Reform Administrative reform has enjoyed significant support in Europe, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand during the past decade (Campbell and Peters, 1988; Christoph, 1992; Stone, 1993; Campbell and Wilson, 1995; Kettl and DiIulio, 1995); it has also ‘permeated Latin America, entered Asia, and most recently penetrated Africa’ (Kearney and Hays, 1998). In contrast to this widespread support at the nation-state level, the adoption of reforms at lower levels of government is more uneven (Brudney et al., 1999). These reforms have been manifested in various ways and under numerous labels, depending upon the national context. In western democracies these reform efforts have gone under the labels of reinventing government, new public management, and managerialism, with the avowed intent of increasing efficiency, responsiveness and accountability of public managers (Barzelay, 1992; Christoph, 1992; Osborne and Gaebler, 1992; Gore, 1993; Mascarenhas, 1993; Dunn, 1997; State Services Commission, 1997; Hood, 1998). Most of these reforms have intended to change the culture and context within which public managers conduct their duties to increase government’s efficiency, effectiveness and accountability. Strategies adopted have included decentralizing government, downsizing government, cutting red tape, increasing administrative discretion, empowering workers, encouraging entrepreneurial behavior, managing for results, and increased attention to performance measurement to make accountability more transparent (Campbell, 1993; Gore, 1995; US General Accounting Office, 1995; Peters and Savoie, 1996). While being in favor of efficiency, responsiveness and accountability is a popular rhetorical stance, the reality of public sector reform represents substantial challenges, not the least of which is how reforms impact the accountability of public administrators. These reforms have implications for the accountability relationships of government agencies and public managers; Olsen (1988) notes that the patchwork of administrative reform can result in administrative apparatus that are more complex and render accountability more obscure. The long-term

Organizing governance, governing organizations

Dynamics of Public Sector Accountability in an Era of Reform

In this article a theoretical framework designed for a comparative research project on organisational change in higher education is presented. In the project the main focus is on how organisational change in universities and colleges is affected by governmental policies and programmes. The framework is based upon two major theoretical perspectives, resource dependency and neo-institutionalism. It is argued that for examining changes in universities and colleges both the relationship between these organisations and the government, as well as their internal dynamics are of importance. In addition to integrating the two main theoretical perspectives in the project also attempts to do justice to the complexities of the concept of (governmental) steering by attempting to incorporate general models on the role of the state. The article suggests that these models offer a meaningful insight into how and why governmental steering approaches have been changed over time.

Governmental policies and organisational change in higher education

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1016/S0952-8733(00)00012-X.pdf

Hybrid steering approaches with respect to European higher education

In this article we focus on the dynamic interplay between increase in autonomy of regulatory agencies and political control of those agencies. The general research issues are the weak empirical foundations of regulatory reforms, the complex trade-off between political control and agency autonomy, the dual process of deregulation and reregulation, the problems of role-specialization and coordination, and the questions of “smart practice” in regulatory policy and practice. The theoretical basis is agency theories and a broad institutional approach that blend national political strategies, historical-cultural context, and external pressures to understand regulatory agencies and regulatory reform. This approach is contrasted with a practitioner model of agencies. Empirically the article is based on regulatory reform in Norway, giving a brief introduction to the reform and agency context followed by an analysis of the radical regulatory reform policy introduced recently by the current Norwegian government. We illustrate how regulatory reforms and agencies work in practice by focusing on two specific cases on homeland security and telecommunications.

/pdf/regulatory-agencies-the-challenges-of-balancing-agency-5bp0txeeo3.pdf

Regulatory Agencies—The Challenges of Balancing Agency Autonomy and Political Control

This article presents an analytical platform for discussing and analyzing administrative reforms in terms of democracy. First, we present the democratic theory positions represented by output democracy and input democracy. These two positions are used to classify different types of reform. The second explanatory approach on democracy and reforms is transformative, and it applies a mixture of external features, domestic administrative culture, and polity features to understand variations in the democratic aspects of public sector reforms. Central issues are whether these reforms can be seen as alternatives or whether they complement each other in terms of layering processes. Third, we take a broad overview of New Public Management (NPM) and post-NPM reforms and carry out an in-depth analysis of a new administrative policy report by the Norwegian centre-left government. Finally, we discuss briefly the broader comparative implications of our findings.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S1755773910000299

Organizing governance, governing organizations

Citations

Dynamics of Public Sector Accountability in an Era of Reform

Governmental policies and organisational change in higher education

Hybrid steering approaches with respect to European higher education

Regulatory Agencies—The Challenges of Balancing Agency Autonomy and Political Control

Democracy and administrative policy: contrasting elements of New Public Management (NPM) and post-NPM

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