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Public management reform started in Great Britain, New Zealand, and Australia in the 1980s. In the US, the reform occurred mainly at local level, but the National Performance Review Program ‘Reinventing Government’. Public management reform also advanced in the Scandinavian countries and in the Netherlands. In Canada, the reform had to await a major fiscal adjustment programme that lasted most of the 1990s, but it is today under way. In Italy, it is beginning. Among the developing countries, only in Brazil and Chile has public management reform gained ground. It is lagging behind in countries such as Germany, France, and Japan, where bureaucratic administration was more successfully and formally established.

Discusses the transition from bureaucratic public administration to public or new public management. Classic bureaucratic administration, based on the Prussian army’s administrative principles, resulted from a series of civil service reforms implemented in the second half of nineteenth century. It revealed a surprising historical persistence. Public management reform is the capitalist state organization’s second major reform. It emerged when globalization and the crisis of the state challenged the legitimacy of state bureaucracies and bureaucratic public administration. Margaret Thatcher launched public management reform in Great Britain, but in the end it was adopted by governments formed by political parties from across the political spectrum, including parties on the traditional left, most notably Labour governments in Australia and New Zealand.

This chapter summarizes and compares the trajectories of public management reform in Great Britain, Sweden, The Netherlands, Finland, and France. It explains the common themes in the management reforms of the five countries. These are the need to restrain expenditure, increasing productivity of public services, responsiveness of public services to the conveniences and preferences of the users, and the strengthening of transparency. These four themes imply considerable changes in public administration.

This chapter explains the objective of this book, which is to study the practice of performance audits and relate it to contemporary development public management. This book evaluates audits carried out by Supreme Audit Institutions (SAI) in Great Britain, Sweden, The Netherlands, Finland, and France. It highlights the need for more publications that offer sustained and independent analysis of the audit process and stresses the importance of exploring the connections between performance auditing and public-sector management reform.

This chapter analyses the fiscal problems of Dutch local government in the 1980s and the way that municipalities handled the fiscal squeeze of that time. It first explores the causes of the 1980s fiscal squeeze, that is, the decrease in municipal revenues (particularly in block-grant funding from central government through the ‘Municipal Fund’) and increase in expenditures, partly as a result of recession. It then describes the local government responses to the fiscal squeeze, that is, what cutback measures were taken and what strategies were employed, and explores the linked reform of the financial management system and adoption of ‘divisionalised business model’ structures. Thirdly, empirical evidence about the causes and effects of Dutch local public management reform is considered. Finally, the chapter discusses the longer-term effects that went beyond management reform, that is, developments in local democracy in the 1990s.

This chapter explores, in greater depth, the idea floated in the Introduction that the macro-level political economy of public services reform can exert effects on preferred management knowledges at both national and local levels. We argue that an important series of New Public Management reforms evident since the 1980s have made UK public agencies more ‘firm like’ and receptive to firm-based forms of management knowledge. We characterize key features of the UK’s long-term public management reform strategy, benchmarking it against, and also adding to, Pollitt and Bouckaert’s well-known comparativist typology. We specifically add to their model a consideration of the extent to which public management reform is constructed as a top-level political issue.