CONCLUSION Given that the generic role of central agencies has not been diminished under NPM reforms even though some specific central agencies might have lost powers and functions, and that generally bureaucrats have been forced to be more responsive to political leadership, there should be little cause for concern that the progress of decentralization and devolution initiatives will weaken the central direction of government. Reform, in this respect at least, does not appear to lead to excessive pluralism or fragmentation in government as a whole. Central agencies exist to manage the decision-making process within government and there is nothing in the New Public Management that changes this vital function. Decentralization cannot eliminate the need for central coordination, indeed it strengthens that need because of the inevitable fragmentation that results from genuine devolution of authority and empowerment of line officials. Central agencies are not likely to disappear as a result of NPM, and as long as they are in existence they are likely

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to do what central agencies have always done and that is safeguard the whole against its parts. To the extent that decentralization frees central agencies of routine and time-consuming functions, it creates greater scope for those agencies to think strategically about the broader problems of coordination and coherence. The role of central agencies is also likely to be maintained by the structure of political leadership. Governments are hierarchical. Prime ministers carry more influence than line department ministers and there is usually a pecking order in cabinets in which the senior ministers are generally those who carry the central agency portfolios. So long as that remains the case, it is likely that central agencies will have the ear of senior politicians and will also have at least the status to be able to exercise oversight and coordination of line departments and independent agencies within the confines of the statutory regime that accompanies efforts to decentralize responsibility. What is still uncertain after some fifteen years' experience of NPM is the effect of decentralization and empowerment on central agencies and the coordination process. For reasons discussed earlier on in this paper, the evidence is not entirely clear and what evidence there is suggests that different central agencies in different circumstances have adapted to NPM in different ways. The dynamic of reform is still at work, and as so much of the literature suggests, it may still be too early to fully assess the consequences. Nevertheless it must be admitted that decentralization and empowerment initiatives may well make the coordinating and control functions of central agencies more difficult than they used to be. And they can be a cause of much concern particularly to those who see merit in the more traditional form of public administration. As Peters and Savoie (1995:4) note, "Many of the ideas now in vogue in public sector management also promote greater policy incoherence." Their concern raises important questions about how the system will produce "a broad policy picture ... and ensure a degree of 'sameness' in the provision of government services and in government operations" (26). Ulti-

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mately, if decentralization and empowerment are successfully imposed, there must be some diminution of uniformity, notwithstanding improved accountability, and greater oversight and monitoring capabilities on the part of central agencies. Reformers will of course see that as a benefit, not a cost, arguing that the old uniformity and sameness stifled initiative, innovation, and change. The critical question may well be, At what point do decentralization and empowerment seriously threaten coherence in government administration and policy making and will that point be recognized in time to take remedial action? Perhaps the worrying aspect of the NPM movement is that the model for reform has come out of the private sector, and the private sector seems to thrive on decentralization, fragmentation, and a high degree of incoherence. NOTES 1 Of course, not all change takes place within the context of the New Public Management paradigm. Changes outside NPM (for example, massive spending reductions and the consequent downsizing due to budget deficits or ideological imperatives) can affect the relationship between central agencies and line departments and, indeed, steer that relationship in the opposite direction to NPM reforms. 2 This is an example of terminological confusion. The OECD Public Management Committee seems to be using the term "decentralization" to refer to a shift of power from central government to regional and local government. How then would one treat the United Kingdom under this dimension of NPM reform? During the 19805 the UK set the lead in decentralizing functions to new agencies through the Next Steps initiative while, simultaneously, undermining the power and independence of British local government. 3 The UK omits staffing data for its central agencies from the figures it reports to the OECD each year. 4 Interestingly, the lack of systematic collation and evaluation of the product of the reinvention labs was criticised in the first major academic assessment of the National Performance Review. See Kettl 1995:72-3.

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Campbell, Colin, and John Halligan. 1992. Political Leadership in an Age of Constraint: The Australian Experience. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Carroll, James D. 1995. The rhetoric of reform and political reality in the National Performance Review, Public Administration Review 55, 3 (May/June):302-i2. Flynn, Andrew, Andrew Gray, and Bill Jenkins. 1990. Taking the next steps: the changing management of government, Parliamentary Affairs 43, 2 (April):i59-78. General Accounting Office. 1995. Managing for Results. GAO/GGD-95-i2o. Washington, DC: u.s. General Accounting Office. Gray, Andrew, and Bill Jenkins. 1995. From public administration to public management: reassessing a revolution. Public Administration 73 (Spring):75-99. Handler, Joel F. 1996. Down from Bureaucracy: The Ambiguity of Privatization and Empowerment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hart, John. 1995. The Presidential Branch: From Washington to Clinton. Chatham, NJ: Chatham House. Heclo, Hugh, and Aaron Wildavsky. 1974. The Private Government of Public Money. London: Macmillan. Hennessy, Peter. 1989. Whitehall. London: Seeker & Warburg. Holmes, Malcolm, and David Shand. 1995. Management reform: some practitioner perspectives on the past ten years. Governance 8, 4 (October), 551-78. Hood, Christopher. 1991. A public management for all seasons? Public Administration 69 (Spring):3-i9. Kernaghan, Kenneth. 1992. Empowerment and the public administration: revolutionary advance or passing fancy. Canadian Public Administration 35, 2 (Summer):i94-2i4. Kettl, Donald F. 1995. Building lasting reform: enduring questions, missing answers. In Inside the Reinvention Machine: Appraising Governmental Reform, ed. Donald F. Kettl and John J. Dilulio, Jr. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution. - Patricia W. Ingraham, Ronald P. Sanders, and Constance Horner.

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1996. Civil Service Reform: Building a Government That Works. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution. McAllister, Ian, Malcolm Mackerras, Alvaro Ascui, and Susan Moss. 1990. Australian Political Facts. Melbourne: Longman Cheshire. Moe, Terry. 1985. The politicized presidency. In The New Direction in American Politics, ed. John E. Chubb and Paul E. Peterson. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution. National Performance Review. 1993. Prom Red Tape to Results: Creating a Government that Works Better and Costs Less. Washington, DC: u.s. Government Printing Office. OECD. 1993. Public Management Developments: Survey 1993. Paris: OECD. - 1994. Public Management Developments: Update 1994. Paris: OECD. - 19953. Governance in Transition: Public Management Reform in OECD Countries. Paris: OECD. - i995b. Public Management Developments: Update 1995. Paris: OECD. Peters, B. Guy, and Donald J. Savoie. 1995. Managing Incoherence: The Coordination and Empowerment Conundrum. Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Management Development. Pollitt, Christopher. 1995. Justification by works or by faith? Evaluating the new public management. Evaluation i, 2 (October):i33~54. Radin, Beryl A. 1995. Varieties of reinvention: six NPR "Success Stories." In Inside the Reinvention Machine: Appraising Governmental Reform, ed. Donald F. Kettl and John J. Dilulio, Jr. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution. Rector, Robert, and Michael Sanera, eds. 1987. Steering the Elephant. New York: Universe Books. Rhodes, R.A.W. 1996. Reinventing Whitehall, 1979-95. Paper delivered at the 1996 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, 29 August-i September. Spice, Martha, and Alan Gilburg. 1992. Leadership for empowerment. The Public Manager 21, 3 (Fall):27-3o. Task Force on Management Improvement. 1992. The Australian Public Service Reformed: An Evaluation of a Decade of Management Reform. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, u.s. Senate 1986. Office of Management and Budget: Evolving Roles and Futurelssues. Committee on Governmental Affairs, 99th Congress 2nd

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Session, Senate Print 99-134. Washington, DC: u.s. Government Printing Office. Weller, Patrick. 1993. Reforming the public service: what has been achieved and how can it be evaluated? In Reforming the Public Service: Lessons from Recent Experience, ed. Patrick Weller, John Forster, and Glynn Davis. Melbourne: Macmillan. Zifcak, Spencer. 1994. New Managerialism: Administrative Reform in Whitehall and Canberra. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Restructuring Government for the Management and Delivery of Public Services PETER AUCOIN

With tongue in cheek James Q. Wilson opined: "Only two groups of people deny that organization matters: economists and everybody else" (1989:2-3). Yet reorganization has always featured prominently in efforts of governments to respond to the exigencies of the day (Peters 1992). It comes as no great surprise, accordingly, that major restructuring of government has been pursued in several Western democracies over the past fifteen years in order to improve the management and delivery of public services (OECD 1993). Although efforts to restructure the machinery of government in order to improve public management have long been commonplace, the results of such efforts have usually been deemed to have entailed considerable cost but precious little in the way of concrete benefits. It is not without some justification that cynicism and scepticism invariably greet new efforts at restructuring (Savoie 1994). Cynics have had ample cause to doubt that these efforts amount to little more than the swings of the pendulum - from integrated to specialized organizations and back again; from centralized to decentralized structures and back again. Sceptics have cause to disbelieve. All too frequently these efforts are symbolic or superficial; real change is undermined by the interests embedded in existing structures. Reformers, it seems, learn too late if at all that institutional structures are not merely instrumental arrangements that can be reshaped with ease. Rather most if 310

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not all are structures of entrenched power and influence (March and Olsen 1984; 1996). Government restructuring to achieve administrative reform over the past decade in a number of political systems, nonetheless, has appeared to have "come of age" (Caiden 1991:73-90). While false starts, delays, and missed opportunities have characterized efforts in some systems, the record of the past decade is one of substantial change. Moreover there are few signs of retreat in those systems where changes have been vigorously pursued. Although the stated objectives of restructuring government vary across political systems, two major foci have been evident almost everywhere over the past two decades. First, political leaders have sought to assert authority over their bureaucracies, and the interests embedded therein, in order to effect greater economy and efficiency in the management of government resources. Second, they have sought to make the delivery of public services more responsive to the needs and requirements of citizens as clients, consumers, and customers of government operations. The catalysts of change in these regards are numerous and vary in their particulars across political systems. Virtually everywhere, however, they include the introduction of budgetary austerity as governments seek to control and discipline public spending; the consequences of globalization for governments as they seek to enhance the competitiveness of their national economies; the rising expectations of individual citizens and businesses for quality service; and the opportunities new information technologies provide not only for effecting savings but also for reengineering the delivery of services. As a consequence, there has been a surprising convergence between what had been major differences among political systems in at least two respects: first, structures that seek to organizationally separate responsibilities for policy and operations respectively; and, second, designs to provide for more integrated service delivery systems. In each of these respects, the management dimensions of government have been accorded a political salience that managerially minded reformers of the past could only dream about (Hood 1990; Pollitt 1990; Zifcak 1994). Notwithstanding

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important differences across political systems, there has been a widely shared assumption that a good deal of what is required to improve the management of the state entails organizational changes to "debureaucratize" the management and delivery of public services. While the focus may vary, the stated purpose in every case has been the perceived need to correct for those traditional bureaucratic practices, even pathologies, that are regarded as having diminished attention to productivity in the management of resources and to serving citizens in ways which accord with their priorities and preferences. Closely linked to debureaucratization has been the increasing use of explicit "contractual" type regimes in place of traditional hierarchical structures. Contractual relationships in the management of public services are clearly not novel, especially in the case of relationships between government and the commercial private sector (Purchase and Hirshhorn 1994; Trebilcock 1994). What is relatively new, however, is the extent to which contractual relationships have been extended across government in order to set explicit targets for the provision of public services, to establish service standards, to apply performance measures, and to impose more demanding and transparent reporting and accountability regimes (OECD 1994). These efforts have resulted in a good deal of decentralization of authority within the organizational hierarchies of government. Yet this is not the whole story, as some might wish (Barzelay 1992). Accompanying these changes have been designs both to control the impulses toward bureaucratic autonomy and to require performance according to centrally imposed targets and standards. This simultaneous pursuit of decentralization-centralization has inevitably led to dispute, even confusion, as to what exactly constitutes the bottom line of public management reform (Aucoin 1990). This has been especially the case where conflicting signals have been given to those responsible for achieving greater productivity in the management of public resources while ensuring increased service quality in the delivery of public services (Ingraham 1995).

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Notwithstanding the paradoxes contained in the simultaneous debureaucratization-contractualization movements, structural changes in several regimes have been significant; indeed, as noted, it is not uncommon for them to be described as "revolutionary." Western democratic governments may not have been "reinvented" in the process, but it is clear that the old order has passed away in several important respects and, equally important, is not expected to return. Political and public support for the traditional bureaucratic model, in its various manifestations across Western political systems, has diminished dramatically. Although "there is no one best way of organizing" (Wilson 1989:25), governments in different jurisdictions increasingly have sought to learn from one another, and in several cases have consciously adopted or adapted structural models from one or more other jurisdictions. While some are leaders and others laggards, the operative assumption has been that there are common, even generic, principles of good public management, notwithstanding major, even fundamental, differences in constitutional and political structures (Holmes and Shand 1995). REDESIGNING STRUCTURES

The most common trend across political systems as governments seek to improve the management and delivery of public services by way of structural change has been the diminution of the authority of central management agencies to regulate and direct line departments or agencies. While the power of central budget agencies has been strengthened in most cases and central policy departments still set policy, those responsible for the management and delivery of services have generally been given increased authority to decide on the ways they use their resources to meet their service obligations. In a few cases, this has entailed significant structural change to the central management agencies of government. In Australia and New Zealand, for instance, the once-powerful central control agencies responsible for staffing and associated matters of

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personnel administration were transformed into primarily policy advisory and administrative support agencies. But even where such dramatic changes have not occurred, the central corporate management apparatus of government has been subject, if not to a major streamlining of powers, at least to a reorientation of functions (e.g., Clark 1994; Lindquist 1996). Uniform, standardized, and government-wide policies, rules, and regulations respecting financial, personnel, and related administrative practices have been thinned out, whittled down, or replaced with guidelines and advice on "best practice." This has been the case even in those systems, such as Sweden and Germany, where centralized management systems have not been the norm for all functional areas of administration or have not been as intrusive as in other systems, such as the Anglo-American systems. In Sweden and Germany, where the management and delivery of public services have long been undertaken primarily by separate operational agencies, as well as lower orders of government, it is not surprising that these systems have been characterized by relatively minimal central management agency control over the administrative dimensions of public management. Compared to the Westminster systems, among others, they have thus had less to reform, at least along the lines of decentralization. In Sweden, nonetheless, there has been increased devolution of authority. Devolution has been pursued in part as an austerity measure, that is to off-load national responsibilities to local authorities. Equally important, however, it has been a measure to debureaucratize state-citizen relations and thus an attempt to reclaim the legitimacy of the state in its relations with civil society (Pierre 1993). In Germany there has been some administrative deregulation, but the major efforts at structural reform have occurred at the level of local government, where concerted attempts have been made to implement new schemes for the management and delivery of public services that promote greater economy and efficiency (Derlien 1993). Even in France, long the epitome of the centralized administrative state, reforms to decentralize and devolve authority for the purpose of improving public management and enhancing the

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legitimacy of the state have been effected. Here administrative reform has necessarily been closely linked to political reform. The increased delegation of management authority to the field offices of the national government has thus been coupled with devolution of authority to local governments. "Modernization" of the national public service has enhanced the powers of local officials at the very time that the establishment of new local government regimes has diminished central government dominance over the administration of public affairs at the local level (de Montricher 1995; Rouban 1993). In the two Westminster systems which are unitary systems of government, Britain and New Zealand, the powers of local government and associated local authorities have been reduced by centrally imposed new structural arrangements that require them to conform to national public management systems and practices. Each of these systems thus has increased the extent to which local government and associated local authorities are viewed as an extension of the national state. In a number of critical respects, however, the aim of central government changes has been to provide citizens with greater "user" say or choice - a form of centrally imposed decentralization. In Australia and Canada, the two Westminster federal systems, as well as in the United States, there have been efforts to reduce the overlap and duplication between federal and state/provincial orders of government. In the process federal governments in these systems have sought to refocus their roles on the core responsibilities of the national government. Here too there is a kind of centrally inspired decentralization. Decoupling Policy and Operational Responsibilities

In addition to these general trends in the direction of greater administrative decentralization in government, some governments have taken further steps to promote economy and efficiency. The most significant structural changes here have involved changes in the Westminster systems where there has been a marked departure from the traditional ministerial department model that has long been a defining organizing principle under

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the Westminster model. In every case these changes have been taken as a response to deficiencies in the departmental model in securing effective political direction and control on the one hand, and good management on the other. The British and New Zealand governments were the first of the Westminster systems to institute such organizational changes. While they did not depart from the traditional departmental model in precisely the same way, each accepted the need to institute designs to separate organizational responsibilities for policy and operations (Boston, Martin, Pallet, and Walsh 1996: 42-95; Greer 1994; Campbell and Wilson 1995). In doing so they established structures that were predicated on the assumption that the most effective way to secure economy, efficiency, and service quality in public sector management was to ensure that those primarily involved in the operational tasks of government were assigned explicit responsibilities in these regards and given the necessary authority to fulfil them. In each case this meant clarifying relationships between ministers and those responsible for managing operations according to contractual type agreements. The new British and New Zealand models stand as alternative forms to the ministerial department model because of the extent to which a new set of principles has informed structural change across government. The organizational designs used to give effect to these models are not uniform or standardized in all respects. However, the principles on which they are based stand in some contrast to those which have informed the design of the ministerial department model. They do so in three major respects. First, they assume that improved public management is best achieved when ministers are required to make their objectives sufficiently explicit and transparent in order that a distinction can be made between the desired policy outcomes ministers wish to pursue and the outputs they are willing to sponsor and finance as public service undertakings in pursuit of these outcomes. Second, they assume that contractual, rather than hierarchical, relationships constitute the best mechanism to effect a delegation of authority both for managing resources and for employing administrative practices that promote economy and efficiency in the

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conduct of operations. Third, they assume that these first two conditions are prerequisites for the creation of management systems that secure performance according to ministerial targets and standards and clarify the accountability of ministers and public service managers respectively. The adoption of these models has meant that ministers (or their departmental policy advisors) should not intervene in the management of operations unless they are willing to make their interventions public, for instance by altering the terms of their contracts with those who head operational units. For their part, the heads of operational units are obliged to abide by the terms of their contracts, including their responsibilities for adhering to the corporate management policies contained in their contracts; if they do not, consequences will follow. To the extent that the behaviour of ministers and operational unit heads conforms to the principles of the model, responsibilities for policy and operations are decoupled. Because ministers have the authority to set the terms of these contracts, they retain political responsibility for them. However, they are not responsible for the decisions of the heads of these operational units (or their subordinates) which are taken on the basis of the explicitly assigned authority of these public service executives. These executives are not their subordinates in the same way as officials in the departmental model; they are their "agents." The contractual mode of relationships has thus sought to alter a fundamental feature of the traditional model. Given the legislative basis for its adoption of this model, the New Zealand system is more definitive on this point than is the British regime where the executive agency structure has been implemented by executive prerogative. In each case, nonetheless, an important change has taken place; hence the use of the term "revolutionary" to describe what has transpired. In coming to the conclusion that they needed to go beyond the traditional ministerial department model, even after a number of administrative reforms had been put in place, these two Westminster systems drew in part upon their own experiences. In Britain there has long been a wide variety of non-departmental

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organizations with varying degrees of connection to the central structures of government (Hogwood 1995). While some parts of this machinery have been problematic in their designs as public institutions, successive waves of reformers continued to recommend that the "executive" functions of government, that is, the functions of policy implementation and service delivery, be separated from the policy functions which would remain the principal responsibility of central ministerial departments. The report that proposed the "executive agency" model and led to the restructuring of the British system continued in this vein, arguing for an increased separation of responsibilities as necessary to improve the management of government operations (United Kingdom 1988). In New Zealand reformers drew upon a more recent experience, namely the design that had been put in place in the mid-1980s for the direction, management and accountability of state enterprises. By adapting the basic principles of this design for the core public sector, they reconfigured relationships between ministers and the chief executives of departments and subsequently extended them to a range of non-departmental agencies called "Crown entities." The changes to these two Westminster systems were radical departures within their own traditions, at least in regard to their comprehensive application to what had been the central public service organized in ministerial departments. They were hardly innovations in organizational design from a comparative perspective, however. In several European systems, most notably Sweden, a separation of policy and operational responsibilities has long been a defining feature of public administration (Kickert and Jorgensen 1995); hence the pattern of convergence across political systems. The two other Westminster systems, Australia and Canada, initially expressed little interest in any widespread adoption of the British or New Zealand approach. Relatively early on in its reform program, Australia instituted a purchaser-provider split in the provision of common services within government. It also gradually hived off some operational activities of departments to separate agencies. For the most part, however, the operating assumption

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under successive Labor governments (1983-96) was that "where there is considerable discretion at the operational level and the success of the policy depends heavily on how it is implemented, it is most desirable that policy advice and program delivery be integrated" (Keating 1993:11). More recently, however, and following a change of government, a new service delivery agency has been announced as the organizational mechanism for delivering all the services of the Department of Social Security (and some services now provided by the Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs). This new agency, when fully operational in 1997, will employ approximately 23,000 staff. In addition a new "corporatized" agency is planned to provide public employment placement services. As a government staff newsletter put it: "World-wide, governments are recognizing that the traditional public service department structure is not best suited to large service organizations" (Australia 1996:3). In 1989 Canada adopted a modest version of the British executive agency model by establishing what it called "special operating agencies" (soAS). Unlike either the British or the New Zealand model, however, all these agencies have been created as units within departments, and their chief executives are clearly subordinate to departmental deputy ministers (or in some instances to an official below the level of deputy minister). In addition the design has been applied to a very limited number of government operations, none involving the provision of a major public service (Canada 1994; Aucoin 1996). More recently, however, on an ad hoc basis, new separate agencies have been created or announced for a number of major operations, including the operations of the Department of National Revenue and the national parks service. None of these new agencies has been, or will be, established as an SOA. Integrating Service Delivery

The principal objectives of organizationally decoupling policy and operational responsibilities have focused on the management of those resources used in the delivery of public services; achieving

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greater economy and efficiency have thus been the paramount considerations. When restraint in government was joined by increased demands from citizens and business for improvements in service quality, however, the effect was to take structural reforms beyond questions of economy and efficiency, however important these considerations are to citizens as taxpayers (Borins 1995). Service quality, in this respect, has several dimensions, encompassing at least three major sets of criteria: responsiveness, accessibility, and reliability (Seidle 1995:11). Not all these dimensions raise issues of organizational design; but some do. The increased decentralization or devolution of authority that has been a feature of structural changes generally, as might be expected, has an important bearing on improvements in service quality. This is particularly so insofar as those responsible for the delivery of services are able to influence the design of the services themselves and the ways by which they are delivered. Making services more user responsive and their delivery more user friendly is also likely to be advanced where service delivery organizations are designed in ways that give them specific mandates to focus their services on particular categories of users, clients, customers, or consumers. The greater use of specialized operational agencies, rather than multi-purpose departments, to manage the delivery of public services obviously contributes to this objective. (The increasing use of partnerships with specialized organizations in the private sector constitutes a further illustration of the advantages of linking the public service with those who represent identifiable groups of users - the latter can bring an added measure of professional expertise to the design and delivery of public services (Kernaghan 1993)). In addition, service quality is likely to be improved where explicit contractual agreements impose service standards, performance measures, and public reporting requirements on service delivery organizations, whether they be departments or agencies. At the same time, improved service quality also requires that a wide range of services actually be delivered to citizens in ways that overcome the fragmentation that invariably comes with organizational specialization. Integrating service delivery to

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promote service quality is thus a challenge that extends across government departments and separate operational agencies (and even levels of government). Designing structures to promote this objective requires measures that address the need to coordinate the "horizontal" dimensions of public services from the perspective of those who receive them. What governments divide in order to better address their multiple responsibilities and attend to their numerous specialized tasks, they must also bring together if individual citizens and businesses are not to be ill served as a consequence of the institutional rigidities, narrow visions, and organizational boundaries that accompany the division of labour in complex governmental structures. Notwithstanding variations among the political cultures of Western political systems, citizens in all these polities are increasingly better informed and better educated, less deferential to government, and more assertive in their demands on government, especially in respect to their expectations for service quality. They are not only more conscious of their rights and entitlements, but are less tolerant of poor service in the public sector simply because it is provided by the public sector. For their part, public servants on the front lines of service delivery are increasingly more anxious to be responsive to citizen demands for service delivery mechanisms that overcome the fragmentation inherent in complex bureaucracies (Carroll and Siegel 1995). Restructuring government to provide more integrated service has thus become the second most prominent feature of structural change over the past decade. Integrated delivery systems require that bureaucracies be reconfigured from structures which are shaped as "triangles," that is, a narrow apex to set strategic direction expanding progressively down to a broad base where specialization is most evident, to structures which are shaped as "diamonds," that is, a narrow apex, an expanded middle to accommodate the requirements of specialization, but then a narrow base at the point where citizens interact with the delivery system. These new structural configurations come with a number of designations, including "single windows," "service clusters," and "one-stop shops." Each of these terms is an attempt to portray

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the idea that these delivery structures provide users with a single point of access for the delivery of a range of services that previously would have required multiple points of contact. As such they are a reflection of the extent to which governments have recognized the need to rethink how bureaucracies are structured to interact with citizens (Seidle 1995:7-29). These new designs take a variety of structural forms. Some entail not much more than integrated information and advisory services that help citizens access services from two or more delivery centres. Some go further and provide at a single location a bundle of services from different parts of a department or agency, from different agencies, or, in some instances, even from different levels of government (CCMD 1995). Some go further still and enable a single service agent to "case manage" the provision of a range of separate services on behalf of an individual citizen or business client. A variation on this approach entails teams of agents from different specialties and/or service units collaborating to provide an integrated service to single clients. Each of these organizational designs assumes that the several "services" provided in this manner remain the separate responsibilities of different specialized organizational units further back and out of sight, so to speak, in the governmental structure. The overall structure thus retains its organizational differentiation for the purposes of departmental and/or agency specialization. While the complexities of integrated service delivery vary among these different designs, each raises questions of authority, responsibility and accountability. They do so because of the extent to which service delivery must be managed horizontally by structures that encompass more than one organizational unit and where services are delivered by officials who are not necessarily from the unit directly responsible for all the services in question. One organizational response to this conundrum has been to design new service delivery departments or agencies that bring together the services in question under a single roof. Canada's creation of a human resources development portfolio and department in the 1993 restructuring represents one such example (Bakvis 1996). This new design brought together programs and

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units from five former departments. The department then developed a service delivery network of regional and local offices that provides more integrated client service than had been the case prior to 1993. A1996 reorganization of the provincial government in Nova Scotia provides a second example of this design. Its new Department of Business and Consumer Services houses under one roof various components from seven different departments that collectively had accounted for what the government described as 90 percent of the "transactions" individuals and businesses have with this Canadian provincial government. In each of these two cases a multi-purpose department constitutes an alternative to the provision of integrated service by way of the inter-organizational mechanisms noted above. While the lines of authority, responsibility, and accountability, as they extend from senior management to the integrated front lines of this new delivery structure, will be more complicated than in the case with traditional departmental structures with their more specialized structures on the front lines, they will be less complicated than those designs that require interorganizational matrix arrangements. There are, however, limits to the extent to which governments have been able to avoid the use of inter-organizational arrangements. The reasons are not new. There are always competing bases upon which organizations can be designed because governments must deliver a multiplicity of services to a diverse population of clients. Each definition of a client population to be served logically excludes one or more other definitions as the principal basis for organizational design (Simon 1946). It must be emphasized that this is not a question of the availability of resources, and thus of the slack that may or may not be available for tailoring services for particular clienteles defined in different ways, for instance by place of residence, age, sex, or racial or ethnic categories. Rather the question is one of trade-offs between what will be the principal bases used in designing different departments or agencies. The continuing demands for organizational designs that effectively address the concerns of clienteles that intersect in a host of different ways have bedevilled even the most innovative governments.

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Enlarging the sphere of responsibilities of individual ministerial portfolios, as effected in the 1987 Australian and 1993 Canadian cabinet consolidations, can help somewhat (Aucoin and Bakvis 1993). But not only does this often simply push the design conundrums down into the enlarged organization, as it decides on how its different parts will be specialized, inevitably some elements will be left out. For instance, the new Department of Human Resources Development in Canada has broader responsibilities than any of the departments that were brought together to create it, but it still must interact with other departments and agencies in seeking to address the concerns of many of its clients. It must interact, for example, with the Department of Industry (also with enlarged responsibilities as a result of the 1993 consolidation) on matters relating to job creation. Indeed, in this case, the matter is complicated further by the fact that the federal government has maintained a series of four separate federal regional development agencies (most recently folded into the industry portfolio but remaining distinct entities with each headed by a junior minister) with responsibilities for regional development in separate parts of the country. Organizing to deal with the regional dimensions of integrated service delivery is hardly a new development in Canada, however. Both departments, such as Environment in an earlier form (Brown 1986), and central policy agencies, such as the former Ministry of State for Economic and Regional Development (MSERD) (Aucoin and Bakvis 1985), have had experience with various kinds of horizontal, matrix management structures at the regional level of the federal government. In Britain, the recent establishment of a system of regional government offices, bringing together four major departments for the purposes of horizontal coordination within ten regions, bears some resemblance to the efforts pursued as a result of the establishment of a system of regional offices for MSERD in the early 19803. Both intra- and inter departmental/agency structures must be horizontally managed to effect a significant integration in service delivery. This invariably means matrix-type arrangements at the front lines of service delivery. Moreover, even if this occurs within a single department or agency, it must entail front-line managers

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with greater authority than has been the norm. This is likely to mean that the top positions in the field may need to be staffed by those who belong to higher ranks than has traditionally been the case for managers on the front lines, as has occurred, for example, in the new service network of the Canadian Department of Human Resources Development. At the same time, the requirements to manage the cases of individual citizen and business clients with multiple service needs requires a new generalist breed of service providers on the front lines, "generic workers" as one British study calls them (Burns, Hambleton, and Hoggett 1994: 95-8). These new generalists need to be both trained to deal with a multiplicity of specialists from separate divisions or agencies further back in the organizational chain and well versed in the corporate values and ethics of public service administration if they are to provide "seamless" service in ways that respect both the law and the policy requirements of the services in question. CONSEQUENCES OF RESTRUCTURING: TAKING STOCK

Notwithstanding a good deal of the rhetoric associated with structural reform initiatives, assessing the consequences, intended and unintended, of these structural changes is exceedingly difficult. This is especially the case when significant (as opposed to symbolic or token) organizational change occurs. In these instances, organizational change is invariably accompanied by changes in leaders and support personnel, new ideas about what the core business of these organizations should be, or reconfigurations in the constellation of interests at play. These several dimensions of change militate against efforts to isolate the independent effects of structural changes in comparisons of performance before and after such changes. And of course it is rarely if ever possible to conduct experiments with a sufficient number of cases. It is even difficult to assess the changes in terms of the criteria of economy and efficiency that have driven much of the structural reform. Everywhere these changes have been accompanied by some combination of program expenditure reductions, overhead and staffing cuts, contracting out, and the increased use of user

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pay. New financial management and accounting systems have also been introduced, and while usually complementary, they have their own separate impacts. On matters of service quality, equally difficult methodological problems are inherent in efforts to assess the independent impact of structural change. New delivery systems have usually been coupled with changes in the use of technology or at least new administrative processes and program requirements. Nonetheless, what is perhaps most significant in regard to structural change over the past decade is the degree to which observers, both inside and outside government, including those who are critical of the changes, agree that the major structural changes have been bedded in virtually all these systems. While changes continue to unfold, there are no signs of major reversals in direction. For instance in New Zealand, where perhaps the most radical changes were effected, the new structures have survived a change in government where the new governing party had been dubious of the changes while in opposition. In Britain there are no signs from the Labour Party that a major reversal of at least the principal organizational changes over the past decade would accompany a change in government, even though certain policy and managerial aspects of the Thatcher/Major revolution are certainly to be reversed. In Australia the recent change in government, as noted, has led to a further evolution of structural reforms in the direction of an increased use of nondepartmental models for service delivery. In Canada the 1993 change in government did not lead to changes to the major structural alterations put in place earlier that year by the outgoing government, and as in Australia, the new government has shown a greater interest in adopting alternatives to the departmental model. In other systems, including Sweden and France, the changes introduced in the 19805 continue to unfold in a consistent direction. And everywhere, governments are continuing to pursue initiatives to bring about more integrated service delivery. Evaluations and assessments of these structural changes have been generally positive. As might be expected, this is perhaps more so the case for those studies undertaken by or for govern-

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ments themselves, although some of the disruptive consequences of the changes have been noted (e.g., Australia 1992:84). In every case these studies have recommended ways both to advance the intended objectives of the organizational changes and to offset their unintended results. But in virtually no case have reports suggested changing course. External assessments by auditing agencies and especially academic observers have been less enthusiastic on the whole, although in the cases of Australia and New Zealand, academic studies have been largely positive (Campbell and Halligan 1992; Weller, Forster, and Davis 1993; Boston, Martin, Pallet, and Walsh 1996). Studies of the United States and Canada have been less positive, in part because of the shortcomings in implementation (Kettl 1994; Aucoin 1995; Canada 1993, 1994). In comparative terms, academic studies of reforms in Britain have been more critical than government or parliamentary reports. Here the negative assessment appears to be as much a reaction to the ideological inspiration of many management changes that have accompanied structural changes - for instance, mandatory contracting out and "the crude application of specific techniques," as Pollitt puts it (Pollitt, 1995:234) - as it is a critique of the changes in government structures themselves, particularly the executive agency model. Nevertheless, some see the passing of the old order as a retrogressive move away from the tenets of good government (Campbell and Wilson 1995). A similar conclusion is reached by two academics who have examined the increased use of executive agencies in the Netherlands (Kickert and Verhaak 1995). The Policy-Operations Divide

Perhaps no other structural change has provoked more disagreement among participants and observers than the question of those designs that have brought about the organizational separation of policy and operational responsibilities in the Westminster systems. Those who are critical of these designs argue, more often than not from a mix of empirical and normative perspectives, that the

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functions of policy and operations cannot or should not be separated. Among other things, they claim that the management of operations constitutes policy implementation and that much policy emerges in the ongoing processes of implementation; that such a separation increases the tendency of political leaders to turn to partisan political advisors and away from professional public servants who are now removed from directly managing operations; that this leads those in "autonomous" operational agencies to make policy through their operational decisions and invariably give short shrift to traditional democratic values in favour of managerial values; and that the result of increased operational autonomy combined with a greater fragmentation through agency differentiation is an inexorable diminution in the capacity of government to steer the ship of state by way of strategic policy coordination across government. The debate of course is not really a new one. As Hogwood (1995) has noted, a very large part of what constitutes the British state apparatus has long been outside the classic ministerial department structure. Moreover, a good deal of what has been formally encompassed by these departmental structures has long been managed in a quasi-autonomous manner in actual practice. Britain is clearly not unique in this respect. In the Canadian case, for instance, there has long been a mix of ministerial departments on the one hand, and of agencies, boards, and corporations at various degrees of arm's length from ministers on the other. The latter have been designated "structural heretics" by Hodgetts (1973:138-56) precisely because they deviate from the structural principles of ministerial departments. This mix indicates a kind of schizophrenia toward organizational designs, an attitude most recently exhibited by those ministers who express little enthusiasm for the British or New Zealand models but, ironically, are willing to continue the Canadian tradition of creating organizations even further removed from direct ministerial control than are executive agencies in Britain or operational departments in New Zealand. The evidence from the experience in the systems which have recently moved in this direction, as well as from those systems

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which have long used such an organizing principle, suggests that there is no easy resolution to this debate. At the same time, the evidence indicates that this approach can lead to the outcomes promoted by its advocates, namely greater contestation in the public service policy advice received by ministers, improved management practices, and increased transparency in public accountability. Contestation in Policy Advice Greater contestation in the policy advice received by ministers has been evident to the extent that the design of the policy-operations divide has provided ministers with independent advice directly from at least two public service sources: those primarily responsible for "policy," that is, policy development, monitoring of implementation and evaluation; and those primarily responsible for "operations." Under this design, the former no longer monopolizes the provision of advice; the latter are not their subordinates as they are in vertically structured departmental hierarchies. Those responsible for operations are required, in some cases as part of their formal mandate and in other cases as a result of practical necessity, to provide policy advice that speaks directly to the ways by which the operations they manage contribute to the realization of ministerial policy objectives. As such they are now more exposed to the myriad realities faced by their ministers (and their departmental policy advisors) in setting priorities and in dealing with the intractable problems of governance than is usually the case with operational managers down the line in departmental hierarchies. It is important to emphasize that those responsible for operations have not been excluded from the provision of policy advice to ministers under this approach; this is simply not their first responsibility. While the evidence is not definitive here, and perhaps never could be, the British and New Zealand experiences suggest that the likelihood of ministers being captured by their departmental bureaucracies has been diminished. Concerns have been raised that policy advisors in some ministerial departments have become too removed from operations, and are less able to advise ministers effectively when operational considerations give rise to policy

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issues. Successive reports in each system have thus proposed organizational mechanisms to better link policy departments and operational agencies in the provision of advice to ministers. In neither of these systems, however, has it been proposed that the organizational regime revert to integrated departmental structures, as has occurred, for instance, in Canada in the case of a number of special operating agencies and with some agencies in Denmark (Jorgensen and Hansen 1995). Improved Management of Resources The management of public services has been improved under this scheme, as proponents claimed it would, for at least three reasons. First, it has led to greater differentiation in the organization of operational departments and agencies, that is, in place of integrated multi-purpose departments. In many if not all cases, this has sharpened the focus of operational organizations on their core functions. Missions thus have become better aligned with the actual tasks performed by these organizations. Second, improved management has led to changes in the definitions of the relationships between ministers and those responsible for the management of operations by virtue of the use of contractual-type relationships established in law and/or framework agreements. This has introduced a critically new element in relations between ministers and those responsible for operations. Ministerial direction and controls for performance have taken on a new dimension where such "contracts" have become the principal mechanism for linking policy and operations. Explicit contractual relationships may not square the circle for these aspects of public management, but they largely account for the willingness of ministers to see them as an acceptable tradeoff between their own desire to maintain, even enhance, political authority while securing improved management of operations. These contractual-type arrangements have restricted, but not eliminated, the capacities of ministers and their departmental officials to intervene in operations. This has enhanced the likelihood of increased productivity in the use of resources, even though it has shifted the burden of administrative management

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from the centre to operational managers, and in some cases has redefined who constitutes a manager for these purposes (Pollitt 1995:210-12). As unwelcome as this may be for those who previously did not have to concern themselves with the allocation of resources, there is general agreement that this has led to greater cost consciousness in the provision of public services. Third, these new organizational forms for managing operations have led to even greater delegations of authority to operational managers than has been the case with delegations under the departmental model. These delegated authorities have for the most part focused on the management of financial and personnel resources as well as the procurement of the various kinds of goods and services required in operations. The focus here, in short, has been on improving economy and efficiency in the use of resources. While experience varies across systems in terms of the formal and informal extent to which these delegations are granted and exercised without excessive intervention by central departments and agencies, the general view among managers is that they would not want to return to past practices. Enhanced Public Accountability Finally there is debate over the consequences of this separation of policy and operational responsibilities for public accountability. In Sweden the model of the policy-operations divide, "political accountability [for bureaucratic operations] does not exist" (Pierre 1993:399); other devices have had to be used to secure the responsiveness and legitimacy of the public bureaucracy in civil society. In the United States the separation of powers has also meant that public accountability of the executive and administrative branches of government has always been different than ministerial accountability as practised in Westminster systems. Even in the Westminster systems the development of judicial and quasi-judicial oversight and review of administration, the expanded role of parliamentary committees and audit agencies, and increased public access to government information have all served to supplement, and in some cases supplant the functions of ministerial responsibility (Cooper 1995). In Britain it is not surprising that there have been major concerns

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in these respects; these developments are comparatively less advanced, notwithstanding improvements in the transparency of government operations. The structural changes of the past decade must thus be situated in the changing character of public accountability. An additional factor is the belated recognition in Westminster systems that ministerial responsibility has been diminished over time as an effective mechanism for securing accountability in any event (Woodhouse 1994). As Campbell and Wilson (1995) note in regard to the executive agency system in Britain, for instance: "Next Steps was not seen as reducing ... [back-benchers'] ability to hold ministers significantly to account because they had such limited ability in the first place. At least under the Next Steps system MPS could gain some idea of the general instructions ministers gave agencies and could obtain information on the agencies' successes or failures in meeting objectives" (280). The fact that all Westminster systems formally cling to the traditional principles of ministerial responsibility ensures that at least the academic debate will continue. The actual practice of securing accountability through a host of other means, nonetheless, will continue to evolve. An increasingly greater separation of policy and operational responsibilities will thus characterize systems of public accountability. As elsewhere, including those systems such as Sweden and France, greater decentralization and devolution will require public servants to face increased demands for a public account of their decisions and actions. Critical to the enhancement of accountability under this scheme has been the extent to which the separation of policy and operational responsibilities has led to greater specificity by ministers in defining the outputs they expect delivered from their operational organizations. At the same time, accountabilities have been enhanced to the extent that the delegated authorities of these managers are outlined in legislation. Finally, the respective accountabilities of ministers and these managers are best secured to the extent that contractual-type relations are explicit, particularly in regard to the authority of ministers to intervene in operational matters and the circumstances and conditions for such interven-

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tions. In each of these three respects there has been an obvious trade-off between greater certainty in relation to accountability and greater discretion for ministers. The logic of the policyoperations divide requires that the trade-off be made in the direction of the former. This requirement appears to have been accepted more fully in New Zealand than in Britain, where ministers seem to want to have it both ways. The more recent developments in Australia and Canada appear to come down on the side of the New Zealand preference, given that the major new agencies in these two countries will have a legislative basis. Integrated Service Delivery

Unlike the debate over the organizational separation of policy and operational responsibilities, structural changes to effect integrated service delivery have not been the subject of much controversy. At least three reasons would appear to account for this fact. First, a greater focus on service quality can hardly be challenged as a value to be promoted, either by political leaders or by public servants. Second, those who are concerned that integrated service delivery structures may diminish the integrity of specialized services are on the defensive. They appear to be protecting their own turf to the extent that they are unwilling to engage in horizontal endeavours that break down the so-called "stovepipes" of separate delivery systems. Third, a great deal of what has been done to improve service delivery has been done as a consequence of financial restraint. Innovations in service delivery, accordingly, have been pursued as much as a function of necessity as a function of service quality. In this respect criticism tends to be directed at the quality and quantity of the services provided, rather than the structures used for delivering them. Matrix Structures While matrix-type structures for horizontal management are new to government, integrated service delivery systems require their use at lower levels than has typically been the norm. In some instances they have brought together service providers who have traditionally operated in isolation from one

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another, notwithstanding the fact that their clients must deal with each of them, often in a prescribed sequence. In other instances they have brought together in a formal manner service providers who have traditionally sought to collaborate informally to address the multiple needs of their clients. These new matrix structures for service delivery have had an appeal to those intent on structural reform as a means to improved service quality in at least two respects. Because they require greater attention to the ex ante specification of service responsibilities, including the sequencing of service provision, they have legitimized a good deal of business reengineering, as service providers seek to find more efficient and effective approaches to providing seamless services for their clients. At the same time, because such specifications cannot possibly capture all requirements for integrated service delivery, these structures have legitimized a good deal of decentralized management. In each respect, integrated service delivery has constituted a response to citizen demands as well as a focus for reforms in public management that, to this point at least, does not appear to threaten the political leadership. Enhancing Management Capacity The adoption of matrix structures has inevitably increased the tendency toward diffusion and delegation of authority and responsibility in the management of integrated delivery systems. This has raised the question whether such systems have the capacity to secure adherence not only to the law but also to fundamental public service values and ethics. The critical factor here is the capacity of so-called middle managers to function as "the critical link" (Aucoin 1989) between senior management, especially when these are the senior managers of different departments or agencies, and those on the front lines of integrated service delivery. Yet almost everywhere, downsizing in government has led to a significant delayering of these middle levels of management (Kettl 1994:16-18). They have been viewed as redundant "overhead" in organizations where delegation has placed greater authority at the level of line managers, an obstacle to the empowerment of front-line workers, or both.

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Those responsible for structural reforms have sought to address this conundrum in at least two ways. First, they have provided "multi-skills" training for those responsible for the delivery of integrated services on the front lines, given that there must be a capacity to advise on, or deliver, a broad range of services. In many respects this is the relatively easy part, especially since new information technologies can be used to program the different elements of integrated service delivery. Second, they have sought to enhance the capacity of front-line managers to manage both across organizational boundaries and across what have been separate functional and line responsibilities. This has been the more difficult part. Management in government has been impoverished to the extent that functional and line management responsibilities have been organized as separate career structures (Swift 1993). It has also been impoverished to the extent that managers have been conditioned to manage up the organization, that is, to serve superiors, rather than down and across their organizations, that is, to provide the required leadership not only of their subordinates but also in relation to those organizations whose tasks complement their own (Zussman and Jabes 1989:66-70). In short they too often pay insufficient attention to those managerial functions that build and maintain well-performing organizations (Brodtrick 1991). Securing the Public Interest in Service Delivery To the extent that the management of organizations in government has been required to counter the above two tendencies in public administration, it is not surprising that the pursuit of organizational changes to effect integrated service delivery has resulted in increased attention to private sector experience in providing services to individual clients and specialized clienteles. The danger here is of course that the specific values of public service, including equal or equitable treatment of citizens, as well as the norms of due process and natural justice, may well be given less than the required priority in service delivery to the degree that private sector experiences are accepted as best practice.

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Service to the public cannot completely emulate private sector practice without running the risk of undermining the legitimacy of the public administration of public services. Even in those instances where service entails mainly transactional activities with single clients or customers, that is, individual citizens and businesses, the services in question remain "public" services (Pierre 1995). The more integrated these services become, the greater the need to ensure that their public policy requirements are met. These requirements constitute the bottom line of public management as governance. Because these requirements can no longer be imposed arbitrarily on a deferential and passive public, the competence of service providers in attending to these requirements, in ways that secure both compliance and consent, takes on a new priority in the management and delivery of integrated services. It is not at all certain that, beyond a minimal level of technical training for those at the front lines of integrated service delivery, sufficient attention has been given to the preparation of front-line managers and staff on the perennial questions of public service values and norms, including ethics, in the public administration of public services. The increased use of consultative mechanisms for the design of integrated service delivery systems demands that those who represent the public service be able to inform and educate citizens, as clients or partners, on how the public interest is served by adherence to these values and norms. Hence while there is still widespread enthusiasm for proceeding with integrated service delivery systems, only time will tell whether governments have paid sufficient attention to their implications in these respects. In some instances it appears that innovations are leaping ahead of these requirements on the assumption that if reformers push ahead, the necessary adjustments will follow. To the extent that citizens and businesses are primarily concerned with "results," it is not surprising that governments have wished to respond. While state bureaucracies may be less nimble than small business enterprises, they have shown themselves to be remarkably adaptive to changing circumstances once the realities of change become politicized. Public administration

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theory, however, has long emphasized the obstacles faced by governments when structural reforms seek to go against the grain of "bureaucratic politics." While reformers may view such politics as nothing more than the pursuit of the vested interests of bureaucrats in protecting their turf, the reality is that these politics are often an institutional expression of competing conceptions of what must be done to secure the public interest in how services are managed and delivered. There are, in short, limits in the public sector as to how far service delivery systems can define service quality on the terms demanded by individual clients or users. Securing the public interest requires delivery systems managed and operated by those who are competent to address real or potential conflicts between the demands of clients and users and the public interest as established in law and policy. CONCLUSION: LESSONS FOR PUBLIC M A N A G E R S The architecture of government in Western political systems has changed and continues to change in important ways. This is hardly a new phenomenon for those with some sense of the evolution of these regimes. In some respects the lessons from the collective experience of the past decade in changing organizational structures are perhaps not at all surprising. For those knowledgeable of the rich history of the machinery of government in these systems, the lessons may appear to be old stories told in new ways. For those without a historical perspective but with a keen appreciation of their own administrative experience, these lessons may appear to constitute little more than applied common sense. The Limits of Centralized Structures

The first lesson from recent experience is that productivity in the use of public resources cannot be secured in complex organizations simply through highly centralized decision-making structures and corporate management controls applied uniformly across the state apparatus. Governments do need to concentrate power to reduce and discipline public spending because there is

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only one public purse and most revenues must come from a single expenditure budget. But a concentration of power over the total outlay, or even the allocation of its major components, cannot produce the productive use of these resources. This can be achieved only by those who are responsible for the diverse tasks of managing and providing public services. This point raises the obvious difference between economy and efficiency in government. Central structures can secure greater economy, in the sense that they can cut spending totals. With few exceptions, however, the instruments at their disposal do not provide the capacity to effect efficiencies. They are simply too blunt, as best illustrated perhaps by the effects of centrally imposed across-the-board measures. All too often, such measures have perverse consequences for the promotion of efficiency. Organizationally separating policy and operational responsibilities has proved to be one way to promote efficiency. These new arrangements constitute an acknowledgment that integrated policy and operational organizations, most notably the traditional ministerial department form, no longer serve to secure the desired degree of productivity. While cost consciousness in the efficient use of public monies is by no means a public service ethic originating with the New Public Management, the move to separate policy and operational responsibilities is one structural response to the imperative; as Wilson puts it: "To do better we have to deregulate the government" (1989:369). This is recognized everywhere. Changes in the Westminster systems have thus brought about a convergence of structural forms across most systems, even while debureaucratization in pursuit of greater productivity was pursued in systems as varied as Sweden, France, Germany, and the United States, each of which had structures that separated policy and operational responsibilities long before the recent inventions of the Westminster systems. Managing the Policy and Operations Nexus

In several respects the debate over the separation of policy and operational responsibilities is a sterile one. It is so precisely

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because there must always be a nexus between policy and operations - policy is the basis for operations, and operational considerations give rise to policy questions. Yet how this nexus is managed in complex organizations has always been subject to the need to separate responsibilities. This separation is never complete, even where legislation establishes an organizational separation for practical purposes and puts operational responsibilities in an organizational form at some distance from those responsible for policy. Three points have to be made in considering recent organizational changes in the Westminster systems in relation to their traditional structures. First, the traditional ministerial departmental form, created in the nineteenth century to secure ministerial control over the administration of public affairs, did not assume that there would be no division of responsibilities between ministers on the one hand and their departmental officials on the other. In fact it presumed precisely that, even though ministers remained accountable for everything. Second, this model of the vertically structured department assumed that the most senior officials would be highly conversant with the details of departmental operations and would have extensive experience in the departments they headed. It did not envisage a cadre of senior officials whose careers had been spent advising on the policy responsibilities of ministers and government, either in the tradition that eventually developed in Britain or that has more recently become the norm in all Westminster systems, and who thereby would lack extensive experience in the line management of government operations. On the contrary, the effective management of the policy-operations nexus in vertically structured departments assumed that senior officials would have intimate knowledge of and experience with both sides of the equation. Third, while the traditional model did not necessarily assume that vertically structured departments would undertake few tasks, it was not meant as a design for those departments that are little more than conglomerates of organizational units with diverse

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functions, brought together only because they must be presided over by a single minister in a cabinet that could have only so many departmental ministers. In all four Westminster systems governments have recognized this by resorting to a wide variety of non-departmental forms of government organization, with varying relationships with ministers and their departments. In the debate over the organizational separation of policy and operational responsibilities, this fact is too often ignored. Indeed those who are not from the Westminster systems could be forgiven for assuming, on the basis of this debate, that the only significant form of government organization in these systems prior to the recent changes in Britain and New Zealand was the vertically structured department. The lesson from the experience of the past decade in this respect is that the management of the policy-operations nexus does not require vertically structured organizations. They may be appropriate for some undertakings. But where diverse tasks must be performed by discrete organizational units, horizontal structures are likely to be more appropriate. Since the number of cabinet ministers must be kept to a certain maximum in order that a cabinet may reasonably function as a collective corporate executive, governments are best advised to create ministerial portfolios as ministry systems, that is, encompassing both a policy organization and as many operational organizations as there are discrete functions to be undertaken. The basic principle to be observed here is that the management of the policy-operations nexus in these contexts requires efforts to manage and coordinate in a horizontal mode of mutual adjustment rather than in a vertical command mode (Mintzberg 1979:1-9). This is best achieved to the degree that the principals involved are not in superior-subordinate relationships, as in vertically structured departments, even though there is one ultimate superior, the minister. This principle applies as much to the design of operational agencies as separate delivery vehicles as it does to the design of integrated delivery systems on the front lines of government-citizens relations. For this reason there is no necessary contradiction between the creation of a wide range of

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operational agencies and the adoption of integrated delivery systems; each proceeds from an assumption that greater horizontality in government design is necessary to achieve the two major objectives of public management reform - greater efficiency and service quality. Organization Matters

The third lesson from recent experience, although it is not restricted to recent experience, is that organization matters. Many fail to accept this. They argue accordingly that the objectives of public management reforms are little more than the principles of good management and that these objectives can be realized in any organizational setting. Applied to recent experience, this view holds that the restructuring under consideration here was not necessary. Improved management systems and practices, they claim, could have been pursued using the existing machinery of government. There is of course an element of truth in this view. Some progress was made independent of structural changes, although in some political systems more so than in others and, within each system, in some parts of government more so than in others. Further, even after restructurings were implemented, some organizations left relatively intact, such as the New Zealand Department of Social Welfare, have done well by the new standards (Boston 1996:11). In these cases various administrative reforms have been implemented to good effect, in part because of the leadership provided by their organizational leaders or because these organizations possessed a culture that promoted adherence to good management practices. At the same time those intent on significant reform concluded that restructuring was required precisely because of the limited degree to which most parts of their system actually achieved improved management following administrative reforms. According to this view restructuring was a necessary condition to achieve administrative reform. The operative assumption, based on experience with their initial efforts at reform, was that behaviour would

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not change without a change in structure. Restructuring was thus regarded as an essential catalyst to reform; it was a means to an end. This has essentially been the storyline of reforms over the past fifteen years in the four Westminster systems, even though Australia and Canada were slower to accept the critical importance of restructuring than were Britain and New Zealand. Restructuring, of course, is not a panacea, even when it does shake up an organization. But it is an equally naive and illfounded assumption to conclude that significant change can always be accomplished in the absence of structural change. The Canadian experience with Public Service 2000 (an administrative reform program grounded on a disclaimer as to the importance of organizational restructuring) ought to be an important learning point in this regard. The irony in the failure of this program should not be lost to history; it subsequently led to an acceptance of the need for major restructuring. The relatively simple part was a consolidation of cabinet and ministerial portfolios to position the government to effect greater restraint in spending. The more difficult part is now unfolding with designs to decouple policy and operational responsibilities and to introduce integrated delivery systems. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aucoin, Peter. 1989. Middle Managers: The Crucial Link. Toronto: Institute of Public Administration of Canada. - 1990. Administrative reform in public management: paradigms, principles, paradoxes and pendulums. Governance 3, 2:115-37. - 1995. The New Public Management: Canada in Comparative Perspective. Montreal: Institute for Research on Public Policy. - 1996. Designing agencies for good government: the urgent need for reform. Choices 2, 4:5-19. Montreal: Institute for Research on Public Policy. - and Herman Bakvis. 1985. Regional responsiveness and government organization: the case of regional economic development policy in Canada. In Regional Responsiveness in the National Administrative State, ed. Peter Aucoin, 51-118. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

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- 1993. Consolidating cabinet portfolios: Australian lessons for Canada. Canadian Public Administration 36, 3:392-420. Australia. 1996, August. Agency News. Issue i. Australia. Task Force on Management Improvement. 1992. The Australian Public Service Reformed: An Evaluation of a Decade of Management Reform. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service. Bakvis. Herman. 1996. Shrinking the "House of HRIF": Program review and the Department of Human Resources Development Canada. In How Ottawa Spends, 1996-97, ed. E. Swimmer, 133-70. Ottawa: Carleton University Press. Barzelay, Michael. 1992. Breaking Through Bureaucracy: A New Vision for Managing in Government. Berkeley: University of California Press. Borins, Sandford F. 1995. Public sector innovation: the implications of new forms of organization and work. In Governance in a Changing Environment, ed. B. Guy Peters and Donald J. Savoie, 260-87. Montreal and Kingston: Canadian Centre for Management Development and McGill-Queen's University Press. Boston, Jonathan. 1996. Separation of Policy and Operations in Government: The New Zealand Experience. Unpublished paper. Public Policy Group, Victoria University of Wellington, June. - John Martin, June Pallet, and Pat Walsh. 1996. Public Management: The New Zealand Model. Auckland: Oxford University Press. Brodtrick, Otto. 1991. A second look at the well-performing organization. In The Well-Performing Government Organization, ed. James C. McDavid and Brian Marson, 16-22. Toronto: Institute of Public Administration of Canada. Brown, M. Paul. 1986. Environment Canada and the pursuit of administrative decentralization. Canadian Public Administration 29, 2:218-36. Burns, Danny, Robin Hambleton, and Paul Hoggett. 1994. The Politics of Decentralisation: Revitalising Local Democracy. London: Macmillan. Caiden, Gerald. 1991. Administrative Reform Conies of Age. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Campbell, Colin. 1983. Governments Under Stress. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. - and John Halligan. 1992. Political Leadership in an Age of Constraint: Bureaucratic Politics Under Hawke and Keating. St Leonards, Australia: Allen and Unwin.

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Campbell, Colin, and Graham K. Wilson. 1995. The End of Whitehall: Death of a Paradigm? Oxford: Blackwell. Canada. Auditor General of Canada. 1993. Report of the Auditor General of Canada to the House of Commons. Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services. - Steering Group on Special Operating Agencies. 1994. Special Operating Agencies: Taking Stock, Final Report. Canadian Centre for Management Development (CCMD). 1995. Delivering clusters of services to clients: innovations from outside the government of Canada. A report prepared for the Deputy Minister Task Force on Service Delivery Models. Ottawa: CCMD. Carroll, Barbara Wake, and David Siegel. 1995. Two solitudes or one big happy family: head office-field relations in government organizations. Paper presented to the Canadian Political Science Association, Montreal, 5 June. Clark, Ian. 1994. Restraint, renewal, and the Treasury Board Secretariat. Canadian Public Administration 37, 2:209-48. Cooper, Phillip J. 1995. Accountability and administrative reform: toward convergence and beyond. In Governance in a Changing Environment, ed. B. Guy Peters and Donald J. Savoie, 173-202. Montreal and Kingston: Canadian Centre for Management Development and McGill-Queen's University Press. Derlien, Hans-Ulrich. 1993. German unification and bureaucratic transformation. International Political Science Review 14, 4:319-34. Greer, Patricia. 1994. Transforming Central Government: The Next Steps Initiative. Buckingham: Open University Press. Hodgetts, J.E. 1973. The Canadian Public Service. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Hogwood, Brian W. 1995. Whitehall families: core departments and agency forms in Britain. International Review of Administrative Sciences 61,4:511-30. Holmes, Malcolm and David Shand. 1995. Management reform: some practitioner perspectives on the past ten years. Governance 8,4:551-78. Hood, Christopher. 1990. De-Sir Humphreying the Westminster model of bureaucracy: a new style of governance? Governance 3, 2:205-14. Ingraham, Patricia W. 1995. Quality management in public organiza-

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OECD. 1993. Public Management Developments: Survey 1993. Paris: OECD. - 1994. Performance Management in Government: Performance Measurement and Results-Oriented Management. Paris: OECD. Parris, Henry. 1969. Constitutional Bureaucracy. London: George Allen and Unwin. Peters, B. Guy. 1989. The Politics of Bureaucracy. New York: Longman. - 1992. Government reorganization: a theoretical analysis. International Political Science Review 13, 2:199-217. Pierre, Jon. 1993. Legitimacy, institutional change, and the politics of public administration in Sweden. International Political Science Review 14, 4:387-402. - 1995. The marketization of the state: citizens, consumers, and the emergence of the public market. In Governance in a Changing Environment, ed. B. Guy Peters and Donald J. Savoie, 55-81. Montreal and Kingston: Canadian Centre for Management Development and McGill-Queen's University Press. Pollitt, Christopher. 1990. Managerialism in the Public Services: The AngloAmerican Experience. Oxford: Blackwell. - 1995. Management techniques for the public sector: pulpit and practice. In Governance in a Changing Environment, ed. B. Guy Peters and Donald J. Savoie, 203-38. Montreal and Kingston: Canadian Centre for Management Development and McGill-Queen's University Press. Purchase, Bryne, and Ronald Hirshhorn. 1994. Searching for Good Governance. Kingston: Queen's University School of Policy Studies. Rouban, Luc. 1993. France in search of a new administrative order. International Political Science Review 14,4:403-18. Savoie, Donald J. 1981. Federal-Provincial Collaboration: the Canada-New Brunswick General Development Agreement. Canadian Public Administration series. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press. - 1994. Thatcher, Reagan, Mulroney: In Search of a New Bureaucracy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Seidle, F. Leslie. 1995. Rethinking the Delivery of Public Services to Citizens. Montreal: Institute for Research on Public Policy. Simon, Herbert A. 1946. The proverbs of administration. Public Administration Review 6 (Winter):53-67. Swift, Frank. 1993. Strategic Management in the Public Service: The

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Changing Role of the Deputy Minister. Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Management Development. Trebilcock, Michael J. 1994. The Prospects for Reinventing Government. Toronto: Howe Institute. United Kingdom. Efficiency Unit. 1988. Improving Management in Government: The Next Steps. London: HMSO. Weller, Patrick, John Forster, and Glyn Davis eds. 1993. Reforming the Public Service. South Melbourne: Macmillan Education Australia Ltd. Wilson, James Q. 1989. Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It. New York: Basic Books. Woodhouse, Diana. 1994. Ministers and Parliament: Accountability in Theory and Practice. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Zifcak, Spencer. 1994. New Managerialism: Administrative Reform in Whitehall and Canberra. Buckingham: Open University Press. Zussman, David, and Jak Jabes. 1989. The Vertical Solitude: Managing in the Public Sector. Halifax: Institute for Research on Public Policy.

The Changing Nature of Accountability P A U L G. T H O M A S

Accountability is at the heart of governance within democratic societies. It is both a normative concept which provides a foundation principle for democratic political systems and a complex, multifaceted, and dynamic process taking place on a daily basis within governments. As Leslie Lipson once argued in Democratic Civilization, "All democracies have to cope with a contradiction which is inherent in power itself: if used, it may be abused. How does one provide for the former and prevent the latter?" (Lipson 1964:478). Preventing the potential abuse of power is the ultimate goal of the numerous accountability arrangements and procedures adopted by contemporary governments, but these devices are also meant to serve narrower purposes such as enhancing responsiveness, improving administrative efficiency, and increasing transparency in decision making. Despite being a central concern of democracies, there continues to be confusion and controversy over accountability. Conceptually, the term has been defined and applied variously to describe a wide range of situations. In practice, the achievement of accountability is sought through a multiplicity of approaches, activities, and techniques, some of them far more visible than others. Before we can safely conclude that accountability is missing or weakly enforced, we must first clarify our understanding of the concept and then present as comprehensive a picture as possible of how the various mechanisms of accountability are working, including 348

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the impact they are having on the subjective role perceptions of public servants. To support a conclusion that accountability is lacking, we must examine the cumulative effects of various mechanisms of control, not just their individual limits or their potential for failure in particular circumstances. Moreover, a complete understanding of accountability must incorporate the perspectives of public servants. Respect for accountability requirements and restraint in terms of the use of authority are not just a function of external control mechanisms, they are also a product of internalized role perceptions held by public servants and other actors within the political system. Finally, satisfaction with the overall level of accountability achieved within any political system is as much a function of the subjective perceptions of politicians, interest groups, and citizens as it is of objective reality. Just as there will never be complete and perfect accountability in practice, no single study can hope to provide a comprehensive and systematic treatment of the topic. Traditional approaches toward the achievement of political and administrative accountability within different political systems have been the subject of extensive commentaries that need not be reviewed in detail here. Instead, the focus of this discussion is on the implications for accountability arising from the currently popular ideas which comprise New Public Management (NPM). The NPM approach involves both ideas about the future roles of government and a variety of managerial approaches. Under the auspices of NPM ideas, the public service of the future will be more decentralized in structure, will share more functions with the private sector, will be expected to demonstrate results based on published performance measures and customer satisfaction standards. For these developments to take place there must be a reconciliation of the issues they will raise for accountability. There is a tension at the centre of the public service reform process between, on the one hand the need for greater managerial discretion, and on the other the insistence upon a greater degree of political direction, control, and accountability over public bureaucracies (Aucoin 1989). The extent to which this dichotomy becomes a problem in practice will depend upon the willingness and capacity of political officials to

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set directions, to develop indicators of progress, and to compel the production of the relevant information needed to hold public servants accountable for the exercise of discretion and the achievement of results. The chapter proceeds in four stages. First, an attempt is made to clarify some of the key terms associated with the debates over accountability. The lexicon of accountability includes such terms as responsibility, answerability, responsiveness, control, influence, autonomy, and transparency. Assigning a clear meaning to accountability and affiliated terms is necessary to frame the analysis and debates over current conditions and future consequences for accountability. The second section examines how different political systems have sought to structure and control the use of power so as to balance effectiveness in governance with the requirement for ultimate democratic accountability. Formal, written constitutional provisions and informal, unwritten constitutional conventions represent idealized statements of the relationships which ought to exist between the political executive and the legislature, between the political executive and the public service and between the public service and the legislature, which is intended to represent citizens. Traditional definitions of these relationships under cabinet-parliamentary and presidential-congressional systems made public servants accountable through the political system. However, public cynicism and mistrust of the political process and politicians and dissatisfaction with existing accountability approaches have led to the development of alternative conceptions of and approaches to accountability. I will argue that the upshot of recent accountability and public service reforms has been to make accountability a more complex phenomenon, more diverse in its criteria and procedural requirements and potentially more confusing and inconsistent in its outcomes. Whether the net result is a gain or loss in terms of the overall level of accountability is a difficult and open question. The third section examines the implications of the leading ideas of New Public Management for accountability on several levels within the political system. NPM approaches would seem to

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involve greater accountability of the bureaucracy to the political executive, but they may also dilute the accountability of the public service to the legislative branch. Also, the emphasis on contracting out, customer service, market testing, and benchmarking is producing new types of accountability and of responsiveness, a closely related but not identical value. Supporters of the NPM movement insist that accountability is being clarified, simplified, and enhanced, but the critics argue that the management challenges and accountability problems are being not so much resolved as changed in nature. The final section offers concluding thoughts about future directions for accountability both inside and outside of government. Nothing like a grand or perfect theory of accountability can be formulated. Certain conundrums and paradoxes inherent in the search for accountability are being ignored by the more theoretically shallow and procedurally simplistic approaches to accountability which are coming into fashion. As Michael Harmon warns, attempts to eradicate the paradoxes or to pretend they do not exist are bound to disappoint and may backfire (1995:3). Instead of conceiving of accountability as a problem to be resolved, we should see it as a process to be continuously refined. There are many questions surrounding accountability, and as we will see, there are very few straightforward answers. CLARIFYING THE ACCOUNTABILITY LEXICON

Since the concept of accountability is multifaceted in meaning and often difficult to discern in practice, a comprehensive and universally accepted definition has yet to emerge. It is useful to begin by distinguishing accountability and responsibility, two terms which are often used synonymously. Harmon (1995:11) has demonstrated the ambiguity and multiple meanings of these terms. He suggests that in both philosophical and popular usage, three distinct meanings of responsibility can be discerned. Each of these meanings can have an individual, as well as a collective or institutional aspect. The first such meaning is responsibility as "agency," in which it is presumed that an actor(s) is given a goal

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and the power to cause events to happen and is guided by a sense of obligation. According to this definition, there are both an objective, descriptive aspect to responsibility and a subjective aspect. The second meaning of responsibility involves "accountability," which consists of an authoritative relationship in which an agent is answerable for performance and is subject to sanctions for failure to meet defined criteria. The third distinct meaning refers to "moral obligation," which can exist separately from an authoritative relationship. Obligation introduces an explicitly moral meaning of responsibility by suggesting that one should, or should not, perform a particular action. Harmon points to the paradoxical relationships among these different uses of the term responsibility. To take but one example, if an individual acts strictly as an agent of the will of others, then his or her moral responsibility is diminished (Harmon 1995:185-6). We might conclude that responsibility entails the authority, power, and freedom to act, as well as the ability to distinguish right from wrong in reaching a judgment. For our purposes, accountability will be taken to consist of an obligation to explain and to justify how one discharges responsibilities, the origins of which may be political, constitutional, statutory, hierarchical, or contractual. Different origins give rise to several variants of accountability which in turn differ in the degree of direct control and public disclosure involved. In general, four components usually exist in an accountability relationship: • the assignment of responsibilities, ideally based upon agreedupon goals or purposes • an obligation to answer for the discharge of those responsibilities • surveillance of performance to ensure compliance with directions given • possible sanctions for non-performance and rewards for successful performance. Accountability involves the conferral of authority from an external source, although it needs to be recognized that negotiation

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may be part of the assignment of responsibilities. The regular reporting of information, monitoring and periodic answerability are the procedural manifestations of the existence of an accountability relationship. Prevailing approaches to accountability in the public sector emphasize the assignment of blame for mistakes. To be accountable means that an individual or group of people is liable to assume the duty to correct mistakes or to recompense for wrongdoing (Caiden 1988:25). The stress on blaming may fit with the prevailing culture of politics, the media, and society at large, but it may also be dysfunctional. An emphasis on the negative aspects of accountability (i.e., on blame) may lead to more buckpassing and scapegoating by both politicians and appointed officials. In other words, because of its potential negative consequences, accountability may become something to be avoided at all costs (Harmon 1995). This implication has led to the suggestion that potential sanctions for blunders or abuses must be balanced in any accountability scheme by rewards for results, especially for positive results which exceed some norm or standard set in advance. An accountability framework can represent both constraint and opportunity. While accountability limits freedom of action and requires justification for behaviour, it also entails the delegation of authority which empowers officials to act. Usually accountability is thought of as retrospective in nature, requiring officials after the fact to justify what they have done. But accountability can also operate in a more prospective manner in three ways: first, by requiring the clarification of goals, objectives, or standards of performance; second, by obliging institutions and individuals to organize themselves to meet their obligations according to appropriate standards and to report on results; and third, by conditioning the values and behavioural norms of individuals to correspond with the expectations, priorities and concerns of the prevailing authorities or with professional norms and values of a particular field of activity. The latter, subjective sense of responsibility which is internalized by organizations and individuals can arise from a number of sources, including institutionalized accountability relationships and devices like

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codes of ethics. Finally, as both an opportunity and a constraint, accountability requirements can cover both actions and inactions. Accountability frameworks can vary in their stringency or degree of control. The stringency of the accountability relationship reflects the willingness and the capabilities of those in authority to set direction and insist upon the provision of adequate and timely information. Direction can be based upon formal control or informal influence, with control usually seen as the more stringent form of accountability. As Judith E. Gruber (1987) has observed, two basic types of control can be exercised over bureaucracies: efforts to specify the substance of decisions and efforts to require specific procedures to be followed in decision making (13-17). Whether control is exercised directly or indirectly, in a detailed, rigid fashion or a vague, flexible fashion, on the basis of objective or subjective criteria, and within or across organizational boundaries, are all variables which will affect the stringency of the accountability achieved in practice. Influence represents a softer, more indirect form of control. Typically influence mechanisms take the form of incentives, belief systems, and pressures which motivate and persuade officials to act. Influence mechanisms usually lack the continuous scrutiny and strong sanctions exhibited by controls. Influence mechanisms also tend to be less perceptible. Numerous activities exist outside the reach of control mechanisms but not of influence mechanisms. Examples include pressures external to an organization, such as the opinions and demands of interest groups. In practice, the distinction between "real control" and "mere influence" is often blurred in that influence arises from the exercise of (or potential to exercise) controls. The stringency of an accountability framework depends not only on the authority to set directions and to insist upon procedures to guide decision making, it also requires the willingness and the capability to demand an accounting. This involves the ability to monitor and to assess performance against some standards. Provision of information is at the centre of accountability relationships. The adequacy of the information flow within an accountability framework depends upon four factors: the

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accessibility of information, the sensitivity of officials to the information needs of authorities, the capacity of authorities to interpret information, and the capacity of authorities to verify the authenticity and accuracy of information. The successful gathering, transfer, and utilization of information within the context of an accountability relationship will depend upon factors such as the precision or vagueness of the organization's core task, its complexity, technicality, and stability. The contentious, vague, complex, multiple, shifting, and sometimes conflicting nature of the goals of many public organizations and public programs makes the fulfilment of the information requirements of a sound accountability framework far more difficult than for private firms. Calls for greater transparency, in the form of disclosure requirements, are part of the growing public insistence that governments become more responsive to the public will. Responsiveness is a related, but different, concept from accountability. Put simply, responsiveness entails responding readily and sympathetically to some request or signal from an outside source. Unfortunately, according to Saltzstein (1985), the concept of bureaucratic responsiveness has been utilized by scholars in a contradictory and incomplete fashion. She seeks to clarify the meaning of the concept by raising the questions of responsiveness to whom, for what, and in what form. Traditionally, the dilemma facing public servants has been posed as a polarized choice between responsiveness to elected officials versus responsiveness to the public. If it is assumed that the bureaucracy has a direct relationship with the public, then responsiveness becomes a more complex and "political" phenomenon than is the case if elected officials are the sole source of direction. In either case, empirical studies reveal that in practice public servants work with a richer, more multi-dimensional concept of responsiveness than the traditional literature implies. Whether there are variations in responsiveness d emonstrated by different types of agencies or by a single agency over time has not been extensively investigated. The concept of responsiveness can only become more complicated as public organizations are pushed, under the auspices of NPM ideas, to redefine their operations in terms of serving customers and to

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pay more attention to market signals. Customer and market responsiveness, however, should not be seen as synonymous with accountability since their purpose, dynamic, and visibility are quite different, as is discussed more fully below. It has to this point been suggested that accountability is multifaceted and differs from subjective responsibility and from responsiveness. Furthermore, it has been suggested that based upon the source of control and the degree of control, a wide variety of types of accountability can be identified. The listing below of categories of accountability is meant to be illustrative rather than exhaustive: • political (examples: competitive elections, constituent/representative relations, responsiveness to stakeholders) • constitutional (examples: ministerial responsibility, approval of taxing and spending by legislatures) • legal (examples: mandates of departments, reporting requirements, contractual requirements) • administrative (examples: superior/subordinate relationships, manuals of administration, the accomplishment of results) • professional (examples: adherence to professional norms, deference to expertise) Variants of accountability can also be distinguished in terms of whether they are internal or external to an organization, whether they operate prospectively or retrospectively and whether they emphasize substantive or procedural control. All of the different types of accountability may be present in a particular situation, but they may not have equal legitimacy in the eyes of the accountable decision makers. It is more likely in practice that only a couple of accountability pressures will actively compete for an agency's or individual's attention, with the other types in place but latent (Romzek and Dubnick 1994:271). A complete picture of how accountability works would require us to explore both the constraints and the opportunities that public administrators see in the various accountability mechanisms and the conditions under which they feel compelled to obey one accountability requirement

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rather than another, presuming that the multiple accountabilities may not always be consistent in the practice. In concluding this initial, somewhat abstract discussion of the many aspects of accountability, it must be pointed out that there is another level on which accountability can be seen to operate. This is the symbolic and psychological level. From this perspective accountability consists of symbolic gestures rather than real actions. The adoption of a code of ethics for politicians and public servants or the appointment of commissions of inquiry might qualify as mainly symbolic in purpose and effect. If on one level accountability is as much a subjective experience as an objective reality, then it will likely be difficult to convince a sceptical (if not hostile) public that progress is being made. The existence of a powerful, negative stereotype of public servants will cause members of the public to dismiss their own experiences as unrepresentative and endorse instead the more popular image presented by the media that most bureaucrats are arrogant, incompetent, and uncontrollable (Goodsell 1994). Proliferation of accountability devices will not do much to enhance public trust in governments if the well-publicized and vivid examples of abuses of authority or blunders block any recognition of progress being made. The next section examines how different political systems approach the achievement of the elusive value of accountability. ACCOUNTABILITY WITHIN CABINET-PARLIAMENTARY SYSTEMS

The level of accountability achieved throughout any political system is a function of numerous factors, including the constitutional arrangements which exist in a country. In a democracy a constitution serves the purposes of creating legitimate governments, defining the relationship between individuals and the state, and specifying the relationships which ought to exist among the different institutions of government. In setting forth the parameters of power and authority in this way, constitutions are meant to protect and to promote the rule of law. In simple terms, the rule of law means that no one, no matter how powerful or

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important, is above the law, including the government and its leadership. Respect and protection for the principle of the rule of law arises from a variety of sources, including a growing role for the courts in enforcing constitutional requirements. Despite the historical and obvious importance of constitutional and legal limits on the exercise of power, critics insist that the NPM reforms are ignoring or de-emphasizing the requirement for a legal foundation for all government activity, including bureaucratic activity. As the study and practice of public administration drifts away from its former disciplinary home in law and political science and draws more heavily upon the ideas and approaches of private management there is concern about the possible erosion of the principle of the rule of law (Moe and Gilmour 1995). The way that constitutional arrangements provide the starting point for the emergence of distinctive accountability patterns can be seen in an examination of the two most widespread models of democracy - cabinet-parliamentary and presidential-congressional systems. Of course, there are other examples of stable democracies which depart from these two categories, such as the hybrid model which operates in Switzerland or the semi-presidential system found in France. Also, within parliamentary and presidential systems there can be significant differences in terms of how particular constitutional provisions or conventions operate in practice. What follows in this section is a demonstration of how constitutional design, in combination with other factors embedded in the political process, affects the level of political and bureaucratic accountability achieved. Cabinet-parliamentary systems represent a distinctive approach to the distribution and control of power. Such systems concentrate power in the hands of the prime minister and ministers serving in cabinet and then seek to prevent the abuse of such power by holding ministers accountable to parliament for their performance in office. The principles of ministerial responsibility provide the constitutional foundation for this arrangement. Collective and individual ministerial responsibility are mainly unwritten conventions rather than strictly legal requirements. Though not enforceable by the courts, the courts may recognize the existence

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of these rules which are intended to bind politicians in the exercise of power. Under the convention of collective ministerial responsibility, the prime minister and cabinet take the initiative in terms of presenting most legislation and spending proposals to parliament for its approval. Governments may remain in office only so long as they are able to retain the support of a majority of members of the elected House of Commons. Apart from defeats on straightforward motions of non-confidence, it is left up to governments to determine how seriously they regard the loss of a particular bill and whether they will feel obliged to resign. Another political practice involved with collective responsibility is an insistence upon cabinet solidarity. Individual ministers must either support cabinet's plans, stifle their dissent, or resign. To preserve the outward image of cabinet unity and to encourage frank discussions, decision making in cabinet occurs in private. Cabinet confidentiality means that a certain amount of secrecy is ingrained into the constitutional order and this poses a limit on accountability. In addition to collective responsibility, individual ministers are legally responsible for their departments and politically answerable before the House of Commons for all official actions of the department. According to the traditional "orthodox" version of this convention, ministers can be forced to resign from cabinet as a result of major policy blunders or serious administrative errors. Critics of the pure version of individual ministerial responsibility point out that under modern conditions ministers rarely, if ever, resign for administrative errors. It is now generally recognized that ministers will be held accountable in the sense of being forced to resign only when major policy or administrative errors can be traced directly to their instructions or perhaps their failure to act when made aware of a serious problem. Recognition of the unrealistic nature of the convention of absolute ministerial responsibility has lead to a shift in the concept towards political answerability before a usually sceptical audience in parliament, rather than a legal liability requiring resignation. The real sanction behind individual ministerial responsibility has become loss of political reputation, not loss of office. Still, the doctrine of

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answerability obliges ministers to pay attention to activities within their departments and to ensure that mistakes are corrected when they occur. By holding ministers answerable to parliament, and by insisting upon a residual capacity to force ministerial resignations for purely personal transgressions, the convention of ministerial responsibility still serves to promote political accountability, albeit in a somewhat diminished version. The gradual retreat from the absolute concept of ministerial responsibility may be sensible, but according to the critics the result has been to create a gap in the accountability system for the actions of individual public servants. The perceived gap arises because of the separate but related conventions regarding the role of the public service within the cabinet-parliamentary system. These conventions stress that anonymity, neutrality, and relative permanence should characterize the public service. Public servants are appointed on the basis of merit, they provide frank and objective advice to ministers in private, they do not express their personal views in public or engage in partisan activities, they execute policies faithfully and to the best of their abilities, and in return for their support and loyalty they are protected from being personally named for mistakes and enjoy relative job security based upon satisfactory performance (Kernaghan 1979:249). If public servants cannot be named or dismissed for serious errors and if ministers refuse to resign, then the public may be left with the impression that no one is prepared to accept the consequences for mistakes. Critics also see the administrative half of the accountability framework being challenged by the trends within the political system. First, the anonymity of the public service, especially at the senior levels, is declining for several reasons. Public servants in all parliamentary systems are spending more and more time before parliamentary committees in conjunction with both legislation and spending. In theory public servants are present in such forums strictly to provide background information to parliamentarians. However, the rules to govern the interactions between public servants and politicians in what are essentially partisan arenas are unwritten or vague at best. This new procedure means that public

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servants must be cautious and agile in order to avoid being drawn into partisan controversies. The recent adoption of the corporate format for most departments in New Zealand, the placement in 1994 of departmental secretaries in Australia on contracts, and the emergence of executive agencies in the United Kingdom and special operating agencies in Canada are discussed more fully below, but these developments also mean that public servants increasingly replace ministers before parliamentary committees in order to explain and to justify administrative performance. A second trend eroding public service anonymity involves the growing emphasis on the use of consultation and partnerships for the design and delivery of programs, processes public servants are often expected to lead. More time is being spent by public servants on briefing and negotiating directly with pressure groups, including acting as brokers among competing value perspectives and demands. The public nature of these meetings runs counter to the traditional expectation that advice to ministers will be confidential and that public service views on policies and programs are not for public consumption. Televised coverage of the proceedings of parliamentary committees, the emergence of reporters who cover the "bureaucratic beat" full time, and the adoption of an investigative and adversarial approach by the media to coverage of government activity have all increased the public profile of senior public servants. Adoption of access to information laws assists the media in uncovering political and bureaucratic mistakes and heightens public awareness of the influential role of particular public servants. These trends have not brought us to the point where public servants are recognizable household names, but they are better known in the sense that parliamentarians, pressure group representatives, and interested members of the public are better able today to identify the occupants of important positions within the bureaucracy and may even feel confident in attributing certain policy perspectives to such individuals. Another trend within parliamentary systems which receives less attention in the accountability literature is the emergence of what might be called a "counter bureaucracy" created by and

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reporting directly to parliaments. In theory the regular bureaucracy is only indirectly accountable to parliament through elected ministers who assume responsibility for directing departments. But in practice parliamentarians have increasingly recognized that ministers are unable or unwilling to provide a full accounting for bureaucratic activity, and parliaments must therefore expand their surveillance capability to ensure that the public servants were carrying out the policy intentions of laws, running programs in an efficient and effective manner, and not abusing the enormous discretionary power delegated to them. To this end parliaments have modified their procedures and created a number of auxiliary agencies to assist with the scrutiny of the bureaucracy. There is not the space here to go into these changes in detail. In general terms, parliaments have sought to get involved in the lawmaking process earlier so that the often crucial preliminary stages of negotiation with affected groups is not completely dominated by ministers and senior public servants. Second, parliaments have sought to strengthen their roles in the complicated financial processes of modern government, particularly in terms of approval of spending (review of the estimates by parliamentary committees), contributing to the formulation of overall budgetary policy (including tax changes), and in the retrospective examination of the public accounts to detect waste and mismanagement. Attempts have been made to check the proliferation of discretionary law-making authority and to provide protection for the rights of citizens affected by the immense rule-making capacity of the bureaucracy. Parliamentary committees have been given authority to review delegated lawmaking and to disallow regulations which violate specified criteria. However, parliaments acting alone cannot provide anything close to continuous watchfulness over the vast range of decision making taking place in departments and agencies. Over the years parliaments have increased the staff support available to individual legislators, to committees, to party caucuses, and to libraries of parliament as a partial way to offset the information advantage enjoyed by ministers and the public service. Parliaments, or at least governments working through parliaments, have also sought

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to expand their surveillance of the bureaucracy through the creation of auxiliary agencies. In Canada these agencies include the Auditor General's Office, the Information and Privacy Commission, the Commissioner of Official Languages, the Human Rights Commission, and a corrections commissioner. In Australia there is an auditor general, an ombudsman, freedom of information and privacy laws, an administrative appeals tribunal, an administrative review council, and equal employment opportunity tribunals. In the United Kingdom the Audit Office produces numerous reports annually for use by the select committees of parliament organized along departmental lines. The Parliamentary Commissioner for Administration (PCA) has been available to deal with citizens' complaints about government action and inaction. Since 1994 the PCA has been responsible for dealing with complaints about denial of government information under the Code of Practice on Access to Government Information. The belief that individual and collective ministerial responsibility in combination with parliamentary surveillance represent weak devices to enforce bureaucratic accountability has led to a growing reliance upon statutes and the courts to protect the rule of law. In its 1980 report on Independent Administrative Agencies, the Law Reform Commission of Canada observed: "In a society committed to government under law, the role of the courts as a check on illegal or arbitrary action is crucial. Upon them falls the responsibility of reviewing the actions of state organs to ensure that they do not stray beyond the limits of the law. Nor are the courts restricted to the mere letter of the law. Under the rubric of natural justice, they also review state action from the standpoint of fundamental fairness. This role is vital to the political organization of our society" (143). Adoption of constitutional or statutory guarantees of individual rights have prompted courts to broaden their roles in protecting individual rights and in ensuring procedural justice. Australia has led the way in terms of an extensive scheme of control known as the "new administrative law." Its main features are: a code of ethics, freedom of information, an administrative review council, an administrative appeals tribunal, a stronger ombudsman and

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auditor, whistleblower protection, and an enhanced role for the courts. The impacts have included more work and constraints on public servants as administrative review agencies and the courts seek to monitor and control bureaucratic discretion (Wiltshire 1993). Reviewing these trends in the United Kingdom, Dawn Oliver has observed that the expansion of the role of the courts has led at times to a clash between the criteria of ministerial responsibility and those of legal accountability (Oliver 1994:635). Even before the launch of the various administrative reforms which are labelled "New Public Management," it was recognized by all observers that the circumstances of modern government were placing a real strain on the largely unwritten conventions of ministerial responsibility and on the separate but closely related set of ideas concerning an anonymous career public service. Critics insist that both sets of ideas constitute a mythology which misrepresents reality, provides a convenient defence of the constitutional status quo, and stands in the way of necessary reforms. However, reformers are faced with the difficult intellectual challenge of presenting an alternative accountability framework which matches the traditional model in terms of its internal consistency and practicality. Over the years of constitutional evolution, the concepts of ministerial responsibility and an anonymous public service had become part of a holistic framework of political and bureaucratic accountability. The concepts complement and reinforce one another. They have similar implications in terms of how public servants are to be held accountable for their actions. Ministerial responsibility requires public servants to subordinate their personal views to those of their political masters. As a requirement of anonymity, public servants are expected to provide objective advice in private, carry out policies loyally and efficiently, and avoid actions which entangle themselves (and the governments they currently serve) in partisan controversies that could undermine the confidence of future governments in their professional objectivity and capabilities. Changing one part of the traditional accountability framework has implications for other parts of the framework. This point

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becomes clear in the later discussion of the impacts of NPM reforms which have been implemented in cabinet-parliamentary systems without explicit changes being made to the traditional constitutional principles. While the advocates of NPM might insist that their ideas are constitutionally neutral in their implications, it will be argued in the next section that they are more consistent with the diffusion of responsibility and power which is the hallmark of presidential-congressional systems. ACCOUNTABILITY IN

PRESIDENTIAL-CONGRESSIONAL SYSTEMS

The political system of the United States epitomizes the presidential-congressional approach to the control of political power. Its distinguishing features are familiar, but warrant a brief description here in order to highlight the contrast with parliamentary systems. The U.S. constitution reflects a suspicion of governmental power, and to curb abuses it provides for a division of authority and an elaborate system of checks and balances. The President of the United States is elected separately from Congress in what amounts in practical terms to a popular election, serves for a fixed term, and cannot be forced to resign because of a non-confidence vote in the legislature, although there is provision for impeachment in the event of serious crimes. Separate elections are held for each of the two houses of Congress. Bills and spending must be approved by both the House of Representatives and the Senate before being approved by the president. The president has a veto over bills, which can be overridden by a twothirds vote in Congress. The constitutional design of separation of powers, reflected and reinforced by decentralized and undisciplined political parties and a decentralized organization and power structure within Congress, make the legislative process a huge obstacle course. The institutional rivalry inherent in the separation of powers model is intensified by the growing phenomenon of divided government. The term refers to situations in which the president is a member of one political party and one or both houses of Congress is con-

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trolled by the other party. The frequency of divided government has been increasing. Critics of divided government "Americanstyle" insist that it prevents bold, timely, and coherent policy making, leads to "log rolling" among legislators, promotes parochialism in legislative and expenditure decision making, and diffuses responsibility and accountability. According to William S. Livingston, the u.s. system represents an "institutionalization of buck-passing" (Livingston 1976:882). Defenders of the u.s. political system have counter-arguments, of course. First, they correctly observe that the framers of the constitution intentionally designed the system, in Madison's words, "to set ambition against ambition." They were prepared to accept delay as a price for greater deliberation and protection for the liberty of groups and individuals. Despite a diffuse and rambling power structure, governments have been able to pass broad domestic policy programs when political support for such initiatives exists. There is always an incentive for politicians to make government work, and this fact of political life has led to some centralization of power in the congressional party leadership and to an increased willingness by presidents to engage in consultation over their legislative agendas. The political system may lack focused accountability compared to cabinet-parliamentary systems, but it provides more points of access for state and other interests to the national policy process. Senators and representatives are able to bestow benefits on their states and districts and are constantly claiming credit for actions of the national government which are positive to their areas. More of the bargaining over policy and spending which takes place in the privacy of cabinet and caucus in a parliamentary system occurs in the open within a presidential-congressional system, contributing to the public perception of greater responsiveness. The role of the bureaucracy within the American political system reflects these constitutional and political features. The idea of an anonymous career public service is less firmly entrenched in u.s. government than in the UK or Canada. Theoretically, the public service is there to serve the president, but in practice organizational loyalties are divided. Because authority and power

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are dispersed, departments and agencies in Washington see themselves as accountable, not only to the president, but also to the congressional committees which provide their mandates and financing, to their own programs, and to outside pressure groups whose lobbying efforts permeate the policy process. Controlling these "iron-triangles" - departments, congressional committees, and lobbyists - is thought to depend upon presidential leadership, but there are numerous obstacles to such leadership. Presidents rarely arrive in office with a clear electoral mandate which could provide specific direction to the bureaucracy. As presidential appointees, cabinet members owe the president loyalty, but there are not the same incentives to cabinet solidarity as in parliamentary systems since governments do not fall based upon negative votes in the legislature. The constraints of time and information make it impossible for the president to provide leadership across the entire administrative branch, even with the support of a greatly enlarged presidential support staff. The response of recent presidents to these problems of presidential leadership in the bureaucracy has been to rely upon "team-playing loyalists" appointed to strategic posts within the executive branch. This trend has led to a blurring of the line between political appointees and career public servants and pushed the political appointment process further down into the bureaucracy. Depending on who is doing the calculating, between 15 and 25 percent of the top executive positions in Washington can be considered political appointments - a far higher percentage than in parliamentary systems. However, these political executives are in a relatively weak position in relation to the permanent bureaucracy. In Heclo's (1977) artful phrase, they are "a government of strangers" who are structurally separated and often unknown to each other. There is no strong incentive for them to coordinate their efforts across departments, and as temporary occupants of their posts, they depend on the permanent bureaucracy for advice, information, and follow-through. On the other hand, they are supposed to serve the president's goals, if these exist, and avoid being "captured" by their departments. In summary, the American bureaucracy is not subject to the same degree

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of unified direction as is found in cabinet-parliamentary systems, where loyalty to the government and to individual ministers is a stronger norm. The more pluralistic, permeable, and open nature of the American bureaucracy leads to an emphasis on the personal responsibility of individual public servants and to a preference for publicity surrounding the exercise of bureaucratic authority. This contrasts with the parliamentary emphasis on public service anonymity and the insistence on secrecy concerning internal decision making. As an equal branch of government, Congress has been concerned to preserve its prerogatives regarding the creation of administrative agencies and the supervision of their implementation of laws. To this end, Congress has created extensive procedures and auxiliary agencies to provide scrutiny of the bureaucracy - a convoluted budgetary process, powerful committees, large personal and committee staffs, the General Accounting Office, the Congressional Budget Office, and so on. Cabinet secretaries and their deputies appear regularly before congressional committees to explain departmental policies and actions. While formally representing the president, such sessions constitute accountability sessions that bring home to the public servants their personal responsibility for actions. This system compels public servants to share information more freely with the legislature than in parliamentary systems. The American public servants who achieve real influence and prestige are those who are politically adept and prepared to break the mask of anonymity. In contrast, until recently the most respected public servants in parliamentary systems have eschewed publicity and exercised their influence discreetly in private. ACCOUNTABILITY FRAMEWORKS AND PUBLIC SERVICE REFORMS

Throughout the Western world governments have embarked upon ambitious efforts to reform their public services. These reforms have been launched with considerable fanfare, involving the use of positive rhetoric about reinventing government, shifting

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the boundaries between the public and private sector, cutting back to basics, breaking through bureaucracy, deregulating and delayering the public service, reengineering program delivery, empowering individual public servants, developing a new public service culture, making governments more "customer friendly," utilizing competition and market testing to enhance productivity, and requiring that results be demonstrated through published performance reports. NPM is clearly a many-splendoured thing. As critics have noted, it is not a unified and consistent set of principles, but rather an agglomeration of ideas about how governments should redefine their roles and change how they deliver services. The experience with NPM to date might best be described as a "mile wide and an inch deep," reflecting the fact that most governments have rhetorically embraced the ideas to a much greater extent than they have actually implemented them. Also, at this stage the evidence on the success of NPM reforms is patchy and limited. Elsewhere I have argued that the knowledge basis which supports the confident prescriptions of the NPM is limited and ignores the problematic nature of the findings on organizational change, whether in the private or the public sector (Thomas 1996). However, governments and public services have found it difficult to resist the seductive appeal of the NPM message and the demonstration effect of reforms which "appear" to be working in other jurisdictions. Appear is the right word in this context, because the experience with NPM-style reforms remains relatively limited, we lack clear explanations for why some reforms seem to work and others do not, and we do not agree on what constitutes appropriate criteria of success. With these qualifications in mind, a number of NPM reforms are assessed in terms of their implications for accountability. In superimposing NPM language and practices on the already confusing world of public service accountability, governments have added new types of accountability without providing a conceptual framework to weight and to reconcile the various, sometimes conflicting, demands placed upon public officials. The emerging picture is complex, with more than a little hint of confusion about which types of accountability will prevail in practice in

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any given situation. This condition can be illustrated by examining four of the main ideas which constitute the core of NPM: a policy/operations split; the use of the market and the private sector through privatization, contracting out, partnerships, and market testing; the granting of managerial flexibility and the insistence upon performance-oriented measures; and the adoption of a customer service approach to the design and delivery of public services. These ideas overlap in practice. They all have accountability implications which have not been adequately defined. According to the "reinventing government" philosophy, "steering" (policy determination) should be separated from "rowing" (the operation of programs and the delivery of services). Two approaches to the implementation of this philosophy have emerged: first, traditional line departments have been redesigned to reflect the policy/operations split; and second, more of an organizational separation has occurred with operational responsibilities being placed in non-departmental entities called agencies. The public service reforms which took place in New Zealand during the mid- to late 19805 represent the best example of the first approach. First there was a separation of the commercial from the non-commercial activities of government and the commercial activities were transferred to state-owned enterprises, many of which were subsequently privatized. For the remaining core departments several modifications were made: • a corporate format was adopted • chief executives (CES) were placed on term contracts • CES were required to sign performance agreements to deliver specified outputs in return for resources granted • some CES were given the status of separate employers • internal (direct) accountability to ministers was strengthened through the use of agreements, plans, budgets, financial reports, and after 1994 a system of key result areas indicators • external (indirect) accountability to parliament was to be based upon the presentation of budgets, estimates, plans, and annual reports.

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Reflecting the predominance of the political conception of accountability, the conventions of ministerial responsibility were not formally modified to fit with the new arrangements. Ministers remained in theory answerable to parliament for the performance of their departments and the CES were considered to be acting as agents of their ministers. However, in practice the CES became the principal figures appearing before parliamentary committees to explain and to justify their administrative actions. Assessments of this aspect of the New Zealand reforms are mixed. Peter Aucoin (1995) provides a positive review of the new arrangements because of the delineation through contracts of the respective roles of ministers and senior public servants and because of the requirement for departments to demonstrate results in a public fashion. A number of benefits are alleged to flow over time from the new arrangements: • ministers will accept responsibility for policy and program outcomes (impacts of results in society), whereas the CE will be expected to explain and defend the outputs (the goods and services) produced by the department • the relationship between ministers and public servants will be placed on a clearer constitutional footing • ministerial authority to set directions and to insist upon results will be clearer and more effective • public servants will have more freedom from political interference in return for the expectation that they will demonstrate positive results for outputs • within the partisan arena of Parliament, it will be harder for ministers to shift the blame for policy or program shortcomings onto the shoulders of public servants • over time the reforms will strengthen the professional pride and self-confidence of the public service • because a more comprehensive and balanced approach to accountability (involving the recognition of accomplishments as well as the identification of mistakes) is being followed, there will over time be an increase in the public's confidence

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in public institutions. (Aucoin 1995; Boston, Martin, Pallet, Walsh 1996; Schick 1996) Most of the available commentaries on the New Zealand model judge it to be a success. According to Jonathan Boston, writing in 1992, overall the system for appointing CES was "working pretty well," there had been "no politicization of the public service," and while there had been examples of confusion over the respective responsibilities of ministers and CES, these represented a "teething problem" (15). Similarly, Aucoin (1995:227) and Canada's Office of the Auditor General (1995) praise the New Zealand model for its transparency which allows parliamentary committees and parliamentary agencies to hold both ministers and public servants accountable for results within more clearly delineated domains of activity. Not surprisingly, not everyone agrees that the New Zealand model represents an ideal solution to the dilemmas of accountability. The objections to the new system are both philosophical and more empirical in nature: • rather than concentrate on broad policy and leave managerial decision making to their CES, ministers will reserve the right to intervene when it suits their political purposes • the new system ignores the complexity and uncertainty involved with the setting of policy goals and the development of the best administrative means to accomplish such goals • if ministers prefer, for a variety of reasons, to express policy and program goals in broad, rhetorical language, it is unfair to hold public servants accountable for translating such vague intentions into effective operational activities • a great deal of policy making consists of diffuse, interactive processes of social learning in which modifications to existing policies and programs are made on the basis of administrative experience; a process which could be compromised by too wide a separation of policy and operations

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• with its strong emphasis on the achievement of vertical accountability within individual departments, the New Zealand model may compromise policy and administrative harmonization and thereby weaken collective political and administrative accountability • based upon the currently popular corporate philosophy of "tight-loose" control, the New Zealand accountability process relies upon contracts, performance agreements, performance reporting, and an array of accountability documents. The concern is that formalized reporting relationships and measures of accountability narrowly defined replace the public service ethos and trust relationships between ministers and their public servants which were at the heart of the traditional accountability model. (Boston, Martin, Pallet, Walsh 1996; Laking 1994; Schick 1996; Wistrich 1992) These concerns seem to be at least partly justified. John Roseveare (1994:9) concluded, on the basis of a small survey of the attitudes of ministers, that most would not behave according to the pure model, but instead would insist on their continued right to intervene in operational matters if necessary. Most would want discretionary accountability, meaning that they would explain (and take the credit for) successes and insist that their CES answer for unsound managerial decisions of which they had no prior knowledge and did not approve. In many ways this situation is not much different from the "old" arrangement, since ministers in New Zealand, as in other cabinet-parliamentary systems, rarely if ever in the past felt obliged to resign for purely administrative errors. The concern that the specification of accountabilities along departmental lines would narrow decision making unduly was recognized by the adoption in 1994-95 °f a set of cabinet-approved strategic results areas (SRAS). The SRAS identify the government's priority activities over the next three to five years, they are meant to shape departmental work plans and budgets, and they become part of the accountabilities set down in the performance agreements of departmental chief executives.

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According to Aucoin (1995), who is an overall supporter of the New Zealand model, its principal weakness is "the limited capacity of Parliament to make effective use of the significant improvements in performance reporting/' and the resulting lack of pressure on ministers to hold their chief executives accountable, especially in terms of meeting output targets (228). The use of semi-dependent agencies in the United Kingdom and Canada raises similar issues about the balance between ministerial responsibility and managerial freedom. Because the United Kingdom has used the agency concept far more extensively throughout its public sector and has granted individual agencies more autonomy than is true in Canada, its experience will serve as the basis for the following discussion. Under the Next Steps program launched in 1988 the British government had by 1995 created ninety-six executive agencies employing approximately three-quarters of the civil service. Agencies have added to the organizational diversity of the civil service even though they still fall technically within the boundaries of departments and under the ambit of ministerial responsibility. The original Next Steps document recommended a change to the British constitution, by law if necessary, "to quash the fiction that ministers can be genuinely responsible for everything done by officials in their name" (Hennessy 1990:332). However, first the Thatcher and then the Major government have stuck to the assertion that executive agencies can be accommodated within the existing constitutional conventions respecting ministerial responsibility. In a 1994 official statement on the matter, the government argued that it remained the civil servant's role to explain policy, but it was ministers who were to defend it and be accountable for it: "Reduced anonymity and the increasing scope for individual initiative and personal responsibility are positive developments. They do not, however, undermine the key constitutional principle that it is Ministers who are accountable for all that their departments do, including the work of executive agencies" (United Kingdom 1994:16). In the United Kingdom, the chief executives of agencies report directly to the minister rather than through the top public servant

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in the department, as is the case in Canada. The British model may mean more ministerial attention to agency activities than occurs in Canada. Rather than detract from accountability, the government insisted that the Next Steps program served to promote greater openness and accountability: The emphasis on explicit, monitored and published standards of services, with full information about how services are run, what they cost, how well they perform and who is in charge throws new light into many areas which were formerly obscure to external observers ... The effect has been to strengthen accountability to both Parliament and the public, building on the existing framework of ministerial accountability and the particular responsibilities of Accounting Officers. (United Kingdom 1994:15)

Ministers have made it clear that they will not answer questions about the management of agencies; these should be addressed directly to the chief executive. However, the minister is still formally answerable in Parliament for the broad policies which the agency is implementing. The ninety-six agencies vary significantly in size and importance. Actual ministerial attention to agency operations will depend on such factors as the scope and impact of an agency's activities, the size of its budget and staff relative to the parent department, and the quality of its recent performance. Rather than distancing ministers from operations, agencies may actually increase their involvement. Before the Next Steps program was launched, middle-level civil servants in charge of particular operations had several layers of management between themselves and the minister. Now, as chief executives of agencies, the same individuals often have a direct relationship with the minister, and the minister has a formidable array of control mechanisms available to hold agencies accountable: • approval of the agency framework document which set out the responsibilities and delegations of agencies

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• approval of business and corporate plans submitted by agencies • participation in the appointment of chief executives and the determination of their compensation • the approval of annual performance targets. In addition to these powerful levers, ministers also reserve the right, when necessary, to intervene in agency operations. Given these powers, ministers must remain responsible to some degree for agency performance. However, the appropriate degree of responsibility can only be judged by detailed examination of particular cases, and this is difficult because the actual working relationships between ministers and agencies are seldom glimpsed by parliament and others outside of government. When failures or problems arise, as for example in the Learmont Enquiry Report on prison management, ministers have sought to evade responsibility (Talbot 1996:29). While the attempt has been made to structure the agency model on a contractual basis, managers know that the formal arrangements can be set aside at any time. "If this is meant to be a 'contractual' style arrangement," writes Colin Talbot, "it is simply a mess with little clarity and much scope for confusion and conflict" (1996:30). In the United Kingdom, there have been parliamentary select committee investigations and much debate about the implications of agencies for the traditional framework of accountability, but in Canada, in part because SOAS cover less than 5 percent of the public service and because the principle of devolution has been applied timidly, there has been little such debate outside of the inner circles of the bureaucracy itself. Privatization, commercialization, public-private partnerships, contracting out, and the use of market testing are other prominent features of NPM. All these activities reflect a faith in competition and market processes as the most efficient way to allocate resources and to promote organizational effectiveness. While saving money has been the primary motivation behind the introduction of market-type mechanisms, they have also been seen as a way to improve the responsiveness and quality of service delivery. A less frequently noticed and studied purpose behind

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such reforms has been to simplify management processes and to reduce the size of the so-called accountability problem. By moving some previously public sector activities fully into the private sector, and by exposing the remaining activities to market discipline, it is alleged that there will be less need for centralized political and administrative direction, control and monitoring. The transfer of public enterprises or Crown corporations completely into private hands reduces the scope of operation of the principles of public accountability, but this is presumably appropriate given the political judgment that such firms are no longer endowed with a public policy purpose. However, the partial sale of public enterprises creates mixed ventures in which there is the potential for a divergence between the profitability goals of the private partners and the residual public policy goals of governments. As Donald Kettl (1993) has argued so persuasively, the shifting contours of the public sector are leading to more interdependence and shared power with the private sector. Defining and enforcing accountability in a world of hybrid organizations is even more problematic than for the more familiar state forms of the past. The assumption that private service delivery simplifies policy and management challenges has proved to be naive and unfounded in many instances. To be successful at contracting out, governments must be willing and capable of stating their policy and program goals with reasonable precision in order to give direction to and to monitor the performance of private contractors. At the administrative level there must be the organizational capability to refine goal statements, negotiate contracts, monitor contracts, and insist upon results in terms of cost savings, service quality, and the integrity of the process. In many cases the knowledge, skills and resources to perform these functions adequately are not currently available within the various public services. Horror stories are told about contracting out involving unqualified contractors, runaway costs, lack of oversight, poor service, and hardships imposed on displaced public workers. Most commentators accept that the widespread reliance upon contracting out reduces accountability so that the issue becomes

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whether the efficiency and service quality gains are worth this price. Customer service is rapidly becoming the most popular metaphor for describing the future relationship between individuals and governments. Several governments have launched service quality initiatives, the most ambitious being the 1991 Citizen's Charter in the United Kingdom. The charter idea is, in fact, spreading, although there is no one conception of a citizen or of a charter (Pollitt 1994). The UK charter enunciates six principles: the publication of explicit standards, the availability of information, the provision of choice whenever practicable, the promotion of courtesy and personal responsibility among public servants, the creation of well-publicized and easy-to-use complaints procedures, and a search for continuous improvement and value for money (Pollitt 1994:167; Seidle 1996). The official claim on behalf of charters is that they give citizens a real voice. It is also argued that focusing on quality service will enhance public perceptions of government, promote a tolerance of taxation levels, save money over the long term and improve the morale of public employees. The empirical evidence on whether the claims made on behalf of charters are true is patchy and mixed. Seidle's (1996) more positive assessment of the developments in the United Kingdom contrasts with the more sceptical appraisal offered by Pollitt (1994). What is important to the present discussion is to note that the charter movement is more about enhanced responsiveness to clients than about a strengthening of formal accountability. Under the charter, citizens become consumers, and public life could be seen as reduced to a series of isolated transactions from which individuals come away feeling more or less satisfied that they have received value for money. Andrew Dunsire (1995) raises the normative implications of making customer service the predominant perspective on government: "The emphasis on the consumer, a micro-level concept, may actually disempower the citizen, the participant in macro-level and collective decision-making and action. The Charters do not compensate for the loss of power by representative institutions, or the 'democratic deficit' which many observers have noted" (31). As practised to date the customer

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service model involves largely a reactive role for members of the public. Administrators take the initiative; they make services available, empower staff, survey clients, provide appeal mechanisms and decide which services to contract out. Such steps may improve service delivery, but according to the critics they do little to promote active citizenship in which the public helps to set the agenda of government. A final prominent feature of NPM is a shift away from accountability involving the apportionment of blame through the political process in favour of a more positive, objective approach based upon the demonstration of results. Results-based accountability, it is argued, will minimize the distorting effect of partisan debates and sensational media coverage. It will recognize the crucial role of public servants in shaping policy and in ensuring the successful implementation of policies and programs. It will assist ministers in deciding on policy changes and in explaining and defending departmental actions before legislatures and other bodies. It will provide public managers with information on their programs and motivate them to seek improvements. Over time, objective and credible performance reporting would help to improve the negative image of public organizations and help to restore public confidence that they are obtaining value from their tax dollars. Much more needs to be said about the promise and the pitfalls of results-based accountability than can be covered here. Therefore, only a few brief comments are possible. First, although some governments have recently made significant progress, most have limited experience in measuring and reporting on performance beyond the use of indicators dealing with the costs and levels of services provided. There are significant political, institutional, financial, and technical obstacles to the development and utilization of performance measures. The recent emphasis on service standards also raises problems because of our lack of knowledge about the relationship between delivery methods and service quality. Not all types of programs are equally amenable to resultsbased accountability. There are definitional and technical problems with performance measurement, especially when "soft"

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services are being delivered, and these call into question the validity of such measures. However, probably the greatest challenge for a results-based accountability regime is creating the incentives and motivation to establish realistic yet challenging performance expectations and to make these public. We have to ask the hard questions: What are the benefits and costs for ministers and public servants in publicizing their policy and program shortcomings? Won't parliamentarians, interest groups, and the media focus on the imperfections more than the successes? We must not forget that legislatures are primarily partisan arenas and their members are "more interested in vindicators than in indicators" (Graber 1992:45). Communicating performance data to parliaments will only strengthen scrutiny of ministers and the bureaucracy if more parliamentarians are committed to and capable of using such information in an intelligent and constructive manner. SUMMING UP This chapter has focused on the search for the elusive quality of accountability within governments. Accountability is central to democracy and it has been shown to operate on a variety of levels throughout the political system. However, it is not the only political and administrative value which we wish to see reflected in the operations of government. In addition to being accountable, governments are expected to be accessible and responsive to citizens. To this end they should be transparent, both in the sense of being open in terms of the availability of information and understandable in the sense of citizens being able to identify where responsibility resides and how decisions are made. However, in order to ensure representation of different values and interests and to promote fairness, decision-making processes in government tend to be complicated and slow moving. Economy, efficiency,andeffectiveness are also highly prized values in government decision making and much of the internal regulation of the public service is intended to promote these values. Given the turbulent and unpredictable environments surrounding governments, there is the expectation

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that they will become more anticipatory, flexible, adaptive, and innovative. Policy making in government must be characterized not only by foresight, but also by intelligence, coherence, and consistency. Finally, what governments do must be based upon political legitimacy and popular support. As the italicized words suggest, the political and administrative criteria of good government are numerous and they may not always be consistent or compatible in practice. Pushing for the maximum amount of control and accountability, for example, may detract from efficiency, transparency, and responsiveness. Similarly, enhanced responsiveness to clients may clash with democratic legitimacy and political responsibility. It might be helpful when assessing proposed reforms to arrange them on matrix in terms of how much they would enhance or diminish each of these values, but that approach implies greater knowledge about impacts than we possess; besides, societies rarely conduct institutional reform in such a purely rational fashion. Like most analyses of accountability this paper has been rather long on diagnosis and, to this point, short on prescriptions. There is disagreement among analysts about the size and nature of the accountability problem within government. Whether there is too little or too much accountability and the right kinds of accountability depends in part upon the perceptions of the observer. This is true in part because we have not fully mapped the contours of how accountability is being sought and achieved within government, including the sense of responsibility which motivates public servants in their daily activities. There is a clear trend within cabinet-parliamentary systems toward the demarcation of separate accountability arrangements for public servants. There is also a growing erosion of the traditions of an anonymous career public service. A further development is the growing importance of law and the courts as a limit on the discretion of public servants and as another means to enforce accountability. Under the sway of NPM ideas there is growing insistence that public servants be personally accountable for results through, for example, the development and publication of performance indicators. In these respects, cabinet-parliamentary

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and presidential-congressional systems seem to be converging, mainly by the former moving closer to the latter system in which the "political administrator" has been a recognizable type of public official for years. Making public servants directly and personally accountable would require an enforcement mechanism. At present public servants are "answerable" before parliamentary committees, but they are deemed to be reporting on behalf of their ministers, and only ministers can impose formal sanctions for errors or shortcomings in performance. In practical terms, however, public servants can have their reputations and careers harmed in the partisan arena of parliament. Placing public servants before parliamentary committees creates risks in terms of inappropriate and unfair questioning by politicians, and not just from those on the opposition benches. Canadian experience provides recent examples, admittedly not that many, of the kinds of problems that could arise (Sutherland 1993). According to Aucoin (1996) the statutory delineation of the respective responsibilities of ministers and officials in New Zealand has served to limit partisan attacks on neutral public servants. Several other jurisdictions have drafted guidelines to instruct MPS about how to deal with public service witnesses appearing before parliamentary committees, but these can be "fair weather" devices which are ignored when political storms are blowing. Insistence upon greater accountability before parliament may stifle the innovation and reduce the flexibility which are supposed to be hallmarks of the public service of the future. If parliamentary auditors and committees become more aggressive in insisting upon information with respect to economy, efficiency, and effectiveness in different program fields, they may deaden the spirit of entrepreneurialism within the fledgling new-style public organizations. Departments and agencies may set "soft" performance targets or they may seek to limit the scope of inquiry of parliamentary watchdogs. The latter option may be the preferred response if the program goals set by politicians remain rhetorical, vague, shifting, and not always compatible, and public servants feel it is unfair to be held personally accountable for their accom-

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plishment. The experience of Australia and New Zealand reveals that even when quite sophisticated performance information is published, little use is made of it by parliamentarians. The NPM literature tends to denigrate existing approaches to accountability as mistaking adherence to procedures for the achievement of results, stifling creativity and initiative and adding to the costs of running government. Control is seen only in negative terms of adding to red tape. However, control can also serve a positive, constructive purpose: "Control is both restricting and enabling, an apparent paradox. It is restricting in that it protects against unwanted events such as wastes, lapses of probity, or non-compliance with authority. It is enabling in that it helps ensure that objectives are achieved and provides the boundaries within which public servants can take decisions" (Canada. Auditor General 1992:128). Both formal and informal controls serve accountability. It is fashionable today to maintain that we are witnessing the twilight of traditional, hierarchical, rule-bound bureaucracies. This is an exaggeration. Public organizations will continue to rely greatly upon formal controls: legal mandates, organizational structures, delegation of authority, rules and procedures, information reporting, appraisal systems, rewards and sanctions, and audits. However, informal controls, such as the following, will gain in importance: communication, leadership, culture, ethics, commitment, and trust. Any realistic approach to the achievement of accountability within the modern administrative state must rely greatly on the subjective sense of responsibility on the part of public servants. While it has not been extensively analysed here, subjective responsibility can be described as a felt need to fulfil some sense of personal obligation, not just to those in formal positions of authority within an organization but also to others beyond the organization and to internalized norms regarding appropriate behaviour. NPM emphasizes responsibility (the freedom to manage) and downplays accountability (through its call to end micro-management) (Uhr 1993). However, being responsible under the NPM framework is often equated with being responsive

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to market signals and customers. Whereas old-style accountability could be institutionalized (albeit in a complicated manner), responsibility and responsiveness cannot be reduced to a set of simple institutional arrangements. Public servants are increasingly being asked to be accountable to their ministers, responsive to market signals and their clients, and responsible to their professional judgments. The existence of multiple conceptions of accountability linked to different types of institutional arrangements has been arrived at without the benefit of an overarching theory of accountability. While there is a degree of complementarity among the different accountability approaches, there is also a series of tensions among them. Within cabinet-parliamentary systems the debate over the continuing relevance of ministerial responsibility has obscured the emergence of new forms of accountability and stood in the way of discussions about trade-offs among different accountability systems (Stone 1995:523-5). A ranking or step-ladder of the various accountabilities would be helpful to public servants in coping with competing accountability pressures, but there is bound to be artificial precision involved with any such approach. Another proposal to deal with bureaucratic discretion is to set decision boundaries for public servants (Canada, Auditor General, 1994). Based on the private sector approach to managing risks, decision rules would supposedly reconcile political control with entrepreneurial behaviour on the part of public servants. Although they serve a somewhat different purpose from codes of ethics, decision rules would probably end up resembling such documents by being rather self-evident and general in content. They may serve to remind public servants of their various obligations, but they are not likely to provide clear direction in complicated factual and sensitive ethical situations. Like other accountability approaches, they will have limits. Creating new forms of accountability and new mechanisms to enforce accountability does not guarantee that public trust and confidence in government will grow. During the past three decades most governments have increased the number of accountability devices. Taking Canada as an example, the list would include the following:

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• new systems of cabinet decision making to strengthen collective decision making • a more prominent role for central agencies • new budgetary systems to merge policy determination with expenditure allocation • mandatory requirements for the periodic and systematic evaluation of programs • clarification of the responsibilities of the deputy minister • new accountability frameworks for non-departmental bodies like Crown corporations and regulatory agencies • greater scrutiny of the bureaucracy by parliamentary committees through estimates, the review of order-in-council appointments, and general investigations • a strengthened role for the auditor general to practise comprehensive auditing • the passage of access-to-information and privacy laws • the adoption of legislation to register lobbyists and to publicize their activities • the passage of conflict-of-interest guidelines, codes of conduct, and the appointment of an ethics commissioner • development of numerous consultative mechanisms: discussion papers, task forces, partnerships, and so on • extension of judicial review as a form of supervision over the exercise of discretionary authority. Despite these reforms (or perhaps because of them) public trust and confidence in governments has continued to decline over the past two decades. Measures of public trust and confidence are not the same as perceptions of the adequacy of accountability arrangements, but in the absence of other data they will have to serve as a reasonable proxy. Asked whether they were thinking mainly of politicians or public servants when they expressed a lack of confidence in governments, 67 percent of Canadians placed the blame on politicians, 16 percent had public servants in mind and 17 percent were thinking of both (Zussman 1992:15). Declining faith in government institutions reflects a wide range of developments, among which perceived weakness in accountability arrangements is probably only a minor factor.

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It is still possible, however, that the elaborate system of multiple accountabilities is confusing for the public, creates a lack transparency, and leads to perceptions of avoidance of accountability. Have we created what Hannah Arendt called "the rule of Nobody" (Arendt 1963:289)? Systems of multiple accountabilities may fit with the realities of interdependencies among programs and activities and with the pattern of multiple institutions and actors involved in making decisions, but the public will probably not accept a situation in which "the system" is said to have made a mistake. When the public thinks of accountability they expect that some individual - usually the minister, but perhaps also a senior public servant -will be made to "walk the plank" as a price for serious policy or administrative errors. In the highly symbolic world of politics mistakes usually require that accountability involve visible consequences for an identifiable person even though blame is more appropriately shared. Since unfavourable comparisons to the private sector are such a big part of the NPM literature, it needs to be recognized that the problems of accountability have not been resolved completely in large, private firms. A recent study of 117 decisions in multimillion dollar manufacturing firms revealed that in only one third of the cases did the top executives agree on who had the authority to make the final decision (McLaughlin 1994:445). The main factors which blurred accountability were similar to those in the public sector: the number of actors involved, the uncertainty respecting the role of corporate staff versus line managers, the problem of underinvestment in core tasks and technologies which arises in the operation of a conglomerate, the increased use of temporary organizations and group decision making, and the impacts of information technology which diffuses knowledge and opens decisions to more input and debate. In a world of interdependencies and shared power, there is a need to invent credible approaches to the assignment and enforcement of collective accountability. While it is possible to ease the accountability dilemma, it will not go away. More responsible behaviour by political leaders and political parties would help. Improvements to the political

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and legislative processes to reduce the emphasis on blame would allow for more meaningful accountability debates. Greater clarity in program goals and the development of clearer indicators of success would help to inform those debates. Perhaps one percent of the activities of government represent misdeeds or mistakes, but these well-publicized events contribute enormously to the negative public perception. Error-free government is a Utopian ideal. But once mistakes are made, a greater degree of openness, frankness, and courage in explaining what went wrong would be helpful. All these are vague and hardly novel suggestions. But there is no panacea. There are currently many faces of accountability. Accountability will remain an elusive phenomenon because it consists of the interaction of numerous formal and informal process, plus a vital underlying moral sense of responsibility. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aucoin, Peter. 1989. Administrative reform in public management: paradigms, principles, paradoxes and pendulums. Governance 3, 2:115-37. - 1995. The New Public Management: Canada in Comparative Perspective. Montreal: Institute for Research on Public Policy. Bayne, Peter, H.F. McKenna, and John Nethercote, eds. 1989. Administrative law: retrospect and prospect. Canberra Bulletin of Public Administration 58. Bellone, Carl J., and George Frederick Goerl. 1992. Reconciling public entrepreneur ship and democracy. Public Administration Review 52, 2:130-4. Borins, Sandford. 1994. Government in Transition: A New Paradigm in Public Administration. Toronto: CAPAM. Boston, Jonathan. 1992. Assessing the performance of departmental chief executives: perspectives from New Zealand. Public Administration 70, 3:405-28. - 1993. The appointment and accountability of departmental chief executives. Public Sector 16, 2:12-17. - John Martin, June Pallor, and Pat Walsh. 1996. Public Management: The New Zealand Model. Auckland: Oxford University Press.

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Bourgault, Jacques, and Stephane Dion. 1989. Governments come and go, but what of senior civil servants? Governance 2, 2:124-41. Caiden, Gerald E. 1988. The problem of ensuring the public accountability of public officials. In Public Service Accountability: A Comparative Perspective, ed. J.G. Jabara and O.P Dwinehi, 23-37. West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press Inc. Campbell, Colin, and John Halligan. 1992. Political Leadership in an Age of Constraint. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Canada, Auditor General. 1992. Change and control in the federal government. In Annual Report to Parliament, 125-42. Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services. - 19943. Annual Report to Parliament. Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services. - i994b. Annual Report to Parliament. Royal Commission on Financial Management and Accountability. 1979. Final Report. Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services. (Lambert Report). - 1995. Toward Better Governance: Public Service Reform in New Zealand and its Relevance to Canada. Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services Canada, Law Reform Commission of Canada. 1980. Independent Administrative Agencies Working Paper 25. Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services. Clark, Ian. 1994. Restraint renewal and the Treasury Board Secretariat. Canadian Public Administration 37, 2:209-48. Curnow, G.R., and B. Page, eds. 1989. Politicization and the Career Service. Canberra: Canberra College of Advanced Education. Day, Patricia, and R. Klein. 1987. Accountabilities: Five Public Services. London: Tavistock. Doig, Alan. 1995. Mixed signals? Public sector change and the proper conduct of public business. Public Administration 73:191-212. Drewry, Gavin. 1994. The civil service: from the 19905 to "Next Steps" and beyond. Parliamentary Affairs 72,4:582-95. Dunsire, Andrew. 1995. Administrative theory in the 19803: a viewpoint. Public Administration 73,1:25-34. Etzioni, Amitai. 1978. Alternative conceptions of accountability. In Current Issues in Public Administration, ed. Frederick S. Lane, 510-19. New York: St Martin's Press.

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Fry, Geoffrey K. 1986. The British career civil service under challenge. Political Studies 34,4:533-55. Fuller, Don, and Bert Raffey. 1993. Improving public sector accountability and strategic decision-making. Australian Journal of Public Administration 52, 2:149-63. Goodsell, Charles T. 1994. The Case for Bureaucracy: A Public Administration Polemic. Chatham, NJ: Chatham House Publishers, 3rd ed. Graber, Doris A. 1992. Public Sector Communication: How Organizations Manage Information. Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly. Gray, Andrew, and Bill Jenkins. From public administration to public management: reassessing a revolution? Parliamentary Affairs 73,1:75-99. Greer, Patricia. 19923. The Next Steps initiative: an examination of the agency framework documents. Public Administration 70,1:89-100. - i992b. The Next Steps initiative: the transformation of Britain's civil service. The Political Quarterly 63,2:222-7. Gregory, Robert J. 1995. Bureaucratic "psychopathology" and technocratic governance: whither responsibility. Hong Kong Public Administration 4,1:17-36. Gruber, Judith. 1987. Controlling Bureaucracies: Dilemmas in Democratic Governance. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hamer, David. 1994. Can Responsible Government Survive in Australia? Canberra: University of Canberra. Harmon, Michael A. 1995. Responsibility as Paradox: A Critique of Rational Discourse on Government. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Heard, Andrew. 1991. Canadian Constitutional Conventions. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Heclo, Hugh. 1977. A Government of Strangers: Executive Politics in Washington. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution. Hennessy, Peter. 1990. Whitehall. London: Fontana. - 1995. The Hidden Wiring: Unearthing the British Constitution. London: Victor Gollancz. Hood, Christopher. 1995. Emerging issues in public administration. Public Administration 73,1:165-83. Ingraham, Patricia W., and Barbara S. Romzek, eds. 1994. New Paradigms for Government: Issues for the Changing Public Service. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

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Jabbra, J.G., and O.P. Dwivedi, eds. 1988. Public Service Accountability: A Comparative Study. West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press. Jenkins, Bill, and Andrew Gray. 1993. Reshaping the management of government: the Next Steps initiative in the United Kingdom. In Rethinking Government: Reform or Reinvention, ed. F. Leslie Seidle. Montreal: Institute for Research in Public Policy. Kemp, Peter. 1993. The civil service White Paper: a job half finished. Public Administration 72,4:591-8. Kernaghan, Kenneth. 1979. Power, parliament and public servants in Canada: ministerial responsibility reexamined. Canadian Public Policy 5, 3:383-96. Kettl, Donald F. 1993. Sharing Power: Public Governance and Private Markets. Washington: Brookings Institute. Laking, R.G. 1994. The New Zealand management reforms. Australian Journal of Public Administration 53, 3:313-24. Lipson, Leslie. 1964. The Democratic Civilization. New York: Oxford University Press. Livingston, William S. 1976. Britain and America: the institutionalization of accountability. Journal of Politics 38, 2:879-94. Marshall, Geoffrey. 1986. Constitutional Conventions: The Rules and Forms of Political Accountability. Oxford: Clarendon Press. McLaughlin, David. 1994. Strengthening executive decision-making. Human Resource Management 3, 3:443-61. Moe, Ronald C., and Robert S. Gilmour. 1995. Rediscovering principles of public administration: the neglected foundation of public law. Public Administration Review 55, 2:135-46. O'Leary, Rosemary, and Jeffrey D. Straussman. 1993. The impact of courts on public management. In Public Management: The State of the Art, ed. Barry Bozeman, 189-205. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Oliver, Dawn. 1994. Parliament, ministers and the law. Parliamentary Affairs47,4:630-45. Osbaldeston, G.F. 1989. Keeping Deputy Ministers Accountable. Toronto: McGraw-Hill. Osborne, David and Ted Gaebler. 1993. Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector. New York: Plume Books. Oughton, David. 1994. Accountability versus control - rust never sleeps. Public Sector 17, 3:2-6.

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Painter, Chris. 1994. Public service reform: reinventing or abandoning government? The Political Quarterly 64, 2:242-62. Peters, B. Guy, and Donald J. Savoie. 1995. Governance in a Changing Environment. Montreal: Canadian Centre for Management Development and McGill-Queen's University Press. Plowden, William. 1994. Public interests and the public services service: efficiency and other values. Australian Journal of Public Administration 53,3:304-12. Pollitt, Christopher. 1994. Charters: the citizen's new clothes? Hong Kong Public Administration 3, 2:165-76. Reid, G.S. 1976. Responsibility and accountability and the Coombs inquiry. Australian Journal of Public Administration 34, 4:320-7. Rhodes, R, A.W. 1994. The hollowing out of the state: the changing nature of the public service in Britain. Political Quarterly 64,1:138-51. Ridley, F.F. 1986. Political neutrality, the duty of silence and the right to publish in the civil service. Parliamentary Affairs39,3: 437-48. - 1995. Reinventing British government. Parliamentary Affairs 48, 3:389-400. Riley, Dennis D. 1987. Controlling the Federal Bureaucracy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Romzek, Barbara S., and Melvin J. Dubnick. 1994. Issues of accountability in flexible personnel systems. In New Paradigms for Government: Issues for the Changing Public Service, ed. Patricia Ingraham, Barbara S. Romzak, et al., 263-95. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Rosen, Bernard. 1982. Holding Government Bureaucracies Accountable. New York: Praeger. Roseveare, John. 1994. The managerial responsibilities of departmental chief executives. Public Sector 17, 3:7-9. Saltzstein, Grace Hall. 1985. Conceptualizing bureaucratic responsiveness. Administration & Society 17, 3:283-306. Schick, Allen. 1996. The Spirit of Reform: Managing the New Zealand State Sector in a Time of Change. Auckland: Report for the State Services Commission and the Treasury. Seidle, F. Leslie. 1993. Reshaping the federal government: charting the course. Policy Options 14,6:24-9. - 1996. Rethinking the Delivery of Public Services to Citizens. Montreal: Institute for Research in Public Policy. Smith, Chris Selby, and David Corbett. 1995. Parliamentary committees,

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public servants and due process. Australian Journal of Public Administration 54,1:19-34. Stewart, John. 1993. The limitations of government by contract. Public Money and Management 13,1:7-12. Stone, Bruce. 1995. Administrative accountability in the "Westminster" democracies: towards a new conceptual framework. Governance 8, 4:505-26. Sutherland, S.L. 1991. The Al-Mashat affair: administrative accountability in parliamentary institutions. Canadian Public Administration 34,4:573-603. - 1991. Responsible government and ministerial responsibility: every reform is its own problem. Canadian Journal of Political Science 24, 1:91-120. - 1993. Independent review and political accountability: should democracy be on autopilot? Optimum 24, 2:23-40. - and G. Bruce Doern. 1985. Bureaucracy in Canada: Control and Reform. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Talbot, Colin. 1996. Ministers and agencies - control, performance and accountability. Memorandum submitted to the UK House of Commons Select Committee on the Public Service. Taylor, John C. 1992. Public accountability requirements. Australian Journal of Public Administration 51, 4:456-60. Terry, Larry D. 1993. Why we should abandon the misconceived quest to reconcile public entrepreneurship with democracy. Public Administration Review 53, 4:393-5. Thomas, Paul G. 1979. The Lambert Report: Parliament and accountability. Canadian Public Administration 22,4:557-70. - 1996. Beyond the buzzwords: coping with change in the public sector. International Review of Administrative Sciences. 62,1:5-29. Thynne, Ian, and John Goldring. 1987. Accountability & Control: Government Officials and the Exercise of Power. North Ryde: The Law Book Company. Uhr, John. 1993. Redesigning accountability: from muddles to maps. Australian Quarterly 65, 2:1-16. Weir, Stuart. 1995. Quangos: questions of democratic accountability. Parliamentary Affairs48, 2:306-22. Wiltshire, Kenneth. 1993. Administrative reform in Australia. Paper presented to the 1993 IP AC Conference, Toronto, August 1993.

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Wistrich, Enid. 1992. Managing sub-national government in New Zealand. Public Money and Management 12,4:25-9. - 1992. Restructuring government New Zealand style. Public Administration 70:119-35. Woodhouse, Diana. 1994. Ministers and Parliament: Accountability in Theory and Practice. Oxford: Clarendon Press. United Kingdom. 1994. The Civil Service: Continuity and Change. London: HMSO. Zussman, David. 1992. Government services to the public: public perceptions. Optimum 22, 4:5-20.

Fifteen Years of Reform: What Have We Learned? DONALD J. SAVOIE

In the introductory chapter we reported that the idea of a book to take stock of various government reform measures introduced during the past fifteen years from a comparative perspective was born in a meeting of government of Canada officials in the fall of 1994. The practitioners felt that important and perhaps lasting changes were being introduced in a number of OECD countries. They wanted to know the nature of changes, the underlying forces behind the changes, and to gain a sense of what works, what does not and what lessons can be learned for Canada from the changes. An ambitious agenda, to be sure, but also an extremely important one, given Canada's current political and economic circumstances. What have we learned and what can we report back to our Canadian practitioners? One thing we know for certain, as the chapters in this volume make clear. We have witnessed a great deal of change in the public sector during the last fifteen years, particularly in Anglo-American countries. It seems that political leaders in these countries are forever reinventing government. We can easily identify the measures and the various stages of their implementation. We are also confident that a series of lessons can be drawn for the various reform measures and that the lessons should be very useful for both practitioners and scholars of public administration. But beyond that, it is difficult to be certain about anything. The reform measures are essentially political and social experiments and, unlike scientific experiments, explanations of 394

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success or lack of success are subject to multiple and often conflicting interpretations. Put differently, we can never lose sight of the fact that government reform measures are political decisions, and as we are often told by politicians, in politics perception is all too often reality. What are seen as clear signs of success in the eyes of some can be seen by others as sure signs of failure. This chapter reviews this point and lessons learned from fifteen years of government reform efforts, reports on what measures appear to be sticking, identifies some of the forces which gave rise to the reform measures, and offers some preliminary views on the nature and direction of future reform efforts. REFORM AS THE POLITICS OF PERCEPTION

One important lesson learned is that critics can always find things to criticize in government reforms, and indeed few if any reform measures are without major faults. Advocates can also find a good deal to praise, and there are few reform initiatives which do not have some positive features. Even scholars attempting to maintain some objectivity will fundamentally disagree over the success and failure of reform (Borins and Savoie 1995:112-38). Therefore, the outcomes of any stock-taking exercise are likely to depend upon who asked what questions. Contexts are extremely important when trying to determine what works, as Christopher Pollitt points out in this volume. It is not merely that hospitals are different from ministries of finance, but that one hospital is different from another. He adds that one French ministry, for example, can make a success of "centres de responsabilite" while another smothers them with inertia. What works in one context may not work in another. The point is that practitioners should be aware that any stocktaking of public sector reform will to a large extent depend upon perceptions and contexts. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder in administration and politics, just as it is in poetry, and there may be little or no chance to develop an objective reality about reform. Those perceptions may be a function of partisan politics, or a function of organizational politics. Individuals, organizations and

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interests harmed by reform are likely to perceive them as ineffective and harmful to the public interest, while interests advantaged by the reforms are likely to see them in a much rosier light. One of the most important barriers to unequivocally defining success and failure is that success and failure occur on several levels. At a minimal level, success is simply that a change strategy was put into effect. Although this appears minimal, it is not always achieved.1 At a second level we can ask if the program achieved its stated purposes. Often governments are not entirely clear about what those purposes are, but there is usually sufficient evidence to understand the intent of the reformers. Given that success or failure is usually far from complete, we then need to decide how good is good enough to claim success or how bad is sufficiently bad to declare failure. Finally, we will need to look at the unintended consequences of the reforms to determine whether, on balance, government and citizens are better off than they would be without the reform. For example, although the Next Steps initiative in the United Kingdom has been largely successful within its own terms of reference, it may have had negative consequences for other public values such as accountability which can question its overall effect (Thomas, this volume). At the risk of sounding repetitive, when we think about success we must also think about success for whom. There are at least three major groups of "players," each of whom will define success differently. The first group consists of the politicians involved in promoting (or resisting) reform. For this group success may be counted in votes at the next election or favourable media coverage, as well as in the actual delivery of government services to their constituents. Public servants will define success in a different fashion than politicians, especially if the reforms serve to strengthen the position of politicians at the expense of their own. This potential institutional conflict will be conceptualized and presented as alternative ideas of the public interest by both sets of actors, but there is no denying that there are also interests involved directly in the definitions. Finally, the public will have its own definition of success and failure. Moreover, this may well be a highly differentiated view, based upon which particular

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segments of the population are being advantaged by reforms. The prevailing cynicism about government in most Western democracies will make finding success for the public sector in the eyes of the public difficult, but there is some evidence that public opinion is moderating and that the reforms are creating some sense of enhanced public service and responsiveness (de Montricher, this volume). THE I M P O R T A N C E OF A C T I O N

One of the many slogans of self-improvement organizations is "fake it until you make it." The idea is that action may be more important than ideas in producing change, and if there is effective action the acceptance of the ideas underlying that action will follow. This emphasis on action is a difficult concept for some to accept, but it does say something important about changing organizations in government. Changing organizational culture is often seen as a panacea for producing long-term change in the public sector. The problem then becomes, How does the reformer change that culture? If we sit around waiting for culture to change, or if we invest heavily in cultural change devices, then change may be a long time coming, even if it is effective and durable once it is achieved (Peters, this volume). Attempting to change behaviour, on the other hand, can pay some immediate benefits if people act in certain ways, for example, if they "serve the customer" and then begin to think in this way as well. Even if they do not change their "culture," their behaviour will still be different. Most of the successful reforms we have identified during these fifteen years of government change have depended upon generating action, with the hope and expectation that cultural change would follow. For example, the notion of quality has now been embedded in many government organizations. But this institutionalization was accomplished through a series of programs intended to generate behaviour that produced better quality (Paquin, this volume). Those actions, and the bombardment of slogans and pronouncements about quality, have generated a set

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of government employees who now think in those terms to a much greater extent than they would have even a decade ago.2 Likewise, the purchaser-provider split within government was useful in making public servants think about markets and their role in buying and selling public services at the best prices (Pollitt, this volume). But if the objective is to change the culture of one organization, the reformers will need to bear in mind that this often takes a long, long time. Old ways die hard, especially in government departments and agencies. And yet, reformers in government are impatient, perhaps more impatient than reformers in other sectors. Political reformers operate on a short-term basis and unless they see results quickly, they can well jettison one reform measure to introduce another which shows more promise for quick results. Senior public servants, meanwhile, have the details of the day and the most recent crisis to manage. They, too, can lose interest in a new reform measure unless they can see evidence of improvement. THE CHESHIRE CAT PHENOMENON

The analyses of administrative reforms around the world indicate that some reforms have lasting effects, even if those effects do not continue under the name of the particular reform that produced them. Like the Cheshire Cat they disappear, but traces do remain. This persistence can be observed in various reforms implemented during the 19605 and 19705. For example, even though the Planning Program Budgeting System (PPBS) has been terminated in most government organizations around the world, some of the ideas which motivated that reform continue to be applied, or have reappeared under different guises in more recent budgetary reforms. Certainly the ideas of specifying budgetary alternatives and then attempting to analyse the costs and benefits of alternatives are deeply ingrained in contemporary budgeting. Many newcomers to government, however, do not know what the initials PPBS stand for. Much the same pattern can be observed in more recent reforms. Changes that begin with high hopes, and even produce some

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change, are soon forgotten when new ideas are proposed and implemented. For example, during Mrs Thatcher's tenure as prime minister in Britain a succession of reforms was implemented, each to some extent paving the way for the next but also being largely forgotten as new programs were put into effect. The Financial Management Initiative, for example, has been superseded by a range of additional financial and institutional reforms - Next Steps and resource accounting for example - but many of its basic ideas remain in operation. This phenomenon makes evaluating the effects of administrative reforms more difficult than it would be otherwise. On the one hand, reforms can be said to have failed, given that they are no longer in effect, and may even be disdained by subsequent government reforms. On the other hand, these reforms can be said to have generated an effect, given that they are institutionalized in government and thus are just another part of accepted operations. SHOPPING FOR REFORM

The Economist recently declared that "civil service reform is a global business." There is no doubt that the global nature of government reform came of age during the past fifteen years (The Economist 1996:9). Indeed, much of the reform activity described in this volume involved selecting reforms "off the shelf." The development of an industry of management gurus servicing the public and private sectors has meant that there have been more than enough ideas around about how to produce a better public sector, at least in management terms. The prevalence of these ideas, and of "fads and fashions" in management, has meant that any organization that wants to look modern and committed to excellence is virtually obliged to select the newest rage off the shelf. These reforms have legitimacy, given that they are what is in vogue at the time as advocated by prestigious international consultants. In some instances, this strategy of emulation and buying in ready-made managerial technologies may be effective. There is some validity in almost all of these remedies. The problem with

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buying the patent medicine, however, is that it reduces the chances for home-made remedies that may be as good or better. Using reforms off the shelf assumes that all organizations are about the same and therefore that these reforms will work everywhere. Leaving aside the differences between the public and private sectors, even within the public sector there may well be important differences among organizations. Strategies such as the reinvention laboratories coming out of the National Performance Review in the United States ultimately may produce more enduring change than the generic reforms marketed by gurus (Ingraham, this volume). Even if the indigenous reforms are no better on a technical level than the imported reforms, they have the virtue of being "owned" by the members of the organizations in which they are being implemented. No reform can be effected by an entirely autonomous process - there will always be change agents and a climate of ideas that privileges some types of reforms and not others.3 Still, if the members of an organization believe that they have had a significant role in designing and implementing a reform, they are more likely to strive to make it work. The importance of indigenous reforms also highlights the danger of "reform fatigue" mentioned in several of the chapters in this volume. Public servants who have been in government for any length of time will have lived through any number of attempts to make them and their organizations more effective and efficient. They will also have heard dozens of speeches from politicians promising to make government work better. These experiences are likely to generate cynicism about change and a reluctance to invest in any change being imposed from outside. In this context, reform from within may be the only really effective strategy, although even that will require some grant of latitude from the political leadership. The pressure to borrow management practices and techniques from the private sector to fix government operations has been and will likely continue to be great. Political leaders have over the past fifteen years not only looked to the business community for inspiration, but also to take on some of the functions previously

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assumed by governments. There is no denying that both the public and private sectors face similar problems - for example, harnessing information technology to transform giant bureaucracies into more flexible operations and coping with downsizing initiatives. There is also no denying, however, that there are important limits to what governments can borrow from the private sector. As has been stated time and again in recent years, private sector models of management can hardly apply to all government operations - private firms exist to maximize profits while governments exist to provide services to all. Henry Mintzberg goes as far as suggesting that the Harvard Business Review should have "a skull and cross-bones stamped on the cover with the warning - not to be taken by the public sector" (The Economist 1996:7). There is also no denying that the tendency to borrow from the private sector has hurt morale in government and shaken the confidence of civil servants in their institution. To career officials, the message from much of the political leadership in AngloAmerican democracies in the past fifteen years has been clear and hardly positive: a good part of the civil service has no intrinsic value since much of its work could be turned over to the private sector or to agency employees who are expected to behave as though they were in the private sector. Moreover, politicians have insisted that one of the best ways to improve the operations and management of what is left in government is to borrow management practices from private sector. REFORM BEGETS REFORM

Another lesson to be drawn from the experiences of the systems we have been discussing is that reform is more a continuous than a discrete process. Even if a reform is successfully implemented, it is likely to generate a need for a new round of reform. This outcome appears to be a function of the location of most reforms along a continuum of organizational characteristics, so that moving toward one end or the other soon produces a perceived need to move back again. The current round of reforms, for

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example, tends to be decentralizing so that before long we should expect a return to more centralized organizations (Rockman, this volume). For example, budgetary reforms can centralize control over spending or they can provide agencies more latitude to make their own decisions: each solution brings its own set of problems (Aucoin, de Montricher, this volume). This makes the point once again that there is no one solution which applies to all situations for all time. Reformers wishing to "fix" government operations once and for all will invariably be disappointed. This tendency of one set of reforms to generate the need for a counter-reformation can be seen clearly in the effects of "alternative delivery mechanisms," such as Next Steps or corporatization. These reforms addressed the monopoly problem identified by Niskanen and others as central to the pricing and service problems inherent in the public sector (Caiden, this volume). By creating more organizations to deliver public services - both inside and outside the public sector - these changes have produced the need to think more carefully about policy coordination and "horizontal government" (Peters and Savoie 1996:283). A disaggregation of government organization may negatively affect service quality initiatives within government by segmenting the needs of clients among a number of specialized service providers rather than seeking to serve the "whole client." THINGS H A V E CHANGED

Notwithstanding the difficulties in objectively assessing the success of various reform measures, and while recognizing that reform begets reform, we can report back to Canadian practitioners that some things have changed in government during the past fifteen years. The chapters in this volume document a number of changes in several areas. We also know that things have changed because practitioners tell us that their world has changed substantially and because we can easily observe that many national public services are now smaller and that many government services are delivered differently today than was the case fifteen years ago.

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Practitioners contrast their old world with the new. The old world was one where the emphasis on control and command was never in doubt, where an exact count of the number of people employed in the department was readily available, where rules and processes which existed for hiring and classifying employees were clear and applied at all times and where budgets were struck with little flexibility available to reallocate funds. In the new world, control and command are less extreme and government managers are dealt more freedom to manage both human and financial resources. In addition, there is strong evidence to suggest that some elements of the New Public Management have taken root in many countries, and some measures are showing signs of staying power. Public servants everywhere are far more conscious of the need to introduce (or improve) a performance management system for virtually every field of public sector activities. In addition, the introduction of performance measures in routine bureaucratic activities has met with some success in several countries. Public servants are also now much more conscious of "service quality" and the need to focus on "clients" in the delivery of government services. Total Quality Management (TQM) in North America and the Citizen's Charter in Britain have, for example, contributed to a stronger emphasis on responsiveness in government operations. Government departments have also learned to establish a split between their "provider" and "purchaser" roles. A "make or buy" culture is now rooted in many governments and efforts are continually being made to compare the cost of providing particular services or purchasing them from outside government. Governments are also far more willing to distinguish between policy and operations than was the case fifteen years ago. Britain and New Zealand were first off the mark in this regard, but several other countries soon followed. Even the United States, which has long sought to separate policy from administration, has pursued further developments along this line. The civil service as an institution has undergone important changes during the past fifteen years. But practitioners tell us that

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the civil service culture, in particular its willingness to embrace the control and command model whenever things become uncertain, is changing very slowly. In addition, protecting "turf" remains an important force in government and red tape has not disappeared. In fact, some practitioners insist that there is now more red tape than there was fifteen years ago. They argue that the "make or buy" approach has entailed new processes for putting together contracts and service agreements and subsequently for implementing them. Performance reporting also requires a great deal of paper work, as does the need to monitor service quality. The reforms of the past fifteen years have, however, also given rise to new concerns or stimulated the re-emergence of other concerns. With the exception of Australia and New Zealand, central agencies in other countries by and large have carried on through the various reform measures largely intact. Yet, in many instances they led the charge in formulating and promoting the reform measures. It seems, however, that no one at the centre itself bothered to ask how much of the machinery in central agencies would still be required after line departments were "empowered" to make management decisions in both the human and financial sectors. In countries where executive or special agencies have been established, the same question can be asked regarding the role and responsibilities of the central department. It is also not clear where the policy advisory role of senior officials now fits in the brave new world of managerialism. In the old role, permanent officials offered policy advice to their political masters without fear or favour. Today, officials are more often than not expected to read which policy options their political masters favour and then to support them with "enthusiasm." A recent survey of British public servants, for example, reveals that "73 percent (of those responding to the survey) say Conservative ideology has now become part of the civil service culture while one imo say they have been asked by a minister or superior to act in a political manner which breaches strict civil service rules of impartiality" (Niskanen 1971:142). Even some British senior officials support the findings of the survey and are increasingly

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prepared to speak out. David Faulkner, a former senior home official, reports that "it is now a truism in the Whitehall corridors of power that the pressures on civil servants to contribute to political initiatives are greater than ever before" (The Observer 1996:1). Providing "policy advice with enthusiasm" is not by any means a strictly British phenomenon. A recent change in government in Australia saw a good number of senior officials booted out. In Canada senior officials attending our monthly seminars reported that important changes have taken place on the policy advisory front. One senior official explains: "I see advice going to ministers which is suppressing arguments because it is known that ministers will not want them, and that for me is the betrayal of the civil service" (personal interview). The atmosphere is reflected in the philosophy, "Don't tell me why I shouldn't do it but how I can do it." The notion that officials should provide policy advice with "enthusiasm" has, of course, been rooted in public administration in the United States for some time. "Responsive competence" is made possible because a large proportion of senior officials are politically appointed and are expected to promote openly the political ideology of the president occupying the White House. There are also signs that the civil service institution in many Western countries is demoralized and that it has lost its way. Public opinion surveys in Britain, Canada, and the United States, for example, report that public servants are hardly optimistic about the future of their institutions. In Britain The Observer reports that "our survey, based on responses from 1,911 civil servants, reveals a bleak picture of rock-bottom morale - 92 percent describe it as quite or very bad - and deep insecurity about the service's future" (The Observer 1996:1) Surveys in the United States have been reporting for some time that the national civil service has a morale problem (Savoie 1994:343). The same can be said about the Canadian public service. A recent survey reveals that "four out of five public servants believe that their clients think of them as lazy and uncaring. Morale has been consistently low over the last five years. Two out of three report low morale in their department (Mitchell 1996:5).

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There is no doubt a variety of reasons that morale is low in several national public services. That the public service has lost its standing as an objective source of policy advice is one factor. But there are other reasons. One senior Canadian practitioner argues that there is now a "bottom-line guilt" in the public service. For a number of reasons, all of which are well known to students of public administration, the public service can never beat the private sector at its game. Yet, it has not stopped politicians from pitting national public services against the private sector. The vocabulary of the New Public Management, for example, is borrowed almost word for word from the business community empowerment, clients, and customers, make or buy, and so on. Moreover, a key message in public sector reform in many Western countries in recent years is that privatizing activities is often better than leaving them inside government. If privatization is not appropriate, or at least not appropriate for the moment, then the activities should be turned over to a relatively autonomous agency, a kind of half-way house located between the public and private sectors. The central message remains the same: the public service as traditionally constituted no longer measures up. The reforms may well have also left unattended a number of concerns. Privatization, contracting out, the establishment of relatively autonomous agencies, and downsizing may well have compromised a good part of the corporate memory of the public service. A reluctance to hire new recruits explains why national public services are aging rapidly and why governments have to rely on "too many familiar faces" (Canada 1996:7). A good number of public servants, including many in the government of Canada, are also increasingly worried about the lack of a "releve" to prepare their institution for the future. In addition, as has already been noted in this volume on several occasions, the reforms have failed to deal head-on with accountability issues in government operations, a failure which is readily apparent in Canada. Supporters of the various reform measures argue that the above concerns should not be unexpected. Whenever an institution makes a transition away from traditional rules, regulations, and

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processes, there will invariably be uncertainty and some dislocation. Far-reaching and lasting change can never be introduced without upsetting the status quo. If the status quo should no longer hold, and reformers certainly make a persuasive case that it no longer should, then new ways of doing things will invariably have to be introduced. It is only natural that morale will be affected. There is no doubt, however, that the reforms of the past fifteen years will leave an important legacy on the workings of government. This time the reforms will very likely have had a visible impact on the "great rock on the tide-line." This we have learned through this volume. We have also learned that it is unclear whether or not public services will in the long run perform better and more effectively than in the past. What is clear is that there is still much work left to do. If today's snapshot of various public services does not improve with time, we can probably conclude that the institution is in worse shape than it was fifteen years ago. REGAINING RESPECT AND SELF-ESTEEM

On the basis of what we have learned from the past fifteen years of reform efforts and the findings of the chapters in this volume, what advice can we offer Canadian practitioners about the future of their institution? Put differently, how can we improve today's snapshot of the public service? What lessons do the past fifteen years of reform hold for the future of our national public services? What ought to be the focus of future efforts? A recurring theme throughout this volume is that national public services, including the Canadian public service, have lost credibility, prestige, and respect during the past fifteen years. Bureaucrat bashing has taken its toll. The challenge ahead is to strengthen the confidence individual public servants have in their institution and in its role in society. But diagnosing the problem is one thing, prescribing solutions is quite another. Hindsight, as the saying goes, is twenty/twenty vision. Looking back, we can now see that bureaucrat bashing was not always unjustified. Politicians quite simply became exasperated with national public services because they could not get them to

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think about, let alone accept, different models for doing things and they may well have had a point. When Thatcher came to office, for example, the first briefing book she saw made the case that the civil service needed more staff to continue providing current levels of public service. In Canada, senior federal public servants began to argue ten years ago that the fat had all been cut out from the public service and any further cuts would mean cutting into the bone. The U.S. public service, for its part, argued time and again that the Reagan years had taken care of any fat in the system. It was not long before public servants were proved wrong. Thatcher told her senior officials to go back to the drawing board. Not only did she tell them that no new staff would be available, but that important cuts in the total number of public servants would have to be made. Suffice it to note that when Thatcher came to office, she was told that there were 733,000 civil servants "stretched to the limit," and she was warned that "even modest" cuts in staff would inhibit departments from functioning effectively (see, among others, Savoie 1994). When she left office, the size of the civil service had been cut by over 22 percent, down to 569,000. Both Clinton and Chretien also proved the advice of senior public servants wrong - significant new cuts were made to the size of the public service as a result of the National Performance Review exercise in the u.s. and of Program Review in Canada. It is not too much of an exaggeration to write that when politicians - of whatever political persuasion - came to office from the late 19705 onward, they looked at their civil services and saw a complacent, smug institution unwilling to challenge the status quo when it came to their own operations and interests or to admit that things could be done better and cheaper if they were done differently. Yet senior public servants should have been able to see signs of the coming storm. Government deficits, at least in AngloAmerican democracies, were growing at a rapid rate, albeit even more rapidly in some other jurisdictions. Cuts in spending had to be made, and it was politically naive to think that politicians would make tough program decisions but leave overhead costs

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alone. Large private firms were making staff cuts in the late 19705 and early 19803 to remain competitive. They were able to shed jobs by introducing new communications and information processing technologies to the work place. It was only a matter of time before people would start asking why governments could not do the same, given that much government work is routine and lends itself to new communication and information-processing technologies. There was also an important new and growing body of literature - public choice literature - posing some fundamental questions about growth in government spending and growth in government operations. One could challenge the literature, but one should not have ignored it, which is what it appears senior public servants did. One certainly had the sense that senior public servants were only looking inward for ideas, and in time national civil services became isolated. Politicians, meanwhile, were looking to other sources of advice and information. Thatcher, it will be recalled, asked her senior officials to read public choice literature shortly after coming to office. By the mid-1980s, there were precious few voices being heard anywhere in support of public services. Indeed, bureaucrat bashing was no longer the sport just of politicians. The media and academics, by and large, became increasingly critical of bureaucracy. Herbert Kaufman wrote that "bureaucracy is a word with a bad reputation." He argued, "Government functionaries work hard and accomplish little. Many people would question the first part of that statement," and he concluded in the early 19803 that "antibureaucratic sentiment has taken hold like an epidemic" (Kaufman 1981:1). One former senior Government of Canada official explains that there has been "an unwillingness to 'fess up' in senior circles about the size of the public service and the operations of government" (see Savoie 1990:214). In addition, a number of senior government officials, including some from central agencies, acknowledged in our monthly seminars that senior managers in government have had a tendency to turn a blind eye to "administrative slack" in the system. Why deal with difficult decisions,

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they asked, when you are not forced to do so. In any event, from the late 19705 to the early 19803, senior officials were busy building the state. The demand for advice on complex policy issues and on planning new initiatives was high and certainly more rewarding for senior officials than addressing administrative or management issues. When the shift to a new world became apparent, senior permanent officials missed the signals and were caught sleeping. This raises a disturbing question. If senior officials could not scan the external environment for threats to their own institution, how competently could they have been reading threats and opportunities in various policy sectors for their government? In a 1994 interview with a former senior permanent official serving in a central agency under Thatcher, I asked why the transition briefing book had argued that the civil service was stretched to the limit when a few years later major cuts were implemented. He explained that while a number of senior officials, particularly in central agencies, knew full well that there was fat in the system, it was not possible for them to demonstrate this conclusively or to challenge senior line department officials. Thatcher, he explained, did something that senior permanent officials could not do, and in the process did a service to the nation and ultimately to the civil service. But there was a price to pay for opting for the easy way out. In their unwillingness to "fess up" and to speak truth about their institutions, senior permanent officials may well have compromised their ability to speak truth to power or to anyone else. As a result, they also compromised their ability to shape the future of their own institutions. In the process, national civil services lost their rudder and morale among members plummeted. WHAT NOW? Taking stock describes well what is required after fifteen years of change and of introducing one reform measure after another. To be sure, there are important lessons learned from fifteen years of reform, and as we have seen, this volume records many of them.

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But the most important lesson learned is that leadership is important and the most senior permanent officials need to assume a more direct and more public responsibility for the future of their institutions. When we think of leadership in government, we have had a tendency to think of the role of elected politicians. That is the way it should be for major policy decisions, for setting a course for the nation and for resolving conflicts in society. But the public service is one of a country's most important institutions. It is meant to be above partisan politics and is thus expected to serve politicians representing different points on the spectrum of political ideology. The public service leadership has a responsibility to the government of the day for policy advice and administration. But it also has a responsibility for the preservation of the civil service as an institution. Finally, it has a responsibility to citizens to report on the institution's strengths, to "fess up" on its weaknesses, and to fix things that need to be fixed. In these respects it has a responsibility to explain how this institution serves a public purpose in providing public services to all and sundry, even to people like prisoners who do not want them. In this volume we saw time and again that senior public servants no longer enjoy the anonymity they once did. Senior officials should not view that as a one-way street or feel that they must only speak out publicly in venues and under conditions dedicated by parliament, the congress, and the media. Things have changed and they should now feel freer to speak out in a non-partisan fashion about the future of their institution. Senior public servants should make the case about what it is that their institution can do well or better than anyone else. They should voice their opinions about the proper role of their institution in future, particularly as it relates to the emerging global economy. It may well be that since the Second World War far too much has been expected from the public service. One can well appreciate why few in Anglo-American democracies in 1945 questioned the ability of national public services to accomplish what they set out to. Keynesian logic at the time was unassailable, and governments everywhere felt that they possessed a new arsenal

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of economic policy to achieve high employment and generally manage the economy. Not only had the allies won the war but the governments had run the war economy well. Unemployment had fallen to zero, yet prices had been held down. Growth in productivity and real GNP accelerated, inequalities among social groups diminished, civilian consumption actually increased, there were no balance of payment crises, and foreign exchange rates remained stable. Little wonder that we turned to national civil services to come up with measures to solve poverty and urban decay, to attenuate the sting of economic misfortune, to launch a space program, to keep an eye on the weather, to solve regional economic disparities, and on and on. In the process, we expected national civil services to manage routine operations, to ensure equity and fairness, to be error free, to avoid embarrassing their political masters, to be representative of the society, and on and on. Was this realistic? I think not. The challenge at hand now is to define what we can realistically expect from our national public service. In the process, we need to consider the role of political institutions and their omnipresence in government operations. To make this point, we could quote James Q. Wilson (1994) when he observed, "When a culture of forbearance and forgiveness descends on Washington, please alert the FBI at once, for it will be evidence that somebody had kidnapped or anaesthetized the entire legislative and judicial branches of government" (671). Political institutions need to be reformed before politicians can truly set out to reform national civil services. For their part, senior public servants need to attend to unfinished business before someone else again does it for them. At least in the case of Canada, fifteen years of ambitious reform measures have only had limited impact on the work of central agencies. The problems of overlap and duplication between, for example, the Treasury Board Secretariat, and the Civil Service Commission in personnel matters have been well documented for some time, but little has been done. The operations of the Privy Council Office, the Department of Finance, the Treasury Board Secretariat, and the Civil Service Commission look remarkably

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similar to fifteen years ago. At the same time, senior officials need to redefine relationships in government operations and to revisit how senior appointments are made. After fifteen years of reform efforts, accountability remains the hole in the doughnut. Finally, they need to bring into the open the important elements that have underpinned the work of the Canadian public service political impartiality, objectivity, integrity, and recruitment and promotion on merit. Going back to the basic building blocks could well encourage them to consider the most important issues of government reforms. One can debate the success of various management reform measures - after all, success is ultimately in the eye of the beholder. But management reform measures, however well conceived, can never deal with the more important issues now facing the Canadian public service (see also Pollitt, this volume). For example, we need to revisit how public servants should relate to Canadians, to politicians, to political institutions. We need to redefine the "core competencies" required from individual public servants and the public service. We need to define what it is that a national public service can do better than any other group in society. Ultimately, we need a vision of what kind of public service Canada needs. NOTES 1 For example, we could argue that the bonus pay system in the Civil Service Reform Act was never really put into effect because Congress never appropriated sufficient money to implement the legislation. 2 In fairness, the public service of a decade ago did think about doing the job properly, but perhaps without the zeal associated with some parts of the quality movement. 3 For example, it is not clear that, if reinvention laboratories in the National Performance Review came up with reforms that strengthened traditional hierarchical management, these would be seen as a suitable part of the overall change strategy.

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Chapter Title BIBLIOGRAPHY

Canada. 1996. Citizen-Centred Service. Report of the Task Force on Service Delivery. Ottawa (20 May):/. The Economist. 1996. Enigmatic. London (16 November)^. - Leviathan re-engineered. London (19 October):/. Kaufman, Herbert. 1981. Fear of bureaucracy: a raging pandemic. Public Administration Review 59, 3:1. Mitchell, James R. 1996. The future of the public service. Notes for remarks to the Treasury Board Secretariat. Ottawa (8 January)^. Niskanen, W. 1971. Bureaucracy and Representative Government. Chicago: Aldine/Atherton. The Observer. 1996. Whitehall in crisis: now only "yes" minister will do. (14 April):i. Peters, B. Guy, and Donald ]. Savoie. 1996. Managing incoherence: the coordination and empowerment conundrum. Public Administration Review 56, 3:281-90. Savoie, Donald J. 1990. The Politics of Public Spending in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. - 1994. Thatcher, Reagan, Mulroney: In Search of a New Bureaucracy. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Wilson, James Q. 1994. The 1994 John Gaus lecture - reinventing public administration. Political Science and Politics (December):6/i.

The Contributors

Peter Aucoin McCullough Professor in Political Science Department of Political Science Dalhousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia

Naomi J. Caiden Department of Political Science California State University Los Angeles, California

Nicole de Montricher Groupe d'analyse des politicoes publiques/CNRS Ecole Normale Superieure Paris, France

John Hart Department of Political Science Australian National University Canberra, Australia

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Patricia W. Ingraham Department of Public Administration The Maxwell School Syracuse University Syracuse, New York

Michel Paquin Vice-President Cogito Conseil Montreal, Quebec

B. Guy Peters Maurice Falk Professor of American Government Department of Political Science University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Jon Pierre Department of Political Science Goteborg University Goteborg, Sweden

Christopher Pollitt Dean Faculty of Social Sciences Brunei - The University of West London Uxbridge Middlesex, United Kingdom

Hal G. Rainey Department of Political Science Franklin College of Arts and Sciences University of Georgia Athens, Georgia

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Bert A. Rockman Department of Political Science University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Donald J. Savoie Clement-Cormier Chair in Economic Development The Canadian Institute for Research on Regional Development Universite de Moncton Moncton, New Brunswick Paul G. Thomas Department of Political Science St. fohn's College University of Manitoba Winnipeg, Manitoba