CHAPTER SEVEN

ORGANIZATION, MANAGEMENT, AND POLICY

Comparing the Competencies of Government and Public Administration

One of the core topics in the study of public administration is organization and management. Comparing such capacities among nations and cases is invaluable for both generic knowledge on how to run governments better and for pointing to differences among cases that make them distinctive and unique.

A closer look into contemporary knowledge in organization and management studies that is applicable to public administration and policy finds that it draws upon incorporation of the generic knowledge from subfields such as organization studies, global management, public finance and budgeting, human resource management, organizational behavior, and organizational psychology (Vigoda, 2002b). Hence, the focus in this chapter will be on the operational level of organizational activity, with attention to managerial competencies, the use of new public management (NPM) ideology in modern public administration, the incorporation of organizational technology, communication, behavior, and reforms in the study of modern governance.

The Human Side of Public Enterprise: Management, Organizations, and Behavior in Comparative Public Administration

A managerial definition of public administration proclaims that it is the executive function of government or a management specialty applied in public systems (Shafritz and Russell, 1997, pp. 19–23). Although public sector management is distinguished from private-sector management, in many ways the two systems share a surprisingly broad area of similarities (Rainey, 1990). For many years, differences stemmed from the nature of services each sector used to provide, from diverse structures and functions, but mainly from discrepancies in the environment. In a comparative view, changing the environment, moving among cultures and nationalities infuses an additional element of difference between public and private systems. Management is subject to differences in culture, values, and incorporation of change, technology, and ideas in a specific society. The change is, however, also asynchronously determined. From a historical point of view, we used to see much less use of management in public administration at least until the late 1970s. When the environment of public systems started to change more rapidly, public organizations had to change (again) as well. At least some of this change stemmed, undoubtedly, from the experience of others. The systematic study of such experiences, records of success and failure of management initiatives, and their implementation for a specific society were used by others in their effort to improve public services and policies. One example that will be developed later in this chapter is the internationalization of knowledge and the trend of policy transfer and emulation in a global world (Levi-Faur and Vigoda-Gadot, 2004).

What makes managerial and organizational knowledge so important for comparative public administration of the modern era? Looking back to the twentieth century, modern societies have become more complex, flexible, and dynamic. Cultural, industrial, technological, economic, and political environments of organizations have undergone rapid transformations that are still in progress. These transformations took various shapes and consumed different effort, time, and resources in various countries. A handful of examples of such changes and reforms in policy and management will be offered in Chapters 9 to 12. The general idea, however, is that public and private organizations had to adjust and respond to changes in the environment to safeguard their interests and existence. However, the nature of their adjustment differed. The public sector had to comply with political restraints enforced by ideological aspirations of the people and of politicians as representatives of the people. At the same time the private sector had to adjust and respond to the challenge of markets and free economy (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992). In many ways, the starting point for public organizations to adjust to environmental changes was more limited than that of private organizations. While the former were restrained by the political system, the latter were liberated by the icon of free markets and global economies. Moreover, the role of governments in each society, and the meaning of the “public” for policy makers, varied from country to country (Vigoda, 2000; Vigoda-Gadot and Cohen, 2004; Vigoda-Gadot, Shoham, and Schwabsky, 2010). The prime example is the deep gap between the countries of the old continent (Europe) and the United States in the New World with regard to the meaning of the welfare state and the extent of responsibility of governments for their citizens.

A comparative look into development and change in those and in other parts of the world testifies, however, to quite similar processes of urgent calls for rethinking and reinventing government, especially since the 1970s. In recent decades, managerial tools developed by scholars and scientists in business administration became popular and effective in managing government agencies, in a scope and magnitude not experienced in the past. Conventional wisdom globally accepted a classic assumption regarding the relatively stable and unshakable structure of public organizations. Drawing on the Weberian approach, hardly anyone in any of the world's developed and modern nations disputed the need for large bureaucracies in democracies. But bureaucracies differ (Heady, 2001), and one major element of difference is how managerial and organizational knowledge and experience is used (Vigoda-Gadot, Shoham, Ruvio, and Schwabsky, 2008). In other words, whereas the mode in which bureaucracies function varies by culture, they are quite similar in how they are structured. That is, academics and practitioners dealing with the challenges and barriers of modern public administration agree that any nation, regardless of time, culture, and political ideology, must rely upon large and strong bureaucracies. A weighty bureaucracy has emerged simultaneously with the extension of governments' responsibilities and with citizens' expectations for more and better services (Vigoda-Gadot, Mizrahi, Miller-Mor, and Tevet, 2008). Even today the consensus is that governments in democracies and beyond must use large bureaucracies as a vehicle for responding to citizens' growing needs and demands.

The winds of change came relatively late in the previous century. After the Second World War people had higher expectations of their governments that were faced with practical economic and political problems of the expanding welfare states. Comparative studies have shown a worrying decline in government's economic stability as evidenced by rising budget deficits on the one hand, and of public sector efficiency on the other (see, for instance, Rainey, 1990; Peters, 1996). From Britain to France, across Germany, Italy, Scandinavia, and other European countries, to North America, Australia, and into Asia a sound call had emerged in the 1980s for reforming governments' capacities to manage public goods and better respond to citizens' growing needs. This wave of change was also felt quite significantly from the late 1980s on in Eastern Europe and Latin America, and in various parts of Asia. The emergence of new public management (NPM) ideas suggested that governments can and should use knowledge of the markets to improve public services. Each nation and culture used the (new) managerial knowledge differently (Vigoda-Gadot and Meiri, 2008). Looking into managerial reforms in many Western societies testifies to the unique slants for each culture (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011). Basic assumptions about the validity of generic and culture-blind prescriptions for better running of government were questioned. The first challenge was to justify the centrality of management ideas in public administration and policy, not merely as a technical tool for public managers but also as a model and sector prototype of policy making.

Management in the public sector matters also because citizens' demands increase and because these demands are different from country to country (Vigoda-Gadot, 2007; Vigoda-Gadot and Mizrahi, 2008). A British citizen differs from a French citizen, who differs from citizens in other European countries, in Asian countries, in the Arab world, in Eastern Europe, in Latin America, and in North America. In each of these world regions governments should use management tools differently, taking into account the sensitivity of people, the ambitions of minorities, the geopolitical variables, and the socioeconomic variants of the population. In other words, the changing ladder of values and priorities of citizens determines the type of managerial remedy to social ills, as suggested by government and public administration agencies. Notwithstanding, and from a comparative point of view, the one similarity among nations is the growing standards of performance expected from (democratic) governments. These are more numerous today than at any time in the past, and are expected to grow in the years to come. Performance, as perceived by people and in scientific studies, is associated with many indicators such as quality of management, professionalism, motivation, good citizenship, leadership, ethics, and even emotions and moral behavior of public servants in each nation (Vigoda, 2002c; Vigoda-Gadot and Meisler, 2010; Vigoda and Golembiewski, 2001; Vigoda-Gadot, 2007; Vigoda-Gadot and Drory, 2006). Perhaps this perception has guided some recent developments in public administration thinking, making it client oriented and more businesslike. Scholars frequently define these shifts as the principal change in public administration and its transition into a revised field of study named public management.

The Public Management Revolution: Comparative Views

Since the early 1980s much work has been conducted in public administration theory and practice that claims to go beyond the conservative approach in the field. This “liberalization” of public administration is recognized today as the new public management (NPM) school of thought. The self-identity problem of public administration was greatly aggravated by the launching of the idea of NPM. As noted by Kettl and Milward (1996, p. vii), “public management is neither traditional public administration nor policy analysis since it borrows heavily from a variety of disciplines and methodological approaches.” Mainly drawing on the experience of the business/industrial/private sector, scholars have suggested taking a more demanding attitude to the dynamics, activity, and productivity of public organizations. However, “competing academic disciplines dueled to establish bridgeheads or, worse, virtually ignored each other as they developed parallel tracks on related problems.” (Kettl and Milward, 1996, p. 5). Consequently, cross-fertilization, which could have accelerated learning and improved performance of public systems, was delayed.

Unsurprisingly, this lack of intellectual exchange caused redundancy of effort in the comparative track as well. Whereas comparative public administration studies frequently focus on specific research objects (for instance, countries, organizations, regions, local authorities, individual policies), a comparison of results and findings offered by different disciplines and coming from different places is almost unavailable in the literature. A recent summary of comparative articles in public administration (Fitzpatrick and others, 2011) summarizes the trends in comparative research in public administration of the last decade. Out of the 151 articles analyzed for that study only 18 (12 percent) focused on NPM and on the businesslike avenues for running government. This is a marginal figure compared with the hundreds, perhaps thousands of publications dealing with the managerial revolution in government over the same period of time.

NPM became extremely popular in the theory and practice of public arenas only in the third quarter of the twentieth century (Vigoda, 2003b); however, its comparative aspects are still unclear to many of us. Relying on an extensive survey of public management research in America, Garson and Overman (1983, p. 275) argued that its increasing popularity was due to the more virile connotation of the term “management” when compared to “administration.” Over the years, a growing number of political scientists have perceived public administration as an old and declining discipline. Some even used the term “dinosaur” to reflect its vanishing nature (Vigoda, 2002b). Others, and perhaps more so in the study of public administration, have found the term “administration” as relevant today as it was 100 years ago (Raadschelders, 2003, 2011b). It was suggested that public management rather than public administration could contribute to a new understanding of how to run the government more efficiently and thereby to surmount some of its pandemic ailments. As management was considered a more generic scholarly field, some even expected that comparative aspects would become less important in view of the greater paradigm and its potential generalizing power. NPM offered that generic, well-accepted managerial tools, techniques, knowledge, and skills could be used to turn ideas and policy into a (successful) program of action, regardless of nations, cultures, structures, or social values. And once again, despite availability and accumulation of knowledge from so many perspectives, nations, and cultures, only a few comparative studies of NPM were conducted. In many public organizations and government-controlled agencies, no significant use of comparative tools or methods is evident in the literature (Fitzpatrick and others, 2011).

Comparative methods in the study of NPM are also noteworthy. While the emergence of NPM is frequently related to the increasing impact of positivist behavioral science on the study of politics and government (for instance, Lynn, 1996, pp. 5–6), the practical aspect of this process should also be considered. Practical public managers (Golembiewski, 1995), as well as political scientists, refer to the difficulties in policy making and policy implementation that confronted many Western societies in Europe, America, and elsewhere during the 1970s. These practical difficulties are viewed today as an important trigger for the evolution of NPM. Reviewing two books on NPM (Aucoin, 1995; Boston and others, 1996), Anne Khademian (1998, p. 269) argues that American and British advocates of the field find common ground in explaining why such reforms are necessary. The problem of an inflexible bureaucracy that often could not respond efficiently and promptly to the public needs conflicted with some basic democratic principles and values in these countries. More than a decade later Vigoda-Gadot (2009) extended this idea to denote a major paradox for modern democracies. The common ground for building strong nations can be found in the bureaucracy-democracy paradox. A comparative look into the strengths and weaknesses of many democratic nations reveals that strong nations are those that find ways to peacefully live with the paradox, minimize its danger, and maximize its potential for improvement. Hence, reducing the tension between managerial/bureaucratic goals and social/democratic values is a key to better governance.

Adopting a comparative view, Peter Aucoin elegantly summarizes a “trinity” of broadly based challenges with which Western democracies have struggled, and will probably continue to struggle in the future, partly through management reform. These are (1) growing demands for restraint in public sector spending, (2) increasing cynicism regarding government bureaucracies' responsiveness to citizens' concerns and political authority and dissatisfaction with program effectiveness, and (3) an international, market-driven economy that does not defer to domestic policy efforts. A comparative view of developments in many Western governments in America, Britain, New Zealand, Canada, and elsewhere led to the recognition that sound reforms and changes in public service should be made.

Comparing the Sectors

A comparative examination of the private and the public sectors has also changed the way scholars look at public administration (Murray, 1975; Rainey, 2003). Comparative study testifies that at least some of the accumulated wisdom of the private sector in various countries is transferable to the public sector (Pollitt, 1988; Smith, 1993). In an attempt to liberate the public sector from its old traditional image and tedious practice, NPM was advanced as a relevant and promising alternative. In the NPM literature, and mainly through comparative studies, authors have tried to recognize and define new criteria that may help in determining the extent to which public agencies succeed in meeting the growing needs of the public. NPM supporters, across countries and cultures, have continuously advocated the implementation of specific Performance Indicators (PIs) used in private organizations to create a performance-based culture and matching compensatory strategies in these systems. It has recommended that these indicators be applied in the public sector (see, for instance, Smith, 1993: Carter, 1989) since they can function as milestones on the way to improve efficiency and effectiveness of public agencies.

Moreover, citizens' awareness of the performance of public services was suggested as a core element of NPM since it can increase the political pressure placed on elected and appointed public servants, thereby enhancing both managerial and allocative efficiency in the public sector (Vigoda-Gadot and Mizrahi, 2008). Scholars who advocate NPM in many Western democracies argue that this process of public accountability to stakeholders/citizens is similar to the role adopted by executives providing financial reports in the private/corporate sector (Smith, 1993). Compared with the private sector, increasing external-related pressures can have a profound impact on internal control mechanisms, as managers and public servants become more sensitive to their duties and highly committed to serve their public customers.

In view of the foregoing, Lawrence Lynn (1998, p. 231) suggested that the prospective NPM had three constructive legacies for the field of public administration and for democratic theory and practice. These were (1) a stronger emphasis on performance-motivated administration and inclusion in the administrative canon of performance-oriented institutional arrangements, structural forms, and managerial doctrines fitted to particular context (in other words, advances in the state of the art of public management); (2) an enhanced international and comparative dialogue to bequeath a stronger comparative dialogue and a stronger comparative dimension to the study of state design and administrative reform; and (3) the integrated use of economic, sociological, social-psychological, and other advanced conceptual models and heuristics in the study of public institutions and management, with the potential to strengthen the field's scholarship and the possibilities for theory-grounded practice.

Unsurprisingly, the latter two legacies are strongly rooted in a comparative perspective toward public administration. Kettl and Milward (1996) argue that one of NPM's most significant contributions to public administration as a discipline in transition is the focus on the performance of governmental organizations. We should add that a comparative look into methods and rationale leading to this performance measurement “movement” is highly important. It may enhance our understanding of how we can improve the measurement of public services and eliminate the risk of following false tracks. This must include attention for how knowledge and experience from one culture and environment are disseminated to another. According to this, a scientific orientation needs to draw on “a wide variety of academic disciplines for the full and richly textured picture required to improve the way government works. Only through interdisciplinary cross-fertilization will the picture be rich enough to capture the enormous variety and complexity of true public management (and administration) puzzles.” (Kettl and Milward, 1996, p.6) Undoubtedly, a comparative approach is the one that can allow such progress in our time.

The Implementation of NPM in Western Democracies

Learning from the experience of a number of other countries, and especially those representing Western democracies in the last decade, suggests a number of observations based on the series of NPM managerial challenges. It seems that the main patterns of the required change characteristics and their expected trends can be discerned mainly from the experience of several Western societies such as the United States, Britain and the European continent, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. However, studies from the developing world are also of great interest and advantage. A major study by Gerald Caiden and Naomi Caiden (2002) exemplifies the use of such comparative tools for the understanding of NPM impacts in various nations. In the next subsections we use their study as a major source for this comparison.

The United States: Measuring Performance

The main contribution of the United States to the development of NPM came from the improvement of performance and process measures. The basic assumption was that without an ordered decision upon measures and methods to evaluate performance, both the administrative process and the democratic process of the public's supervision on the government's performances were being compromised. Federal government in the United States especially stressed this in the “Government Performance and Results Act” (GPRA), which was approved by the Congress in 1993. Governmental organizations and agencies were requested to develop detailed measuring strategies for their products by identifying goals and purposes, studying the possible influences upon them, and tightening the tie between performances and long-term goals. As part of this process, all governmental agencies were obliged to consult Congress and other stakeholders when needed.

This development switched the focus of discussion to issues of performance and results instead of wallowing in issues of processes and resources as had been previously accepted. This is how the term “performance budgeting” has also been viewed; that is, as the means to improve decision-making processes as an aspiration to boost performance. On the other hand, a number of difficulties have also been revealed in the process, and these stemmed mostly from the need to achieve ambitious and long-term goals, which have not always been under the aegis of governmental authorities. In a great number of cases, the initiative, control, and supervision over government's activities lie with the states or the local government, while the federal government has had only indirect responsibility and involvement. Nevertheless, the main achievement of this focus on performance evaluation has been the implementation of a methodical and ordered process of studying policy products and evaluating their meaning in terms of outputs and outcomes. Nonetheless, as Lynne Weikart (2001) suggests, performance measurement in American-style NPM was but one major wheel in a vehicle of managerialism. It had to work simultaneously with additional components such as the ideas of downsizing government, decentralization, privatization, and de-bureaucratization, of the federal, state, and local American machineries.

Britain: Who Comes First, the Public or the Nation?

The roots of the reform processes in British public management were planted back at the time of the Labor government at the end of the 1970s, but gained momentum with the rise of the Conservative Party headed by Margaret Thatcher. Throughout these years, public policy known as “Thatcherism” included a dramatic reduction in the central government's involvement in the provision of direct services to the citizens. This policy included growing privatization in fields such as transportation and media and, thus, increased market competition and reduced the size of bureaucracies, while introducing an economic logic into the activities of public agencies. However, since the 1990s, the British government has acted mainly to allow political, managerial, and mostly budget decentralization in areas such as Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. In many respects, the purpose of this activity was to bring the government closer to the citizens and to reduce the “remote control” approach.

Besides the managerial benefits, it contributed to the political stability of the United Kingdom. Both the mutuality and exchange between the different areas increased, but most important, they achieved the status of a managerial autonomy, which was characterized by a greater democracy and freedom of choice for citizens. Thus, British public management became more sensitive toward the citizens while increasing the level of responsiveness through the “Citizens' Charter.” In March 1999, the government published the next expected steps for the continuation of the reforms as part of the “White Paper.” These steps were named “Modernizing Government” and stress the new role of the government.

The emphasis was on the fact that the government does not exist for its employees, but rather for the people and the individuals as citizens and clients. It claims that civil servants should be appreciated, nurtured, and promoted, but at the same time suggests that demands for better performance, cooperative work, sensitivity, and consideration toward the individual should be part and parcel of any public servant's activity. Therefore, the government's plan has been based upon five main components: planning of long-term public policy, encouraging a responsive public service, emphasizing technological improvement, stressing information availability, and improving the public service's image.

The European Continent: Cultural Gaps beyond a Few Generic Similarities

The flow of NPM-oriented thinking throughout Europe started in the late 1970s and is still under way today. It reflects a tremendous change in the theory and practice of Western European public service compared with the pre-Second World War period (Barker, 1944). Recent comparative studies are only a few examples of the ongoing debate about the decreasing likelihood of finding a generic model of NPM that is equally effective and useful for all Western democracies such as Italy, France, Greece, Portugal, Spain, and even Germany and the Netherlands (Ongaro, 2009; Barzelay and Gallego, 2010; and Pollitt and Dan, 2011). Public management reforms and modernization are implemented differently, as the policy cycles of every nation take a different shape throughout the years.

For example, Edoardo Ongaro (2009) turns to major differences between the studied nations such as the politico-administrative context and the influence of Europeanization on public management reform. He points to some countries' higher compatibility to global paradigms of NPM reforms (for instance, Italy and Spain) compared with other countries with a much lower level. He points to the centrality of the “Napoleonic tradition” and its uniqueness compared with the Anglo-Saxon tradition. Ongaro finds major differences in the way political reforms and administrative reforms interact, and embedded in a specific (organizational and national) culture that shapes the type of reform. The differences between the studied countries are wide, in terms of public servant recruitment and training, in the way services are delivered to citizens, the perception of citizens as customers, the budgetary process, and the watchdogs of reforms and change such as the auditing and judiciary systems.

Taking an even wider European perspective, Christopher Pollitt and Sorin Dan (2011) discuss the impacts of NPM across Europe and observe a paradoxical situation. They suggest that “on the one hand there have been endless publications by academics and practitioners concerned with NPM-like programs and techniques. Yet, on the other hand, our solid, scientific knowledge of the general outcomes of all this thinking and activity is very limited. Claims and counterclaims outnumber hard, carefully collected evidence by a substantial margin. That was the case in the mid-1990s, and it remains the case today. A summarizing graphic metaphor might be that there is an ocean of studies of the application of NPM ideas within the European Union (EU), but only a modest sea of works that offer direct empirical analysis of outputs, and no more than a small pond that convincingly connect specific reforms to particular outcomes.” (Pollitt, 1995, pp. 32–33).

Accordingly, and based on a vast database of 26 countries (including EU and non-EU countries such as Switzerland, Norway, and Croatia) they suggest the following summary (Pollitt and Dan, 2011, pp. 33–34):

1. Performance-related pay requires a long list of supportive local conditions before it stands a good chance of working as intended. In particular it tends not to work well where (a) political patronage determines most senior appointments, (b) the bonuses available are only a very small percentage of the total remuneration, and (c) the work is hard to measure in an objective and widely accepted way.
2. Performance targets can definitely have a significant impact on performance, but usually only where backed up by significant penalties/incentives.
3. Contracting out often fails to yield significant savings, particularly in the medium and long term. Necessary supports include (a) the possession of contract design and management skills by the staff of the parent public sector organization, (b) the presence of real competition (which may exist at first but then disappear because of private sector mergers and takeovers), and (c) that the activity being contracted is one that can be specified in fairly firm detail.
4. Use of market-type mechanisms (MTMs) may work better in simpler, more standardized services than in complex, unstandardized, professionalized human services.
5. The politico-administrative culture is mentioned as a significant factor shaping reform impacts in many countries—especially in Eastern and Central Europe, but also in the West.

Australia: The Administrative Responsibility Approach

The NPM approach permeated the Australian public management mostly toward the end of the 1980s. The government sector and structure, which had been used to centrality, “heavy activity,” and systematic ineptness, received the change initiative with enthusiasm. The change included a drastic cutback of governmental standards. Stress was on organizational products, a division between purchasing/maintenance and the provision of product roles, development of contractual mechanisms of accountability, and abandonment of the tenure-based employment method in the public sector (Hood, 1991).

However, the main characteristic of change in Australian public management was “Administrative Responsibility and Accountability,” which stands for the increase in direct responsibility of civil servants for their actions and views managers as directly responsible for their decisions in addition to the direct political responsibility that those elected by the public have toward the citizens. Changes occurred across the board in Australian administrative law and a legal framework has been set up to enforce this responsibility. This means that managers are required to account for their decisions, their implementation, and even for their decisions for not acting or executing.

Clearly, this process was accompanied by the extension of the public complaints offices' mechanisms at the federal and the national level. The Australian public auditing office was extended, and a major change in the public's attitude toward public administration systems and their responsibility for the individual took place. In addition to the Administrative Review Committee, which had been set up in 1976, various other bodies were established. These include the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, Immigration Review Tribunal, Industry Commission, The Refugee Review Tribunal, Social Security Tribunal, and the Veterans' Review Board. This process also included comprehensive legislation on the issues of freedom of information, access to archives, and law protecting the privacy of citizens.

Canada: Collaboration in Research and the Shaping of Public Policy

The changes and reforms in Canada have arrived from different directions (Peters and Savoie, 1998), but are all based on a limited number of basic assumptions: (1) maintaining a strong government is essential for the protection of the state; (2) evaluating the government's role in the future is important; (3) a well-performing public sector is highly related to a modern policy of providing services to the citizens; (4) nurturing professional civil servants and those who have an independent way of thinking; and (5) encouraging wise governmental and administrative leadership, which gives direction and backing to those who deal with public service roles (Caiden and Caiden, 2002).

At the beginning of the 1990s, Canada suffered a budget crisis, which badly influenced its investment in development and research and also damaged the implementation of advanced public policy processes. The main criticism against the federal government has been that coordination and direction are missing in the work of governmental agencies, and that public policy in various fields is wanting since knowledge, tools, and experience are not being transferred from one field to the other. As a result, it has been claimed that public money is being wasted and not efficiently managed, and that a horizontal coordinative and integrative action between the different bodies is required. In 1995, the Task Force on the Management of Horizontal Policy was established. Its role has been to centralize the policy issues, which involve more than one office, and to manage the respective activities a little better.

In general, the task force was requested to create a cooperative culture of policy making and implementation, and to form a commitment amongst governmental agencies to coordinate work while constantly and rapidly transferring ideas, information, and learning mutually from past experience. In 1996, the Policy Research Committee was established, whose aim was to assist the government in preparing for cooperative work among public organizations and to implement coordinated public policy by 2005. This committee produced two main reports, which focused on the means to increase the collaboration and coordination between the different market sectors at the national and international levels. The activity of this committee was the first step in a process called “The Policy Research Initiative.” As a part of this framework, a Secretariat for Policy Research was established in the federal government. Moreover, the proclaimed intention of this process was also to export the conceptual-cultural change in the format of the all-inclusive policy approach to other countries.

New Zealand: The Reshaping of Welfare Policy

In the last decades or so, an urgent need to cut back the size of the bureaucratic apparatus has arisen. For this purpose, accelerated processes of privatization, governmental decentralization, reduction in the number of public sector employees, and increase in the collaboration with private bodies (which would perform activities that have been hitherto in the domain of the government, also called outsourcing) has begun. Government initiated a comprehensive plan, which has greatly reduced the rate of national expenditure for the purposes of welfare. It has introduced components that encourage internal and external competition in the public sector's environment, attempt to lower the taxes, and maintain fairness in the distribution of national resources. The plan has also encouraged reliance on the country's own resources. It aims at increasing the emphasis upon the public sector's efficiency, citizens' freedom of choice, and mutual relations between service providers and clients as opposed to the former pattern according to which the citizen is dependent upon the government and its institutes (Boston and others, 1999).

According to Caiden and Caiden (2002) the switch to harsh budgetary restraint has indeed managed to rescue the country and its public sector from the crisis it had fallen into. Yet the harsh recuperation process has left its signs among different social groups, which now have to get accustomed to much weaker support from the government. The gap between the rich and the poor has grown, and at the end of the decade many people in New Zealand are yet to taste the influence of the new management reforms in their lives.

Israel: Decentralization and Privatization

Certain motives of the NPM approach have entered Israel in the last three decades. The main changes in the Israeli public sector since the 1970s are based on two main components: a real revolution in the field of decentralization (for example, the transfer of managerial authorities from central to local government and the awarding of greater freedom to act in terms of budgetary management in different government offices), and growing privatization since the mid-1980s. At the same time, there is a strengthening of processes such as raising the transparency regarding governmental activity, nurturing managers and institutes' accountability to the public, and involving the public auditing system in fields it had not dealt with in the past (Friedberg, 1999). However, it seems that in other fields such as the reduction of bureaucracy and the promotion of structural changes in public organizations, the introduction of a new managerial culture, especially in the field of performance evaluation of public organizations, the steps are smaller and slower and therefore the challenge for change remains great.

Israel was born as a welfare country with a market and society managed in a highly centralized way (Mizrahi and others, 2009, 2010), and which were characterized by three main sectors: the public and the private sectors and the Employees' Federation, the Histadrut. The country's values as a welfare state included the aspiration to provide social security, maintain quality of life, and reduce inequality (Doron, 1985). In order to achieve these goals, the intersectoral power structure during the country's first years had clearly leaned toward the public sector and the Histadrut. These have usually acted in a cooperative and coordinated way (a corporatist model) and stopped the introduction of reforms and changes, which have threatened social values. This power structure has changed completely since the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s when, on the one hand, the dominance of the Histadrut greatly deteriorated and, on the other hand, global trends with greater efficiency and focus on business management in the public sector increased.

Even though the governmental and public committees have been able to keep the issue of change and reform on the Israeli public agenda, close study would show that the public management changes focus on only the organizational, structural, and financial dimensions of the government's branches. They all lack a systematic approach to the introduction of a new managerial culture into the government, and there is insufficient focus on the development of appropriate tools for the behavioral performance evaluation of the public sector. As a result, most of the knowledge we have today centers on the attitude toward changes and reforms on the formal aspects of the public system's structure and organization or, alternatively, on its activities and performances from an economic perspective. The latter deals with the functioning of the budget or with the other issues of resource allocation, and does not make use of tools from the social sciences field, whose efficiency and contribution to the improvement of public service is proven.

The experience of countries such as Canada and the United States shows that performance evaluation can be done using systematic and prolonged studies of citizens' approaches and their status as the public sector's clients, as well as interorganizational studies that focus on public sector employees. Israel is getting gradually integrated in this trend as part of a new international project, the National Assessment Project of Public Administration (NAPPA), whose aim is to comparatively evaluate the functioning of public organizations in Europe and Israel through tools that require the integration of a perceptional/behavioral evaluation with a classic economic and technical evaluation (Vigoda-Gadot and Mizrahi, 2001–2013).

The Implementation of NPM in Other World Regions

NPM reforms have not skipped other parts of the world, and countries in Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa, and Latin America have gained knowledge and experience that have allowed meaningful reforms in government services.

Asia

One should expect major differences of public administration systems and processes among various types of Asian countries. Differences are evident, but too little is known about the nondemocratic systems such as China or North Korea compared with other, more liberal countries. Bing Cheung (2010) examines the checks and balances in China's administrative traditions to find that its system is centralized and unique, based on the older Chinese tradition of hierarchy and obedience. A comparative study examined NPM in four South and Southeast Asian countries: Singapore, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh (Samaratunge and others, 2008). The study reveals that political history, party politics, macroeconomic consideration, state tradition, the role of international development agencies, and the state of civil society are critical factors in determining the outcomes of such reforms. The study found that the type of change and the extent of reform initiatives in these countries were different. The reform programs in Singapore and Malaysia were relatively comprehensive, and the necessary infrastructure was put in place. In addition, strong political commitment and leadership expedited these reforms. Lee and Haque (2006) suggest that the logical thinking of NPM reform is highly compatible with Singapore state tradition. The performance-based bureaucracy is an integral part of state ideology and culture. A trustee model of relationship between government and citizens, as suggested by Vigoda (2002c), may be suitable to describe democracy in these countries. This model justifies delegating wide discretionary power into the hands of political and administrative institutions in return for good results.

Ramanie Samaratunge and others (2008, pp. 44–46) point to public service improvements in Malaysia as a key issue of the reform.⁵⁷ “The structures and traditions of the career service have proved very resilient, and have served to create a bureaucracy that is both relatively competent and insulated.” (Painter, 2004, p. 367) Both Singapore and Malaysia have strong market forces and have introduced massive economic development programs, which demanded an efficient and capable public sector. Singapore may be viewed as the most successful case of NPM reforms among these four countries. Ethnic diversity has not become a critical issue in either of these countries compared to Sri Lanka where the ongoing civil war since 1983 has consumed an enormous amount of human resources that otherwise would have been invested in the country.

Contrary to the previous examples, critical elements for success are missing in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. In these countries reform initiatives were influenced by short-term political motives, and not enough resources were invested in implementation. The collaboration between political, administrative, and business sectors into a strategic plan for change was missing. Samaratunge and others (2008) emphasize that unfunded welfarism, at times determined by partisan interests, was against the main objectives of NPM reforms. In addition, in Bangladesh the absence of political commitment and vision, weak market forces, and lack of institutional capabilities undermined the effective implementation of NPM reforms. They conclude that as a result, Bangladesh was very selective in introducing reform measures.

Privatization in both Sri Lanka and Bangladesh increased during the last decades as a result of the NPM reform initiatives in the 1980s. However, poor management of the privatization process resulted in inefficiency in resource allocation and maximization of the public interest. Samaratunge and others (2008) suggest that in both countries, privatization became a popular source of income for corruption and patronage distribution. On the other hand, Malaysia also implemented a massive privatization program that was designed to create strong market forces, making opportunities for both the Bumiputras and foreign investors. To make the privatization process effective and accountable, the Malaysian government introduced special measures to strengthen the power of the Auditor General to conduct management audits on privatized entities. Singapore used a corporatized model with public ownership and introduced hardcore anticorruption measures to improve efficiency in the corporatized sectors. This process enjoyed strong support by the country's political leadership.

According to Samaratunge and others (2008), Singapore has a strong tradition of authoritarian government that supported the reforms. Collaboration with the business community revitalized the process. Through regulatory mechanisms, Singapore has continuously improved the quality of public services. In the same direction, the Malaysian government has developed symbiotic collaboration and partnership initiatives with the business sector to support the reforms. This unique state tradition in Malaysia has created employment opportunities for underprivileged sections of the community and helped overcome ethnic differences.

Bangladesh is basically run by a politico-military bureaucratic oligarchy. This regime has developed a strong alliance with the emerging trading and business class. The regimes in Bangladesh have supported market economy principles and initiated selective reform measures. The relationship between the politico-bureaucratic-business elites has become the main cause of inefficiency, corruption, and lack of transparency and accountability. Regulatory institutions have become dysfunctional and have failed to neutralize the forces against change. Sri Lanka suffered from quite similar ills, even if to a somewhat smaller extent.

All this should also be considered in view of two other factors—the dependence on foreign assistance and the role of civic society. With the support of the Asian Development Bank (ADB), Sri Lanka introduced performance measures and budgetary reforms in order to improve both efficiency and effectiveness in the public sector. However, performance-based pay and employment contracts could not be introduced due to strong resistance from senior civil servants in Sri Lanka. Bangladesh has introduced some performance indicators as means to employee promotion, but they could not be implemented due to its administrative culture (Samaratunge and others, 2008).

The role of civil society is more limited in Singapore and Malaysia compared with other countries in the region. The electronic and print media in both Sri Lanka and Bangladesh play a relatively significant role in public policy debate. Civil society groups in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh have reasonable access to official documents and records. They have a significant role in public policy making, which is highly restricted in Singapore and Malaysia. The level of corruption and inefficiency in the public service in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh is endemic. Public trust in government is low and provides less legitimization for reforms. Civil society groups are not yet organized in their approach to influence public management actions. The powerful groups in the polity use this as an opportunity to misuse the reform initiatives.

Hence, Samaratunge and others (2008, p. 46) summarize that each country's path to implementing NPM practices was different due to political history, party politics, macroeconomic considerations, state tradition, and the role of civil society. The most prominent influences on the process were the political commitment for change and the leadership and cultural differences amongst the countries. Singapore and Malaysia are categorized as successful cases of NPM reforms. Sri Lanka and Bangladesh are less successful, with the short-term interests of the ruling elites as a core reason.

Africa

During the last three decades, most African countries have engaged in comprehensive public sector reform programs (Adamolekun, 1999; Kpundeh and Levy, 2004). In many cases they have received remarkable assistance from international institutions, which highlighted the diffusion of public ideas from the Western world to less developed countries. However, despite the tremendous efforts and resources that have been allocated to this endeavor, progress remains relatively scant. Public sector management reforms are a central feature of economic policy reform programs. However, the performance of such reforms in Africa remains hindered by a myriad of factors including lack of efficiency, lack of accountability, ineffective management practices, and corruption (UN-Economic Commission for Africa, 2003).

Many African countries such as Ethiopia, Ghana, Mauritius, Senegal, and Uganda have embarked on comprehensive reforms aimed at improving the quality of life of their citizens, and creating new government machineries to establish efficient and effective management systems. However, despite the tremendous efforts and resources allocated to reforms, progress is slow and many African countries have not come close to their goal of developing and transforming their societies to the same standards as developed countries. Effective health services, education, and housing still remain out of reach for many communities. With the exception of a few successful cases (Botswana, for example), public service management remains at a lethargic stage.

Today, public sector management reforms in Africa face a number of challenges that have limited the scope, speed, and quality of services rendered. For example, corruption constitutes by far one of the biggest challenges in the public sector. Other challenges include multiple accountability, inadequate resource utilization, and institutional capacity. International Organizations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and other advisory and humanitarian agencies recommend that African governments, therefore, need to increase their efforts to address these challenges through effective public sector reforms. According to Hope (2001), there is good reason to believe that at least some of these challenges will be met. Hope suggests that the application of NPM-type reforms in Africa, despite their mixed results, has been mostly successful. African economies have been recording positive rates of economic growth during the past few years, foreign investment is returning, and the size and costs of running government are declining.

Nonetheless, future reformers also need to keep an open mind as to cultural diversity, ethnic differences, and cultural gaps of norms and social priorities in each country. What may work and what may not is different in the south than in the north of Africa, as well as between the east and the west of the continent. Reforms must take the needs of the people into consideration, the capacities of the government to plan and implement changes, and the overall political culture and stability of the country. While the NPM approach may not be a panacea for the problems of the public sector in Africa, a careful and selective adaptation of some elements to selected sectors may be beneficial.

Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Other Countries

NPM reforms were also implemented quite extensively in Eastern Europe (Romania, Russia, Poland, Ukraine, to name only a few) and in Latin America (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, and others). However, scholarly writing and systematic knowledge about it is rather scarce.

Eastern Europe: The Post-Communist Era In general, the rapid shift of ruling ideology in former Soviet Union countries and in its satellite communist states brought new managerial thinking and openness to change. Greater competition, higher level of decentralization, and more service-oriented reforms were part of the expected change that citizens had from the new regimes (Rice, 1992; Meyer-Sahling, 2004a; Verheijen and Rabrenovic, 2007). Greater freedom of speech accompanied by encouragement of civic society involvement in politics and in social actions promoted some reforms in higher education, health care, and infrastructure planning. However, the democratization process that many in the West expected (or hoped) to come disappointed, and instead of desired liberal, Western-type markets and public services, a different model was promoted—one with an authoritarian style of quasidemocratic apparatus, some say even pseudodemocratic type with an elite-hegemony sphere.

Ellison (2007) suggests that the countries of Eastern and Central Europe, and some from the former Soviet Union, are in fact transition countries because they ostensibly have populations that want open political systems and free-market economies, but at the same time are struggling to build the public institutions needed to achieve them. Other scholars agree and extend the perspective to discuss a change from post-communism to postsocialism (Rice, 1992). Transition, therefore, has become a label that denotes the disparity between desire and achievement between wanting to be like the West and being like the West (Wiarda, 2002). Those who argue that the transition would be easy suggest that political and market institutions of Western Europe and the United States could be copied in Eastern Europe (Henderson, 2003; Orenstein, 2001; Wedel, 2001). Thus, the transition from authoritarianism (such as in Latin America and Southern Europe) could provide lessons for development in Eastern Europe. However, many transition problems persist, such as corruption, weak economic development, unacceptable wage and income disparities, and political instability.

Nonetheless, the literature on public administration reform and transition uses a comparative approach that reflects dialectical and empirical trends in our thinking about the transition in Eastern Europe (Rice, 1992; Meyer-Sahling, 2004b; Verheijen and Rabrenovic, 2007). The earliest thinking went in two directions. One direction was dominated by politicians, ideologues, consultants, and nongovernmental organizations that saw in the transition countries an opportunity to test neoliberal economic and political ideas (Wedel, 2001). However, other scholars warned that the transition would be more difficult than simply imposing Western institutions on Eastern European societies (Lampe, 1992; Moran and Prosser, 1994).

Culture (Hood, 1998), institutional inheritance (Baker, 2002), and institutional spillovers (Lane and Rohner, 2004) were also used to explain differences in reforms and compare countries' success in such transitions. The literature is dominated by a good deal of normative analysis; scholars assume that the Eastern European countries want to align with and be like the West (Wiarda, 2002). These reform movements were also highly rhetorical and were propelled with the election of conservative, antistate politicians—such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (Hood, 1998). Thus, by the time the transition began in the late 1980s, not only were many countries of the developed world experimenting with NPM, but the collapse of the Soviet Union served as proof for its tenets. It is important to understand that the NPM and free-market protagonists thought that their solutions to the Eastern European transition would be painful, but that the imposition of these new ways of thinking and managing would make the most of the window of opportunity of the post-communism trend (Orenstein, 2001).

Still, Wedel suggests that there is a “disconnect” between Western ideas and Eastern abilities that was “forged by the Cold War and exacerbated by the barriers of language, culture, distance, information, and semiclosed borders.” (2001, pp. 2–3). According to Ellison (2007), all this would require a fundamental, culture-wide reorganization of the management of the state. Hood (1998) was able to describe the type of public management cultures that are typical of Eastern Europe. His fatalistic category, for example, fits the Eastern European experience and envisions a public management culture that is highly atomized both socially and politically—citizens do not trust the government, and they do not trust their neighbors. Public management in fatalistic cultures tends to be corrupt, nontransparent, and capable of delivering few substantive public goods and services (Hood, 1998). Thus, public management is not effective, accountable, or responsive. For these cultures, public management reform should probably focus on building trust and civil society. As Baker notes, “Convincing the public to believe that [reform] is more than rhetoric will be a real challenge given the fundamentally different role of bureaucracy in the past and the inevitable reality that the same faces are going to be peering out over the same counters for quite some time.” (2002, p. 9).

Finally, Ellison (2007) points to a short empirical study by Lane and Rohner (2004) who asked whether institutional development in transition countries goes hand-in-hand with the development of successful markets. They also asked if institutional spillover—whether the successful reform of one institution leads to the successful reform of another—accounts for more systemic success in transition countries; do countries that get one institution right have a better chance of reforming other institutions? They found that public sector institutional development is related to market performance and, perhaps more important, that focusing reforms on one institution does spill over to others. These spillovers were also more important at a more basic level of government. Thus, “institutional issues like property rights, government efficiency, corruption, regulation quality, rule of law (in the narrow sense) have a greater impact on economic outcomes than issues like macroeconomic policy and political stability” (Lane and Rohner, 2004, p. 86).

Latin America: Democratization and Economic Rise Building a new type of state is also the major consideration in Latin America. Studies that examined the state of NPM in Latin America (for instance, Nef, 2007; CLAD, 1998) mentioned that the major goal of reforms is to build a state that will be able to face the challenges of the postindustrial age. It should guarantee the performance of economic contracts while also having the strength to guarantee social rights and competitiveness of each country on the international scene. Thus, a third way is being sought between neoliberal laissez-faire and the former social-bureaucratic model of state intervention. However, in addition to the global reform context, substantial Latin American idiosyncrasies exist. First, the situation in which these countries found themselves upon the outbreak of the crisis in the '70s and '80s was much more serious than in the developed world. Not only did these countries face a serious fiscal crisis, but their previous economic development model (import substitution) had also proved ineffective. Moreover, external indebtedness became chronic on practically the entire continent. A failure to solve these structural problems led, in most Latin American nations, to stagnation and high inflation throughout the '80s. Faced with this scenario, the first generation of reform prioritized the financial scope of the state crisis. Thus, market-oriented reforms, above all opening up to trade and fiscal adjustment, were the principal measures implemented in the eighties. In most cases, the major success of this first round of reform lay in the attempt to stabilize the economy vis-à-vis the threat of hyperinflation (Nef, 2007).

An examination of these first reforms shows that structural adjustment, whose ultimate objective was state downsizing, failed to resolve the set of basic problems faced in Latin American countries. For this reason, a second generation of reforms has evolved, aimed at restructuring the state and its political and administrative mechanisms. It is currently a recognized fact that the state continues to be a fundamental instrument for economic, political, and social development in any country. It may, however, have to be implemented differently from the national-development pattern adopted in most of Latin America and from the social-bureaucratic model that prevailed in the developed world during the postwar.

In the process of rebuilding the Latin American state, the greatest challenge lies in rendering changing world trends compatible with the region's specificities (Nef, 2007). In regard to structural changes aimed at having world impact, Latin America faces international economic competition that has accompanied globalization. The state (such as Brazil, Argentina, and its neighboring countries) attempts to replace its former protectionist (and in some cases tyrannical) policies with measures that make enterprises more competitive in the new international economic environment. To achieve this, a sound foreign trade policy is being employed, aimed at enhancing the countries' participation in world trade flows. In some countries, like Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, these processes are in full power during the 2000s. Likewise, public and private funding is strategically channeled to programs in the areas of education and science and technology.

Another structural trend points to the changing role of the state in the economic and social sectors. State action is aimed primarily at social areas that can guarantee universal health and education services, and at the promotion of economic development, creating instruments to guarantee microeconomic conditions that attract private investment and foster systemic competitiveness in the country, through sound policies in science and technology and foreign trade sectors. As concerns the form of intervention, however, implementation of any major change in the role of the state occurs in the unique economic and political sphere of each country. In economic terms, rather than intervening directly as a producer, some countries already concentrate on regulatory activities. Privatization and the establishment of regulatory agencies are part of this process.

Analysis of the current state of NPM-style reforms in Latin America suggests that the state should develop its strategic capacity for joint action and collaboration with the private sector and universities in order to create an appropriate environment for increasing competitiveness among enterprises. Reforms should aim at ensuring that the new development cycles and increasing productivity are virtuous in respect to the use of natural resources, the increase in the technological base, and income distribution. This will allow to break through the vicious cycle of “poverty-making growth” that was characteristic of Latin America in the past. These structural changes, among others, can only be viable in Latin America when state reform projects take into consideration three specific major problems in the region: (1) the consolidation of democracy, (2) the necessity of resuming economic growth, and (3) reduction of social inequalities. To a great extent, it is by virtue of these three specificities that state reform in Latin America must take on new horizons entirely different from the previous, merely financial and technocratic perspectives.

Redemocratization is an important aspect of state reform in Latin America, above all because it has an impact on the dynamics and pace of the process. Many of the reforms depend upon the establishment of new institutions, constitutional changes, or profound modifications in the administrative system (for Mexico see, for example, Nef, 2007). This will affect the status quo of various groups, some of which have been entrenched for decades in the state structure. This dilemma will be especially evident when the transition is made from the first generation of reform, carried out by a small group of bureaucrats and technocrats isolated within the state, to the next generation, which requires the attainment of democratic coalitions to sustain the state reform process. The new stage of reform must be approved by political systems that arose toward the end of the authoritarian cycle but were mostly unable to immediately consolidate democracy. The fact is that Latin American politics is still marked by a combination of weak parties, patronage, corporatism, and personality leadership. Notwithstanding this, the lessons learned in Latin American countries with respect to the nefarious nature of dictatorial regimes give strength to the notion that it will not suffice to approve state reforms. They must be implemented in a democratic context, either by improving existing political institutions or by creating new ones (CLAD, 1998).

Besides democratization, Latin American state reform is affected by questions relating to economic development and social inequalities. The state structure must not only put in place the conditions for sustainable economic development, but also guarantee the financial and administrative resources necessary for reducing poverty and the serious social inequalities that exist in the region. In regard to the latter, it should be remembered that one out of every three Latin Americans lives in poverty and that the level of inequality in 15 of the 17 Latin American countries is greater than would be expected, given the degree of development achieved in these nations.

If the ongoing state reform project does not resolve these specific Latin American problems, the state will lose social legitimacy in the short term. The reforms implemented thus far have mostly solved the matter of economic stabilization, and to some extent gained political balance. Development has not been firmly resumed, income concentration has not been reverted, and greater democracy has yet to become consolidated.

The “Dinosaur Syndrome” and the Comparative Movement: A Midrange Comment

For many citizens in all of the above mentioned countries and in others, public administration carries the image of a slow and heavy dinosaur that can't keep up with necessary transformations of the modern era (Vigoda, 2002b). Some call for higher responsiveness of the dinosaur in view of its proven capacity to address major societal changes (Ibid; see Chapters 3 and 4), even when acknowledging its heavy mass and complicated structure. Others have less faith in the wisdom of the dinosaur-like body of government. They challenge governmental agencies' rationale and tend to believe that they are too conservative and demonstrate little flexibility, slow adaptation to change, lack of innovation, and almost no entrepreneurship.

Such an image is widespread not only among scholars but also among ordinary citizens. Citizens of Western and developing nations alike are highly critical and skeptical as to potential improvements in this field, and some even believe that the public sector, like dinosaurs, needs to shrink and diminish, if not disappear entirely, in favor of a free market. These perceptions were even stronger in the late 1900s and early 2000s, and have weakened somewhat since the 9/11 events and several subsequent economic failures in the 2000s (the high-tech bubble crisis in 2002, the real-estate crisis in 2005, the bank and finance crisis in 2008, and the current, and ongoing, European/American deficit crises).

Yet, like the progress of any heavy creature, the dinosaur of the public sector may be perceived as moving forward at a snail's pace, but slowly, unevenly, yet constantly, and with great potential for improvement, it does make progress. One way this progress is becoming possible is its learning from similar and different cases around the globe and by comparing current situations to past experiences. The globalization process, the growing trend of open market exposure, high technology that builds communication channels between people at different ends of the world, and rising spiritual and virtual tradeoffs between nations further complicate the picture. Transfer of merchandise, goods, and services is growing and creates much stronger interdependence between countries in economics and finance. The virtual world and new developments of media and communication applications allow more information and data to move between consumers and offers much more to compare. Technology allows a rapid accumulation of such data but in the same time also allows a much more sophisticated avenue for analyzing and understanding this data. Furthermore, citizens of the world are becoming much more knowledgeable compared with any time in the past. It is not infrequent that a patient who uses public health services is at times more aware of options for treatment and risk effects than their physician. Parents can choose today between many more alternatives for education of their children compared with the past. And residents of cities expect local government to become innovative and creative to elevate the quality of life in communities. Policy makers and public servants are expected to apply new methods and novel tools used at the other side of the world and proved useful for making people's lives better, in health, education, and communities. This is all thanks to the growing sharing of knowledge and experience that modern technology and communication allows.

Hence, the decolonialization process in Africa and Asia between the 1940s and the 1960s, the disengagement of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, the rebirth of many new nations in Europe soon after, and the Arab Spring of the 2000s are all linked together. They all allowed for the flow of ideas in a virtual world where people are only separated by geographical borders. They also reflect the growing impact of public policies (sometimes also the lack of such policies) of one country on its neighbors. Consequently, a comparative study of public administration is incomplete unless such global trends and dynamics are carefully analyzed and added to the puzzle. Why does such interdependence develop? When and how we should witness the transfer of ideas, ideologies, and public policies? What conditions permit better application of these policies? We attempt to clarify these questions in the next section. We suggest a discussion of some aspects of the comparative approach under the globalization process with an emphasis on the learning mechanisms borrowed and emulated from one country to another, in a world without communication borders.

The Organization and Management of Global Policy and Public Administration¹

The world is transforming its management and policy learning in view of massive globalization. Cross-cultural and cross-national management learning, policy transfers, and diffusion are reshaping the way public policy is formulated, expressed, and implemented. The democratic world, on its way to change and reforms, is struggling with many problems typical to an open society and free transfer of knowledge, but other countries, as will be demonstrated hereafter, are struggling with quite similar issues as well. In the non-Western world comparable reforms are pursued under a mix of coerced and voluntary imitation, especially when reforms are a condition for development aid (Raadschelders and Bemelmans-Videc, 2007, pp. 281–284).

Dolowitz (2006) suggests that the state and the process of globalization takes issue with the arguments on the decline of the state, and suggests that the growth of policy transfers opens and not only constrains the policy options of the state. Dolowitz, one of the pioneers of the policy transfer literature (Dolowitz and Marsh, 1996; 2000; Rose, 1993), suggests that there are at least three good reasons to use the state level analyses in the study of policy transfer and globalization. First, it is clear that the nation-state has continued to be an important, if not the predominant, entity in international governance. Second, few within the globalization debate acknowledge, let alone discuss, the importance of the state for the very development and survival of “globalization.” Finally, few have discussed the processes inherent in globalization in light of the fact that any state can utilize these processes to strengthen its own position in relation to domestic and international governance. Thus, we maintain that the state is still the only actor that can make binding decisions on behalf of the citizenry at large; it is also the only actor that has the authority to exercise regulatory oversight over market functions, within a specific nation and also internationally vis-à-vis its relative power and influence in the international system.

Globalization in this formulation is an opportunity to learn from other political systems. Thus, comparative approaches enrich the managerial understanding of how to run our states effectively and build better policies. The learning process, accumulated through comparative enrichment, comprises many segments. The segments of the comparative voyage build mainly on the transfer of knowledge, diffusion of ideas, and emulation, changing the old order. Comparing the management of the states means learning from each other. States can learn from each other in order to (a) enhance or reduce the international effects of globalization; (b) expand or reduce the impact of globalization on individual political systems; (c) use the rhetoric of globalization to justify actions based on “foreign” actions and ideas; (d) utilize institutions such as the EU to harness the forces of globalization to their advantage; and (e) use international governing bodies (such as the EU) to limit the impact of globalization. Restricting policy transfer, Dolowitz suggests, is to restrict globalization. To facilitate policy transfer is to facilitate globalization. What we should place on the research agenda are questions of how to govern transfer so as to maximize the social benefits. Embedded in Dolowitz's analysis is the supposition that the policy process is governed, or at least can be governed, and that states, at least some of them, are the most important actors in this process.

Robert Christensen (2006) focuses on international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) such as the World Bank or the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), as means for comparison and understanding of the global and managerial-administrative-policy change. Although not sovereign entities, INGOs possess a vast potential to influence international, national, and local policy, and they have demonstrated that potential in many instances. The most recent decades have witnessed remarkable growth in the numbers of these organizations, with nearly one-sixth of today's approximately 37,000 INGOs being formed in the 1990s. Possibly more significant than the expanding number of these organizations, he presents a datum that indicates that where nongovernmental organizations handled $1 billion in world development funds in 1970, by 1997 these organizations were handling more than $7 billion. The proliferation of these organizations, he suggests, raises the question of whether they are most appropriately placed in or outside the traditional worldview that recognizes nation-states as the primary and legitimate institutions of global policy making (the “Westphalia paradigm,” in his terminology). As an alternative to this dominant perspective he suggests that of “global society” (or “transnational society” or “world community”). This emerging perspective refers to “a society of State actors and non-State actors like NGOs, multinational corporations, and individuals on a global scale, which is characterized by a multitude of decentralized lawmaking processes in various sectors, independent of nation-states.” (Nowrot, 1999, p. 641). Christensen moves on to suggest some ways in which the two perspectives can be evaluated. While in his focus on INGOS he differs from Dolowitz, and while he contends that the state's policy-making ability is being redefined and characterized by nonsovereign entities, he does not go as far as to dismiss the importance of state actors in policy transfer. What both he and Dolowitz share is a recognition that both actors are important for comparative use, and even more notably that policy transfers by both state and nonstate actors are important enough to become a major focus for students who are interested in comparative views of social, political, and economic change.

Summary

It seems that in the study of public administration, boundaries are created between traditional administration (that emphasized the legal perspective), management studies (the business angle), and policy studies (including emphasis on the political element in public sector activities). Perhaps these distinctions are useful for analytical reasons, but at least one author suggested that to distinguish public management and public policy programs from “traditional” public administration is merely a marketing tool masking that old wine is sold in new bottles (Raadschelders, 2011b, p. 208) More important, the distinctions academics make between administration, management, and policy have little meaning in the practitioner world. They are highly intertwined activities. In this chapter we focused on organization and management, but had to pay some attention to the mechanics of policy making in relation to management. Substantive public policy areas will be the subject matter of Chapters 9 to 12.