Public Management Reform and Modernization

Public Management Reform and

Modernization

For Rita and Ezio: thank you

For Anna: your patience and still support have made this book

a joyous enterprise

For Tommaso and Pietro: the mystery of Faith, Being,

Mankind be the heart of your life

Public Management

Reform and

Modernization

Trajectories of Administrative Change in

Italy, France, Greece, Portugal and Spain

Edoardo Ongaro

Bocconi University and SDA Bocconi School of Management,

Italy

Edward Elgar

Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

© Edoardo Ongaro 2009

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored

in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,

mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior

permission of the publisher.

Published by

Edward Elgar Publishing Limited

The Lypiatts

15 Lansdown Road

Cheltenham

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UK

Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc.

William Pratt House

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Northampton

Massachusetts 01060

USA

A catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Control Number: 2009933392

ISBN 978 1 84720 810 1

Printed and bound by MPG Books Group, UK

v

Contents

List of fi gures and tables vi

Preface by Christopher Pollitt vii

Foreword by Elio Borgonovi x

Acknowledgements xii

1 Introduction 1

PART I PUBLIC MANAGEMENT REFORM IN ITALY

2 Reforming the public sector in a politico-administrative

context in motion 31

3 Financial management, audit and performance measurement,

personnel 88

4 Organizational reforms 123

5 Explaining the dynamics of public management reform in Italy 156

PART II COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS: PUBLIC

MANAGEMENT REFORM IN NAPOLEONIC

STATES

6 Trajectories of reform in France, Greece, Portugal, Spain:

comparison and generalizations 201

7 Administrative traditions and models of reform: Napoleonic

countries between global paradigms and the Neo-Weberian

State 247

References 281

Index 305

vi

Figures and tables

FIGURES

4.1 Trajectory of coordination in Italy (1992–2007) 137

5.1 Process of building management capacity at the individual

public sector organization level 176

TABLES

2.1 Events of reform in Italy (1992–2008) 32

2.2 Trajectory of public management reform in Italy 67

3.1 The diff usion of accrual accounting in local governments

in 2004 93

3.2 Numbers, economic reward, type of contract and age of

public managers in Italy 107

4.1 Reallocation of personnel from the state to regions and

local authorities – gap between designed and implemented 126

4.2 Mapping coordination events: symbols and description 131

4.3 Decision powers in local governments before 1992 and

after the reforms occurred over the period 1992–99 152

6.1 Politico-administrative systems of France, Greece, Italy,

Portugal and Spain: outline of some key features 215

7.1 Evolving features of the Napoleonic administrative

tradition in France, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain 253

vii

Preface

Christopher Pollitt

I can truthfully say that this book is one I have been waiting for for more

than a decade, and I am therefore delighted that it has fi nally arrived.

It was in the late 1990s, when I was working with my colleague Geert

Bouckaert on the fi rst (2000) edition of Public Management Reform: A

Comparative Analysis, that I realized that we had very little (at least in

English) on Southern Europe. Neither did we have the time, skills or

resources necessary to fi ll that huge gap. For one thing, we had decided

not to try to cover countries where neither of us had even a passive knowl￾edge of the language – the dangers of relying on selective translations was

just too great. In the second edition of that book, thanks to the generous

help of Edoardo Ongaro and Elio Borgonovi, we were able to cover Italy,

but that, we knew, was only a beginning. Now, however, the job is done –

anglophone readers at last have a detailed, sophisticated, up-to-date treat￾ment not only of France (which has frequently been covered) but also of

Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain.

Yet the value of this work goes far beyond just the provision of infor￾mation about what was previously largely terra incognita on anglophone

management maps (useful accomplishment though that is in itself). To my

mind it has several major additional virtues. First, it is a theoretically chal￾lenging work, engaging not just with the NPM but with other traditions,

as well as with the more recently formulated model of a Neo-Weberian

State (NWS). Further, it attempts a multi-level approach, integrating

observations about developments at the EU level with the analysis of

reforms within each particular country, plus some interesting observations

about the evidently fl exible relationship between national reform motifs

and the trajectories of subnational governments, and even individual

public sector organizations. All this has required some very wide reading

– and an ambitious attempt to integrate a variety of approaches, concepts

and levels of analysis.

Second, and perhaps less obviously, the detailed analysis implies some

signifi cant reorientations for those (many) Anglophone scholars who have

hitherto worked comfortably within the thought-world of North America

and North-Western Europe. Such scholars can no longer assume that their

viii Public management reform and modernization

world is ‘normal’ and anything else is a deviation to be assessed against

what is happening in the USA, the UK, the Netherlands or Sweden. In

this part of the zoo you will fi nd some diff erent kinds of animal, but also

some familiar animals behaving in unfamiliar ways. Thus (for example)

the grands corps in Italy evidently do not behave in the same way as the

grand corps in France, and the public sector unions in most of the south￾ern countries play a bigger role than we are used to in, say, the UK or the

Netherlands. And civil service reforms such as managerialization of the

upper grades and a more contract-like form of employment take on a dif￾ferent hue when implemented within an intense patronage/spoils system

such as prevails in Italy.

Third, although its author is too modest to say so, I would suggest that

this book is another nail in the coffi n of ‘generic’ public management or

‘global recipes’, because what we see here is some very diff erent types of

systems, which exhibit both continuity and change as they pursue distinc￾tive trajectories of their own. As such it is also a sign of growing maturity

in the fi eld of academic public management. We no longer need to debate

everything in relation to one simple model, or even a succession of simple

models (‘NPM turns into networks, which then turn into governance’,

as some of our linear-thinking students occasionally but misleadingly

suggest). We can tolerate complexity and diversity, and still make com￾parisons and build bridges between the diff erent strands of thinking and

practice. Even the OECD has now moved away from the linear language

of countries being ‘behind’ or ‘ahead’ which characterized some its 1990s

publications. ‘Modernization is context dependent’ it says in a recent over￾view (although it still tries to hang on to a singular ‘way forward’ (OECD,

2005, p. 22; Pollitt et al., 2006).

Academic books and articles are supposed to go as far as they can and

then suggest where other scholars might go next. In this case Edoardo

Ongaro brings home a rich harvest of further questions and potential

projects. I would hope to see a range of spin-off s and further projects

emerge from the debate which I hope this book will provoke. One longer￾term strategic vision which I would myself like to add is that public

management scholars could get together to formulate an even more ambi￾tious project – one that compares the diff erent ‘families’ of countries or

‘traditions’ of administration. Thus we might envisage a broad compari￾son of the Napoleonic systems with the Scandinavian systems, the post￾Communist states of Eastern Europe, Germanic federalism and British

centralism. This would require a team eff ort and substantial funding, but

it would give substance and depth to what has hitherto been a prominent

but somewhat intangible concept, that of a ‘European administrative

space’. If such a large-scale project is ever launched then its founders

Preface by Christopher Pollitt ix

will be able to look back on this book as one of the milestones along the

road.

Christopher Pollitt

Research Professor in Public Management

Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

Belgium

REFERENCES

OECD (2005) Modernising Government: The Way Forward. Paris: OECD.

Pollitt, C., Kettl, D., Haque, S., Premfors, R. and Talbot, C. (2006) ‘Modernizing

Government: A Symposium’, International Review of Administrative Sciences,

72:3, pp. 307–340.

x

Foreword

Elio Borgonovi

Changing the public sector is one of the most diffi cult processes.

Commercial sector companies receive from the market immediate signals

and are pushed towards change as the short-term, even daily, results are

worsening. On the contrary, institutions face a major challenge in under￾taking change processes, even when they receive a strong feedback about

the dissatisfaction of citizens, the business sector and the civil society, and

when there are clear signals that the services they provide are no longer

coherent with a society that is becoming more and more dynamic.

In eff ect, change and in particular the reform process require some

conditions, like the perception of the gap between the actual needs and

the quality and the quantity of services provided, the analysis and the

interpretation of the causes of such a gap, which is infl uenced by diff erent

views of the society (ideologies or interest groups) and the consensus on

the direction of modernization. In the modern society, owing to the eff ect

of democracy in a changing society (multiculturalism, tolerance for diff er￾ent values, immigration and multiethnic composition), it is easier to have a

majority of people against the actual functioning of the state and the local

governments, but it is much more diffi cult to create a coherent majority

in favour of a new shape of the public system: it is diffi cult to reform the

public sector.

The diffi culties increase in the Napoleonic model of state, largely based

on formal regulation of the administration and on the bureaucratic organ￾ization model. There is in this system a special branch of law, the admin￾istrative law, that engenders a set of formal rules that require compliance

and are diffi cult to modify even if and when they are obsolete and become

an obstacle to change and the adaptation of the public administration to

its aims and ultimate goals.

Edoardo Ongaro, drawing on the Pollitt and Bouckaert authoritative

book Public Management Reform: A Comparative Analysis (2004), had the

courage to apply the conceptual framework of (public) management and

to adapt it to the peculiarity of the Napoleonic model of state. Following

up the hard work of data collection, documentary analysis and fi eld

investigation – conducted also through the coordination of a number of

Foreword by Elio Borgonovi xi

research projects as well as an intense participation in international fora,

especially the conferences organized by EGPA (the European Group of

Public Administration) and particularly the EGPA Permanent Study

Group he has chaired since 2006 – he can now give evidence in this book

of his conceptual elaboration that has been developed over many years.

He has focused on the concept of ‘factors that stimulate and condition’ the

reform processes and on the concept of ‘reform trajectory’ (see Chapter 1)

and as a fi rst step he has applied it to the Italian context – the one he knows

best (see Part I of the book).

After having fi ne-tuned the conceptual framework of analysis and

having elaborated an explanatory model fi tting the Italian reform process,

it was much more straightforward, though surely not easy, for Edoardo

Ongaro to elaborate the material collected on France, Greece, Portugal

and Spain and address broader-scope theoretical questions (Part II of the

book).

On the Napoleonic model states there are some comparative books, but

most of them address the problem of change in these states exclusively

from a political science or an administrative law perspective. The work of

Edoardo Ongaro is the only one, to my knowledge, that adopts the man￾agement framework to the study of the transformation of the public sector

in these countries.

Elio Borgonovi

Director of the Institute for Public Administration and Health Care

Management

Universitá Bocconi

xii

Acknowledgements

The conception of this book dates back to the summer of the year 2000:

over the long time span till the work has gone to press I have contracted

too many debts with too many people for adequately acknowledging

them all in a small space here. For this reason, and uncomfortably, I will

necessarily have to be selective.

First of all, I wish to thank Elio Borgonovi and all the numerous

colleagues at the Institute of Public and Health Care Management at

Bocconi University, an institute that is now part of the larger Department

of Institutional Analysis and Public Management – a denomination that

perfectly summarizes the two broad streams of study and academic inves￾tigation that have nourished the elaboration of this book. The even larger

‘community’ of colleagues at the Public Management and Policy Area of

SDA Bocconi School of Management has provided me with incommensu￾rable inputs, stimuli and opportunities of professional development that

have so crucially contributed to the preparation of this book. The intense

collaboration with three younger colleagues, Dario Barbieri, Paolo Fedele

and Davide Galli, has been especially enriching for me. Research projects

that have provided important fi ndings for this book have been conducted

in close collaboration with Fabrizio Pezzani and Giovanni Valotti, to

whom I am very grateful.

The research work conducted for the publication of the Italian edition

of Christopher Pollitt and Geert Bouckaert’s authoritative book Public

Management Reform: A Comparative Analysis, which included a new

section on Italy, was the starting point of this endeavour. Over the time,

I have contracted a huge intellectual debt towards Geert Bouckaert and

Christopher Pollitt: their suggestions have powerfully contributed to my

research work.

The periods of study and research that I conducted abroad power￾fully contributed to my development as a researcher: I am particularly

grateful to Michael Barzelay (the London School of Economics and

Political Science) and B. Guy Peters and Alberta Sbragia (the University

of Pittsburgh). During my stay in London I particularly benefi ted from

the interchanges with Alberto Asquer, Anne Corbett, Francisco Gaetani,

Raquel Gallego, Surapong Malee and Valentina Mele; my attendance

at innumerable seminars helped me a lot in shaping this book. Closer to

Acknowledgements xiii

home, a number of prominent scholars visited Bocconi on a long-term

basis during these years: among them, I am especially grateful to Anne

Drumaux, Les Metcalfe and Christoph Reichard for their highly valuable

inputs.

The authors of the articles in the special issue on ‘Public Management

Reform in Napoleonic States: France, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain’

that I had the honour of editing for the International Journal of Public

Sector Management contributed to a joint intellectual enterprise that

has profoundly shaped this book: I am grateful to Isabel Corte-Real,

Salvador Parrado, B. Guy Peters, Luc Rouban, Calliope Spanou and

Giovanni Valotti as well as to those who served as reviewers for the

special issue: Giovanni Azzone, Geert Bouckaert, Eugenio Caperchione,

Cristoph Reichard, Jeff rey Straussman and the anonymous reviewers.

Later, the interchanges I had with the authors that contributed to the

symposium on the journal Public Administration were particularly inspir￾ing: I want to thank particularly the editor Walter Kickert – his ideas

about the diff erent theoretical perspectives from which to investigate

Southern European countries have proved of great importance in the

preparation of this book – as well as all the authors: Carlos Alba and

Carmen Navarro, José Magone, Dimitri Sotiropoulos and Calliope

Spanou.

Martin Painter and B. Guy Peters were so kind as to invite me to the

Workshop ‘Administrative Traditions: Inheritances and Transplants in

Comparative Perspective’, held at the City University of Hong Kong,

Hong Kong, 25–27 June 2007. I learnt much from the comments on my

presentation of a paper on the Napoleonic administrative tradition on that

occasion, and from the debate at large: the fi rst part of Chapter 7 would

probably not have seen the light without my attendance at that seminar:

I am profoundly grateful to Martin Painter and B. Guy Peters, the pro￾moters, as well as all the participants who attended the seminar, namely:

Philippe Bezes, Anthony Cheung, O.P. Dwivedi, John Halligan, Shafi qul

Huque, Goran Hyden, Martin Lodge, Jan Meyer-Sahling, Yorge Nef,

Dimitri Sotiropoulos, Tony Verheijen, Kutsal Yesilkagit.

The organizers of the First Trans-European Dialogue (TED1) on the

theme ‘Towards the Neo-Weberian State? Europe and Beyond’, held at

the Tallinn Institute of Technology, Tallinn, 30 January to 1 February

2008, thought of me as one of the contributors to the start-up conference

of a series aimed at building important bridges between public adminis￾trationists across Europe: I am grateful to Geert Bouckaert, Wolfgang

Drechsler, Christopher Pollitt and Tiina Randma-Liiv as well as to all the

participants to the fi rst Trans-European Dialogue, whose ‘round table’

interactive format created an exciting opportunity for the progress of

xiv Public management reform and modernization

the research on the topic of the Neo-Weberian State. The second part of

Chapter 7 owes very much to my attendance at that conference.

The members of the academic network named ‘Comparative Public

Organization Data Base for Research and Analysis’ – COBRA – chaired

by Geert Bouckaert and B. Guy Peters provided me with invaluable inputs

and advice, since I joined the network in 2005, on diff erent pieces that later

contributed to the book. I thus also wish to thank Koen Verhoest, Eva

Beuselink, Falke Meyers, Bram Verschuere (now at the University of Gent)

and Ian Rommel from the Institute of Public Management at Katholieke

Universiteit Leuven; Per Lægreid, Paul Roness and Kristin Rubecksen at

the University of Bergen; Tom Christensen at the University of Oslo; Jon

Pierre at the University of Goteborg; Christoph Reichard, Werner Jann

and the team at the University of Potsdam; Sandra Van Thiel and Kutsal

Yesilkagit at, respectively, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, and the

Utrecht School of Governance; Peter Humphrey, Muiris MacCarthaigh

and the team at the Institute of Public Administration in Dublin; Oliver

James at the University of Exeter; John Burns and Janice Caulfi eld from

the University of Hong Kong and Martin Painter from the City University

of Hong Kong; Chris Aulich, John Halligan and Roger Wettenhall from

the Centre for Research in Public Sector Management at the University

of Canberra; Ian Thynne from Charles Darwin University; Bidhya

Bowornwathana from Chulalongkorn University.

Andrew Massey and Ellen Wayenberg, with whom I have co-chaired

since 2006 the Permanent Study Group on Intergovernmental Relations

of EGPA (the European Group of Public Administration), have provided

me with inputs and refl ections. The opportunity to write a chapter for the

forthcoming International Handbook of Civil Service Systems, edited by

Andrew Massey, for the same publisher as this book has been a source of

ideas for the section on personnel reform in Italy. I am particularly grate￾ful to Andrew for his esteem and continuous support, in many ways.

Last, but defi nitely not least, I wish to thank Joanne Betteridge,

Alexandra O’Connell, Elizabeth Clack, Alice O’Mahoney and all the team

at Edward Elgar, for their patience, understanding and support. Errors

are all mine.

Edoardo Ongaro

Milan, March 2009