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| 1 |
ID:
108384
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| Publication |
2011.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Since the 1990s, local governments in many countries have responded to the crisis of public finances, legitimacy, and a low level of performance with a combination of territorial and functional reforms, and the introduction of management and political reforms. This article focuses on the latter by analyzing new modes of citizen participation in Germany and Japan. It will employ theoretical assumptions from the local governance debate in order to explore the democratic dimensions of local government reforms. The question considered is concerned with the political context for new modes of participation and whether they can offer opportunities for an improvement of local democracy in terms of an increase in legitimacy and political capacity building for citizens. The conclusion will be reached that while we would expect more favorable preconditions in Germany with regard to a positive impact on local democracy, the opposite is the case: a relatively weak tradition of local autonomy and low resources of civil society actors in Japan explains their focus on co-production of services with local governments but at the same time offers greater opportunities for an improvement in local democracy.
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| 2 |
ID:
173750
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From an obscure sector synonymous with mercenaryism, the private military and security industry has grown to become a significant complementing instrument in military operations. This rise has brought with it a considerable attention. Researchers have examined the role of private military and security companies in international relations as well as the history of these companies, and, above all, the legal implications of their use in the place of military organizations. As research progresses, a significant gap has become clear. Only a handful of studies have addressed the complex of issues associated with contractors’ demographics and lived experience. This article sheds some light over this lacuna, examining contractors’ demographics using descriptive statistics from an original data set of American and British contractors who died in Iraq between the years 2003 and 2016. The article augments our understanding of an important population of post-Fordist-contracted workforce, those peripheral workers supplementing military activity in high-risk occupations with uncertain long-term outcomes.
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| 3 |
ID:
160721
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This article analyzes U.S. defense planning, and more specifically the public administration of the third offset strategy. The U.S. defense bureaucracy is rooted in a tradition of rational planning, which assumes a process of consistent, value-maximizing choices within specified constrains. The cornerstone in this tradition is the program budgeting system, once created to connect plans with budgets according to preferences. The third offset strategy, aimed at dealing with the challenges of geopolitical competition and budget austerity, is influenced by a different public administration philosophy described as metagovernance. Metagovernance is a challenge to rational planning as it entails an indirect approach of organizing arenas for networks, in which start-up companies and civilian corporations get to interact with government officials in order to identify incrementally suitable acquisition projects. Furthermore, the article contextualizes this tendency in reflexive modernity, in which rationality breaks down due to the pace of societal changes and planning processes constantly become subject to feedback.
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| 4 |
ID:
185483
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| Summary/Abstract |
The Swedish defence sector has for the last 30 years been subject to expenditure reductions and changed policy as well as management reforms inspired by the ideas of New Public Management (NPM). The purpose of this article is to provide insights into the major management reforms in the defence sector. We describe and discuss the reforms and the implications for the defence sector in the context of expenditure reductions and changed defence policy. We conclude that the earlier management reforms served as instruments to reduce defence expenditure and that the reforms have affected how agencies and the Government interact and how politicians are able to influence the sector. Furthermore, there are indications that these reforms have contributed to the management challenges we can observe in the defence sector today. These challenges correspond to important features of an efficient network. This implies that there might be a need of a different perspective to improve public management of the defence sector.
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| 5 |
ID:
185789
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| Summary/Abstract |
The history of neoliberalism is a messy attempt to turn theory into practice. Neoliberals struggled with their plans to implement flagship policies of monetarism, fiscal prudence, and public sector privatisation. Yet, inflation was still cut, welfare slashed, and the public sector ‘marketised’. Existing literature often interprets this as neoliberalism ‘failing-forward’, achieving policy goals by whatever means necessary and at great social cost. Often overlooked in this narrative is how far actually existing neoliberalism strayed from the original designs of public choice theorists and neoliberal ideologues. By examining the history of the Thatcher government's public sector reforms, we demonstrate how neoliberal plans for marketisation ran aground, forcing neoliberal governments to turn to an approach of Managed Competition that owed more to practices of postwar planning born in Cold War US than neoliberal theory. Rather than impose a market-like transformation of the public sector, Managed Competition systematically empowered top managers and turned governance into a managerial process; two developments that ran directly against core precepts of neoliberalism. The history of these early failures and adjustments provides vital insights into the politics of managerial governance in the neoliberal era.
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| 6 |
ID:
145861
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| Summary/Abstract |
The literature on how European states have adapted to the post-cold war security environment ffocuses invariably on different understandings of military transformation, a process which is seen as inherently different from other forms of organizational change. However, as this paper argues, new management practices, going back to the introduction of so-called New Public Management (NPM) reforms throughout Europe in the 1980s, have eventually penetrated also the last bastion of the old state – the defense sector. Taking a critical approach to the idea of military transformation and existing theories of military change, the paper demonstrates how other international developments have pushed towards what may be seen as a “normalization” of Europe’s defense sectors. This has important implications for how we approach and understand change in contemporary defense organizations.
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| 7 |
ID:
153573
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| Summary/Abstract |
THE REFORM OF STATE-OWNED ENTERPRISES (SOES) HAS BEEN A
leading element of public sector reform since the 1980s. Starting
with the radical actions of Margaret Thatcher’s government in
the United Kingdom, privatization was disseminated across the
world. By 2004, over $1 trillion of SOEs had been privatized.
The privatization stampede represented the ascendancy of neoclassical
economics and the view that governments should get
out of business and leave the invisible hand of the market to
either generate efficiency in often poorly performing enterprises
or simply close them down (World Bank 1995, 1996, 1997).
This neoliberal policy orientation dovetailed with the Washington
Consensus and the spread of New Public Management, both
of which sought leaner, more fiscally disciplined government
that focused on core functions (Turner, Hulme, and McCourt
2015).
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| 8 |
ID:
091958
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| Publication |
2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Developing countries relying on the assistance of donors have become particularly prone to imposed conditions of aid in the form of requirements on specific reform strategies to ensure good governance. Donors or multilateral agencies have taken leading roles in defining good governance. The donors began to impose good governance conditions on provisions of debt relief and new loans or grants in Bangladesh in the 1990s. They widened conditionality to include transparent administration, the protection of human rights and democracy, as well as public sector reform in Bangladesh. The World Bank made issues of corruption a major element in its governance agenda in Bangladesh. Global pressures to cooperate and compete, rising expectations of citizens and the need to reduce public deficits are changing the way Bangladesh needs to be governed.
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| 9 |
ID:
155413
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| Summary/Abstract |
Public services—in the UK and elsewhere—are under considerable pressure, not just from austerity, but also from a variety of social, demographic and technological changes (in effect ‘austerity plus’). In this context, three broad options are open to policy-makers: continue with tried-and-tested approaches while spending less money, which in the UK means a reliance on ‘New Public Management’ (NPM); withdraw completely from certain public services; or develop new approaches to public administration. We argue that all of these approaches have been attempted in recent years, but it is the final option that is most interesting and potentially the most beneficial. In this article, we examine experiments with these new approaches in responding to ‘austerity plus’. In particular, we examine various attempts at ‘collaboration’ in public services and discuss the risks associated with them. We conclude by setting out the extent to which policy-makers have moved beyond NPM and suggesting some of the benefits that this could bring.
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