Public Management and Administration - Owen E.hughes

268 Public Management and Administration
of public agencies to their clients and customers, reduce public expenditure, and improve
managerial accountability. The choice of policy instruments has also been remarkably
similar: commercialization, corporatization, and privatization; the devolution of management
responsibilities; a shift from input controls to output and outcome measures; tighter
performance specification; and more extensive contracting out.
Kettl also argues ‘the movement has been striking because of the number of
nations that have taken up the reform agenda in such a short time and because
of how similar their basic strategies have been’ (2000, p. 1). He lists the strategies
as: productivity – producing more services with less tax money; marketization
– using market-style incentives; a service orientation; decentralization;
policy – separating purchaser from provider; and accountability for results
(2000, p. 1). He argues ‘painted with the broadest brush, these reforms sought
to replace traditional rule-based, authority-driven processes with market-based,
competition-driven tactics (2000, p. 3).
In looking at instruments and strategies there is far more commonality
between the reforms of various countries than critics allow. What has changed
is the underlying theory rather than the specifics. It would be absurd to
demand, for example, that all countries simultaneously adopt the same model
of performance appraisal and at the same time for a claim of similarity to be
justified. Pollitt, for example, argues that ‘performance indicator systems have
sprouted up in most countries and, for the optimistic, these may appear to hold
out the prospect of pinning down performance improvements so that, eventually,
international comparisons will be routine’ (2001, p. 488). He argues that
there are major problems and differences between countries in the use of performance
indicators. But what is more important, surely, is that a large number
of countries around the world have decided that systematic performance
appraisal is necessary to address their performance and incentive structures and
that this is novel in itself. They may – most likely will – then adopt their own
scheme in their own time, but the underlying theoretical change of now regarding
performance appraisal as important rather than the reform specifics is
where countries have converged.
The similarity of theoretical and policy instruments is the crucial point.
Certainly the reforms and their timing varied in different countries, but it is
argued here that the instruments and strategies were the same. If the new paradigm
is to be the change from bureaucracy to markets, illustrated by the adoption
of market instruments, the similarities are more than they appear. As
Holmes and Shand argue (1995, p. 554):
Changes in the internal management paradigm reflect greater convergence, across the
political spectrum, in terms of many of the core common ‘micro’ themes. They represent
a concern to improve the performance of public sector organizations or ‘to do more with
less’, using the major tools of the market and private sector practice. The convergence is
apparent within the OECD countries, but it is also apparent in many developing countries,
and in economies in transition.