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Why do top-down reforms to public services so often over-promise and under-deliver? Using five concepts from psychology, economics and organisational sociology, Thomas Elston addresses this pressing question of good governance. Focusing on the practical challenge of how to undertake better public management reforms, he questions the assumption that failure typically occurs because of poor reform implementation. Instead, he shows how reforms are often badly designed from the outset, being fashion-led, more focused more on fixing errors than exploiting opportunities and ignoring implicit costs of change. This concise, practically-orientated work employs diverse examples to propose ways to improve the design of public sector reform programmes — and the services that citizens receive.

Public service bargains (PSBs) define rewards, competencies, and loyalties for civil servants. They involve both explicit and tacit agreements with politicians. The article suggests that these two kinds of bargain may not be closely coordinated with one another, and can become "loosely coupled," operating and evolving with relative independence. This is particularly likely when there is conflict between rational‐actor preferences and institutional expectations about political‐administrative behavior. Such a trade‐off can be managed by "decoupling" the explicit and tacit PSB, so that they operate differently in public and in private. Loose coupling results in inconsistent PSBs that are resistant to change, whereas decoupling highlights the compliance costs that actors face when securing cultural legitimacy for their bargains. These arguments are illustrated by the long‐term development of "Next Steps" agencies in the United Kingdom, where a marked disjuncture has emerged between the stated and practiced PSB.

Administrative decentralization to government agencies (so‐called 'agencification') has attracted much attention in recent years, increasingly for its longevity or evolution after the 'high' managerialism of the 1980s, and largely through a neo‐positivist epistemology. Drawing on techniques of narrative and discourse analysis, and a model of incremental ideational change, this article identifies the necessity of supplementing those existing large‐N analyses of agencification's expansion and decline with qualitative attention to the endurance of policy meaning. It demonstrates how the original foundations of managerialism, civil service empowerment and decentralization from the UK's seminal 'Next Steps' agency programme are eschewed in contemporary reform discourse, where agencification is instead advocated as centralized, politically proximate and departmentalized governance. This substantial reinterpretation of the arm's‐length concept not only challenges existing claims of continuity in UK administrative policy, but also demonstrates the utility of interpretive methods for exploring longevity in public management more widely.

Executive agencies remain key players in UK government. However, reflecting their declining political profile, little research has emerged on the longer term evolution of this key new public management (NPM) infrastructure. Although widely cited, the 'disaggregation–reaggregation' thesis – which posits that a significant reversal has taken place, following the extensive agencification of the 1990s – has received little systematic evaluation. As political interest in the agency model reawakens under the Coalition Government, it is necessary to understand how the agency landscape has evolved while outside of the limelight. Accordingly, this article examines developments across 1988–2010 along two dimensions: 'structural', relating to organisational boundaries; and 'functional', relating to the department–agency task division. Viewed within this structural–functional framework, considerable merit is found in the disaggregation–reaggregation thesis, although not entirely in the terms in which it has come to be accepted. The limited extent of formal 'de-agencification', particularly, challenges existing reports of the expansion and decline of agencies, and raises important issues for the future research agenda.

AbstractInter‐municipal cooperation is often regarded as an alternative to privatizing local public services. But cooperation and privatization can also be combined into a dual reform package in which several municipalities jointly issue contracts relating to multiple jurisdictions. Evaluation of these mixed cooperation‐privatization reforms rests on disentangling the separate and combined effects of each strategy. This we undertake for the case of solid waste collection in Catalonia, using environmental protection as our focal performance standard. Drawing on two waves of data (for 2000 and 2019) for 186 municipalities that together use all four combinations of public, private, single and cooperative service delivery, we show that superior environmental performance was initially confined to conventional cooperations involving only public production. But latterly, any form of cooperation, using public or private production, resulted in significant gains. This reinforces the need for evaluators to isolate the "active ingredient" in composite reforms.

AbstractThe Public Accounts Committee is the oldest and, reputedly, most influential oversight committee in the British parliament. Since 2012, the government has published an unprecedented volume of data explaining its actions in response to the PAC's inquiries. By tracking all 615 of the Committee's recommendations from 2010 to 2012 across the first 14 of these 'progress reports', we explore how effectively this novel reporting mechanism serves to inform parliament about the executive's responsiveness to scrutiny. We find the reports to yield rich data on the fate of many individual recommendations, but only limited information on the overall timeliness and quality of implementation. Flexibilities and inconsistencies in reporting style also make the arrangements vulnerable to gaming. We identify potential improvements and research opportunities.