Suchergebnisse

Public sector reform, public management and public governance have become crucial issues since the financial crisis in 2008, but they have been on national as well as global policy agendas for at least fifty years. The OECD has been key to the development of these agendas, but its role and impact have never been explored closely. In this book, Leslie Pal examines the role of the OECD and of global policy networks around public sector reform. Based on extensive interviews and internal documents, the book shows how public management emerged as a policy field within the OECD, explores the tools that the organization uses to achieve its ends, and provides an analysis of what 'good governance' means to the OECD, and hence a large part of the world. It provides one of the closest analyses of how an international governmental organization actually works, and how it contributes toa web of global governance.

Leslie Pal explores a phenomenon unique to Canadian politics - the direct funding of advocacy groups by the government - and makes a significant contribution to the debate on the role of the state in shaping society. Focusing on groups concerned with the official languages, multiculturalism, and women's issues, he argues that funding was not neutral but was driven by state interests, and particularly by a national unity agenda.

In reviewing the history of Canadian UI, Pal shows that while capital and labour had substantial disagreements over policy, their representations to state officials rarely had any decisive impact on policy development. The author suggests that bureaucratic forces, including organizational ideology and inter-agency conflict, provide a much richer basis for understanding UI policy evolution. The actuarial ideology of the Commission explains the conservative dynamic in UI development, while bureaucratic rivalry, which culminated in victory by the Department of Labour, explains the expansionary thrust, particularly the addition of social welfare aspects. In his discussion of federalism Pal shows that intergovernmental bargaining has had a surprising effect: by the mid-1970s representations from the provinces counted for as much as, if not more than, those from employers and employees. Analysis of UI thus favours state-centred explanations over society-centred ones and suggests that we have overestimated the degree to which government simply responds to external pressures in making policy. Autonomous and distinct forces within the state also greatly effect policy evolution.

Abstract
The delegitimization of policy advice has generated a defensive response that combines an assertion of the superior scientific character of expertise with a forthright affirmation of social and political values. This more value-driven discourse of policy expertise is examined with the case study of the Global Solutions Summit/World Policy Forum, launched in 2017 to support the Think20 network of global policy advisors supporting the G20 meetings under the German presidency. The Global Solutions Summit has evolved into a more policy-wonkish version of the World Economic Forum held annually in Davos and now is a switching point of global policy advice for the G7 as well. Through participant observation and an analysis of the proceedings of the annual summits since 2017, the article shows a distinctive configuration of normatively framed policy advice designed to overcome the social and political pathologies that have been the foundation of populist critiques of policy expertise.

Lindblom's 1959 article on incrementalism is one of the most cited works in social science.1 This article examines and probes five of the theory's basic, underlying assumptions in light of current empirical and theoretical approaches. The five assumptions are: (1) the limited nature of rationality and the weak powers of human cognition, (2) the emphasis on practical reason and applied knowledge, (3) partisan mutual adjustment conceived as interactions and conflicts among singular, distinct, and disconnected entities, (4) policy decisions made incrementally can be remediated and reversed, and (5) the United States political system is taken as the model for incremental politics. In our assessment, incrementalism holds up quite well with more recent thinking on public policy process with respect to the first and second assumptions. The third assumption has been confronted by new work on networks. The fourth has been challenged by theories on path dependency. The fifth assumption betrayed a national focus and strong value consensus – globalization and "culture wars" have rendered it untenable. The article therefore gives only qualified support for the continued relevance of incrementalism as a theory of the policy process.

The last two decades have seen substantial public sector reforms efforts around the world. A leading global actor in these reform efforts has been the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The OECD launched its governance efforts in 1990, and published its path-breaking review of public sector reform in 1995 (Governance in Transition). The paper examines the OECD's role as a key actor in a global public policy network devoted to public sector reform, and how it has contributed to changes in state structures and administration. It re views the OECD's key publications, examines how the organization developed its public sector reform agenda, and assesses its relationships with and influence over national governments. The methodology consists of a review of documents and publications, as well as interviews. The key findings are that the OECD is a key node in what is emerging as a global network around public sector reform. ; U zadnja dva desetljeća uloženi su značajni napori za reformom javnog sektora zemalja širom svijeta. OECD je bio veliki zagovornik takvih reformi. On je 1990-ih započeo s takvim reformskim naporima te je 1995. objavio prijelomni pregled reformi javnog sektora. U radu se istražuje uloga OECD-a kao ključnog aktera u globalnoj mreži posvećenoj reformama javnog sektora, kao i pitanje kako je on pridonio promjenama u strukturama države i javne uprave. Analiziraju se ključne publikacije OECD-a, način na koji je ta organizacija razvila svoje reformske upute, kao i njezini odnosi s nacionalnim vlastima i utjecaj na njih. Metodološki, analiziraju se dokumenti i publikacije OECD-a, a dio podataka prikupljen je intervjuima. Glavni nalaz je da je OECD ključno čvorište u nastajućoj globalnoj mreži aktera posvećenih reformi javnog sektora.