Within the public sphere, the most important reform movement of the
last quarter of a century has been the New Public Management (NPM). It is of particular
interest in the post-autistic economics (pae) context because NPM largely rests on the
same ideology and epistemology as standard textbook economics (STE) is based (for my take
on this, see Drechsler 2000), and it has had, and still has, similar results. Already more
on the defensive within public administration (PA) than STE is within economics, NPM also
shows that such major paradigm shifts in theory and policy may actually happen. In
addition, it occasionally appears that pae-oriented scholars have overlooked the fact that
some features in public management reform, state organization, and the economic
interpretation of state functions that they advocate – from "Good
Governance" to "efficiency" as a goal in itself – actually belong into
the "other camp" and by and large have a disastrous effect on
"industrial" and "developing" countries alike, although the
consequences for the latter are much more severe.
NPM is the transfer of business and market principles and management
techniques from the private into the public sector, symbiotic with and based on a
neo-liberal understanding of state and economy. The goal, therefore, is a slim, reduced,
minimal state in which any public activity is decreased and, if at all, exercised
according to business principles of efficiency. NPM is based on the understanding that all
human behavior is always motivated by self-interest and, specifically, profit
maximization. Epistemologically, it shares with STE the quantification myth, i.e. that
everything relevant can be quantified; qualitative judgments are not necessary. It is
popularly denoted by concepts such as project management, flat hierarchies, customer
orientation, abolition of career civil service, depolitization, total quality management,
and contracting-out.
NPM comes from Anglo-America, and it was strongly pushed by most of the
International Finance Institutions (IFI’s) such as the World Bank and the IMF. It
originates from the 1980s with their dominance of neo-liberal governments (especially
Thatcher and Reagan) and the perceived crisis of the Welfare state, but it came to full
fruition in the early 1990s. NPM is part of the neo-classical economic imperialism within
the social sciences, i.e. the tendency to approach all questions with neo-classical
economic methods.
In advanced PA scholarship itself, especially – but not only
– in Europe, NPM is on the defensive by now, if taken as a world view (i.e. an
ideology), rather than as one of several useful perspectives for PA reform (i.e. part of a
pluralistic approach). The question here is more whether one favors post-NPM (anti-NPM) or
post-post-NPM, Weberian-based PA, the latter being the most advanced, and the most
sophisticated, and now called the Neo-Weberian State (NWS). What was an option ten years
ago is not an option anymore today. I would say that in PA
- in 1995, it was still possible to believe in NPM, although there were the first strong
and substantial critiques
- in 2000, NPM was on the defensive, as empirical findings spoke clearly against it as
well
- in 2005, NPM is not a viable concept anymore
Yet, in many areas, both of scholarship and of the world, as well as in
policy, NPM is very alive and very much kicking. It is, therefore, necessary to look both
at the concept itself and at the reasons for its success.
Basic Problems of the New Public Management
As important and, though more rarely, as successful as several
NPM-inspired reforms of the public sector might have been and still may be, what one
notices first when looking at the public and private spheres is the difference, not the
similarity. The state is denoted primarily by its monopoly of power, force, and coercion
on one side and its orientation towards the public good, the commonwealth or the ben
commune, on the other; the business world legitimately focuses on profit maximization.
NPM, however, as it has been said, "harvests" the public; it sees no difference
between public and private interest. The use of business techniques within the public
sphere thus confuses the most basic requirements of any state, particularly of a
Democracy, with a liability: regularity, transparency, and due process are simply much
more important than low costs and speed.
This low-cost and speed imperative is directly related to the main
battle-cry of NPM, efficiency, which is invariably defined much too narrowly in NPM –
perhaps, this misunderstanding is even defining, and systemic to, NPM. Efficiency is a
relative concept that is based on context and appropriateness: it is efficient to achieve
a certain effect with a minimum of resources. But this effect, in the case of the state,
is denoted by several auxiliary but necessary conditions such as the ones mentioned above;
it is never profit maximization. (It could be argued that most activities carried out by
the public sector are there precisely because no direct profit or gain can be made.) If
you go for savings and neglect context and even the actual goals, you will not be
efficient but rather the ultimate wastrel. (Not for nothing are wastrels and misers
considered to be the same type of sinner in Dante’s Hell.) This misunderstanding of
the concept of efficiency and the depolitization that comes with it are typical symptoms
of technocracy and bureaucracy, which NPM professes to oppose but which, as Eugenie Samier
has demonstrated, it rather fosters. (2001) As a result of this insight, we are currently
witnessing a fundamental shift of emphasis in PA discourse, and even practice, from
efficiency to effectiveness, i.e. in effect from getting something done cheaply to
actually accomplishing one’s goal.
But even by the standards of business efficiency, NPM cannot be said to
be successful from today’s perspective. We have no empirical evidence that NPM
reforms have led to any productivity increase or welfare maximization. At best, one may
say that "Several years of attempts and experiences of public management reforms in
western Europe and other OECD countries give evidence of relative failure rather than
success." (van Mierlo 1998: 401; see Manning 2000, section "Did it work?"
on global evidence along these lines – this is the web-page of the World Bank!) The
catchword promises have empirically not been delivered – flat hierarchies are a
matter of appropriateness and depend in their suitability entirely on context; taking the
citizen merely as customer takes away her participatory rights and duties and thus hollows
out the state; the abolition of career civil service will usually let administrative
capacity erode; depolitization – and thus de-democratization – leads to the
return of the imperial bureaucrat (in its worst sense, disguised as the entrepreneurial
bureaucrat – same power, less responsibility); and contracting-out has proven to be
excessively expensive and often infringing on core competences of the state as well as on
the most basic standards of equity. Total Quality Management is actually not necessarily
an NPM concept; it can be just as well used elsewhere and was actually always understood
to be part of a well-working PA; project management may frequently work, but as a
principle and in the long run, it is more expensive and less responsible than the
traditional approach.
The economics-based problems of NPM were in fact quite predictable,
partially because it is not based on genuine economics, so that, for example,
quasi-markets were created within administrative organizations in order to create market
behavior. However, as any market theorist knows, such behavior can only develop in genuine
and not in quasi- (i.e. pseudo-) markets. For example, if there are product monopolies and
no free consumer choice – if one administrative institution is supposed to have a
contract with a predetermined other, regarding a product or service that cannot be
delivered by anyone else, for instance –, then there cannot be a free market either,
nor its beneficial consequences. (See König 2001: 6-7)
Likewise, it would be difficult to argue today against the insight that
humans do not maximize profits but, at best, benefits as perceived. (See only Falk 2003)
They are not, and cannot act, the same everywhere; economic performance is
culture-specific – the homo oeconomicus does not exist. Yet, NPM reforms
"represent assumptions that one style of managing (whether in the public or the
private sector) is best, and indeed is the only acceptable way." (Peters 2001: 164)
The similarities of New Public Management and standard textbook economics are particularly
pronounced here.
The Role of the State
On the other hand, the state is neither dead nor incapacitated, as is usually implied in
NPM-prone ideology, and as is perhaps more visible now than it was a decade or two ago.
(Most readers will be familiar with the arguments in favor of the state, but for the
argument’s sake, I will describe them here, with a specific public administration
perspective.) Globalization is a challenge to state structures – widely understood as
structured human consociation in space and time, rather than in a legalistic or in a
specific sense such as the modern European nation state –; it does not make them
obsolete, but rather more necessary than they ever were, because some form of institution
must structure and make habitable the environment created as a "spill-over
effect" by Globalization.
But even if we take a more narrow definition of state, if the 1990s
have shown anything, it is the remarkable resilience of the state. Indeed, since 1989, we
have more states than ever; the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, as well as of
Czechoslovakia, are striking European examples. What one thus has seen, at least in part,
is the re-emergence not only of statehood, but even of the nation state.
Moreover, the EU, paradigm for times to come in all of Europe, is a
state structure, constitutional crisis or not. There is a complex discussion about the
legal "stateness" of the EU, but it certainly is a state if one uses a
functional definition, which is what matters for PA and which is what is done here. What
is more, the EU is a Continental "state", organized and working along
Continental, viz. French and/or German, lines.
Further, the state is not only as capable to act and as necessary as it
ever was – the tools that challenge it, such as the new ways of communication and
organization, have at the same time immensely increased its powers. Most importantly, key
economic and development issues of today, sustainability, dynamic development, innovation,
and technology, actually foster the role of the state in economic growth. (See Reinert
1999) The Schumpeterian, innovation-based world cannot be imagined without a capable state
actor. If we follow Carlota Perez’ theory of Techno-Economic Paradigm Shifts (2002),
then we are now entering the synergy phase of the Information and Communication Technology
(ICT) surge – or Kondratieff –, which requires a particularly active state with
strong administrative capacity.
And after all, these insights form much of the basis of the EU’s
main development program, the Lisbon Stragegy, which puts innovation as the basis of
national and EU development, thus absolutely requiring a capable state. Even in light of
the current crisis of the EU, as well as of the problems of the Lisbon Strategy’s
implementation and ongoing dilution, the centrality of this agenda remains undiminished.
One may even say that since it was primarily the fears of the effects of Globalization
(and the functional elite’s disregard of those fears) which caused the crisis, the
one strategy that addresses the causes and potential sources of those problems is more
important than ever. And there is not much of an alternative anywhere – as Ha-Joon
Chang says, the "plain fact is that the Neo-Liberal ‘policy reforms’ have
not been able to deliver their central promise – namely, economic growth," and
that the "developing" countries grew better under the "bad" policies
of 1960-1980. (2002: 128)
Fashion and Rhetoric
Why, then, the overwhelming dominance of NPM until a few years ago? Naturally, NPM is more
than a fashion; as already stated, it is a genuine ideology, or based on one, the
neo-liberal creed, in the sense that ideologies are reduced perspectives of reality,
reified by their believers because they cannot handle the complexity of the latter. But
the power of fashion in itself should never be underestimated, and as has been rightly
said,
Public sector reform is in fashion and no self-respecting government
can afford to ignore it. How a fashion is established is one of the most intriguing
questions of public policy. Part of the answer lies in policy diffusion brought about by
the activities of international officials (whose zeal for administrative reform
mysteriously stops short at the door of their own organizations), by meetings of public
administrators, academics, and the so-called policy entrepreneurs. (Wright 1997: 8)
Indeed,
the international vocabulary of management reforms carries a definite
normative ‘charge’. Within the relevant community of discourse … the
assumption has grown that particular things – performance management, TQM … and
so on – are progress. To be progressive one has to be seen to be doing things
to which these particular labels can be stuck. … Suggesting, for example, that an
existing or new activity would be better placed within an enlarged central ministry or as
a direct, state-provided service, becomes an uphill struggle – it is ‘beyond the
pale’, not the done thing. (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2004: 201)
In PA, the problem is that on the one hand, experts are hired both on
the basis of fashionability and of their capacity to suggest change, not to say that
things should remain as they are – the main reason why international consultancy has
gone strongly for NPM. On the other hand, for politicians it is very practical to turn to
experts, because it alleviates them from the pressure to, first, find out what the proper
decision should be and, second, to implement possibly unpopular measures. Under the cloak
of efficiency, NPM specifically returns decision-making to the allegedly expert
bureaucrat, therefore removing political control, and that also means political
responsibility, from the political sphere. "It may be convenient for politicians to
hide behind the smoke-screen of managerial decision and autonomy, but this hardly adds to
the democratic quality of decision-making." (Wright 1997: 11)
For many a politician, the safest and most attractive-looking move is
to follow fashion – and the weaker, the more insecure he is, the more this is the
case. ("A statesman is a politician who uses expert advice but does not depend on
it.") These are "the symbolic and legitimacy benefits of management
reform. For politicians, these benefits consist partly of being seen to be doing
something. … They may gain in reputation – indeed may make a career out of
– ‘modernizing’ and ‘streamlining’ activities." (Pollitt and
Bouckaert 2004: 6) Rhetoric is what satisfies the demand; it does not mean that one has to
do anything. The problem is only that at some point, in the not too long run, the demise
of the state will progress too far, the public will realize that there are delivery
problems, and not only public trust will erode even more.
The Weberian Model
The counter-model to NPM, indeed its bête noire, is what is
called "Weberian PA". This label is highly problematic, as NPM presents a
caricature of it and thus builds up a paper tiger. Its namesake himself, the great German
sociologist and economist Max Weber, did not even particularly like the model of PA so
described; he only saw it, rightly, as the most rational and efficient one for his time,
and the one towards which PA would tend. That this is by and large still the case 80 years
later if one looks at the model rather than at its caricature is something that would have
probably surprised him quite a bit. (He also described, almost clairvoyantly, the NPM
system, which for him was the most dehumanizing of organizational forms; see Samier 2001.)
Apart from the caricature, for Weber, the most efficient PA was a set
of offices in which appointed civil servants operated under the principles of merit
selection (impersonality), hierarchy, the division of labor, exclusive employment, career
advancement, the written form, and legality. This increase of rationality – his key
term – would increase speed, scope, predictability, and cost-effectiveness, as needed
for an advanced mass-industrial society. (Weber 1922: esp. 124-130) And although we are
well beyond such a world – and in what we may or may not call the "network
society" –, these, or almost all of these, are not obsolete criteria, but in
fact, they are exceedingly close to most of the recent large-scale principles of PA reform
agendas worldwide, including the European Administrative Space’s main standards of
reliability and predictability, openness and transparency, accountability, and efficiency
and effectiveness (SIGMA 1998: 8-14). Most certainly, they are closer to responsible PA
reform than the catchwords of NPM.
Regarding the specter of the ancien régime of traditional
bureaucracy, part of almost every era’s and country’s folklore as it seems, it
is important to realize that in general, "publicness / public sphere – politics
– administration … will remain, in spite of all modernization, a culturally-founded
tension. Thus, the critique of bureaucracy will remain permanent as well." (Laux
1993: 345) Yet, the alternative to bad PA – what "bureaucracy" is in common
parlance – is not the abolition of PA, but good PA, one that works for state,
society, and economy alike.
"The direct correlation between the capabilities of government and
countries’ development … is based on vast historical evidence. The most powerful
nations’ strength and ability to create and distribute wealth cannot be explained
without acknowledging the central role of public institutions." (Echebarría 2001: 1)
And this is not limited to the "First World". Ever since the study by Evans and
Rauch of 35 "developing" countries (1999), we also know empirically that
Weberianism, especially the Merit principle, "significantly enhance[s] prospects of
economic growth." (748) And these findings have been backed up most recently by the
fact that Weberianism has worked very well indeed in the transition states of Central and
Eastern Europe, in that the ranking of their economic and social success, especially if
one looks at Hungary, is not by accident very similar to that of their Weberianness.
As the very last argument, doesn’t information and communication
technology (ICT) change this? In a world of e-governance, isn’t Weberianism, new or
old, hopelessly obsolete? As all research on the subject matter has shown – although
this is perhaps the most fashionable field of research, and thus the one with the worst
overall results –, it is not. The written form does not become less real if it takes
the form of an e-mail or a website rather than of a letter or physical ledger; in a way,
perhaps more so, because it is more accessible. Hierarchy and subsidiarity, control and
information flow, but also standardization and the division of labor were never as easy as
with ICT. The hierarchy issue is the one that may be debated, but it, too, has several
sides, including that it may be communication and not layers that truly matters in a
network society, and that the principle of subsidiarity actually requires a hierarchical
organizational set-up. (See Drechsler 2005b)
The Neo-Weberian State
And yet, of course there are legitimate problems with many a bureaucracy, there are still
very self-centered administrations that hinder economic development rather than fostering
it, there is the frequent legalistic domination of PA – and of lawyers within the
civil service – that is preventing a problem-solving approach, and there are
organizational changes and other shifts in public life that distance us from the Twenties.
But the Weberian system has actually (been) adapted to them very successfully, as
Continental PA always has. Both to characterize these and to denote a post-post-NPM,
synergetic system of PA, perhaps a specifically European one that is not a NPM
"laggard" but the opposite, Pollitt and Bouckaert, in what is now the standard
book on Public Management Reform, have coined in the second edition (September
2004) the term "Neo-Weberian State" or NWS. I think it is wise to accept that
label for the sake of clarity and uniformity, even if I do not agree completely with all
details (for my earlier thought on the matter, see Drechsler 2003, 2005a, upon which much
of the current article is based), and even though the Weber label might not be
"cool" enough for the consultancy circuit. The respective outline of the NWS
will be quoted here in full, rather than paraphrased:
‘Weberian’ Elements
- Reaffirmation of the role of the state as the main facilitator of solutions to the new
problems of globalization, technological change, shifting demographics, and environmental
threat
- Reaffirmation of the role of representative democracy (central, regional, and local) as
the legitimating element within the state apparatus
- Reaffirmation of administrative law – suitably modernized – in preserving the
basic principles pertaining to the citizen-state relationship, including equality before
the law, legal security, and the availability of specialized legal scrutiny of state
actions
- Preservation of the idea of a public service with a distinct status, culture, and terms
and conditions
‘Neo’ Elements
- Shift from an internal orientation towards bureaucratic rules towards an external
orientation towards meeting citizens’ needs and wishes. The primary route to
achieving this is not the employment of market mechanisms (although they may occasionally
come in handy) but the creation of a professional culture of quality and service
- Supplementation (not replacement) of the role of representative democracy by a range of
devices for consultation with, and direct representation of, citizens’ views (…)
- In the management of resources within government, a modernization of the relevant laws
to encourage a greater orientation on the achievements of results rather than merely the
correct following of procedure. This is expressed partly in a shift from ex ante to
ex post controls, but not a complete abandonment of the former
- A professionalization of the public service, so that the ‘bureaucrat’ becomes
not simply an expert in the law relevant to his or her sphere of activity, but also a
professional manager, oriented to meeting the needs of his or her citizen/users (99-100)
What I would propose, quite in Weber’s sense, is that this is not
only a classification or analytical model, it is also once again a normative one: An
administrative system generally works better, of course depending on time and place, the
closer it is to the NWS. We have seen why, I think.
Good Governance: The Back Door
This being realized, it is now important to beware of the
"thief that cometh in the night." NPM may be in demise – but what about the
currently ever-so-popular concept of Good Governance? Arising, once again, in the 1980s in
the International Finance Institutions (IFI’s), this was a positive extrapolation
from the negative experiences that these organizations had had in the
"developing" countries by observing that financial aid seemed to have had no
effects. From this, they deduced an absence of institutions, principles, and structures,
the entirety of which was called "Governance" – and "Good
Governance" when they worked well. A good idea as such – but the provenience,
the same as with NPM, may make us halt, and rightly. (See Doornbos 2004)
By and large, the term "Governance" has by now become a more
or less neutral concept that focuses on steering mechanisms in a certain political unit,
emphasizing the interaction of state (First), business (Second), and society (Third
Sector) players. "Good Governance", on the other hand, is not at all neutral;
rather, it is a normative concept that again embodies a strong value judgment in favor of
the retrenchment of the state, which is supposed to yield to Business standards,
principles, and – not least – interests. In that sense, "Good
Governance" privileges the Second over the First Sector, even in First Sector areas.
The Hatter … had taken his watch out of his pocket, and was
looking at it uneasily…. "Two days wrong! … I told you butter wouldn’t
suit the works!" he added, looking angrily at the March Hare.
"It was the best butter," the March Hare meekly
replied. (Carroll 1865)
As this implies,
‘Good’, like its superlative, is often a relative term,
meaning ‘good of its kind’, or for its standard purpose, whatever that may be.
Failing such a reference, the judgment of goodness is indeterminate, and cannot be applied
or debated without risk of confusion. [Thus, the March Hare’s statement is right in
that the butter was best] as butter goes, no doubt, but not as a mechanical lubricant.
(Heath1974: 68 N5)
The same is true, of course, regarding the "Good" in
"Good Governance": It is not good in any general or generalizable sense, but as
pertains to what most of the IFI’s in the 1980s thought was good – a perspective
that today is probably not shared by many experts anymore, including those within the
IFI’s themselves. And indeed, what the respective IFI’s held to be good in the
1980s was neo-liberalism, the Free Market as a world view, and thus the retrenchment of
the state.
Within the state sector itself, many of the principles of "Good
Governance" are therefore identical with NPM. And while a unitary definition of the
concept never existed, not even within the respective individual IFI’s,
"good" principles usually encompassed such concepts as transparency, efficiency,
participation, responsibility, and market economy, state of law, democracy, and justice.
Many of them are indubitably "good" as such, but all of them – except the
last one, which is the most abstract – are heavily context-dependent, hinging not
only on definition and interpretation, but also on time and place. Critics from the
"developing" countries thus often saw and see the demand for "Good
Governance" as a form of Neo-Colonialist Imperialism and as part of negative
Globalization, since it demands the creation of institutions and structures before economic
development, while all wealthy countries of the "West" established them only
afterwards.
Inspired by, but in the end independently from, the development
discourse, the terms "Governance" and – to a lesser, but still significant
degree – "Good Governance" soon traveled into the parlance of general
social science and policy discussions. The problem is that the underlying ideology has not
fully been realized, and that "Good Governance" is often still thought to be
good governance, even by otherwise quite sophisticated Third Sector representatives,
especially from activist NGO’s, who view the concept as one that integrates them into
First Sector processes. But no good governance, and no NGO participation either, is
possible without a well-working government to begin with – and that means, among
other things, no weakening of state capacity, and no NPM.
Intellectual Post-Mortem
Actually, for a post-mortem of New Public Management (NPM), it may
seem a bit early, seeing in how many places one still can get away with it. But in a very
classical sense, the head of the movement – to avoid a more rhetorical metaphor from
the animal kingdom – seems to have been cut off, or at least to have disappeared. In
other words, it has become quite rare during the last five years, and is becoming rarer
still, to see articles in the very top journals, or essays and keynote addresses by the
very top PA scholars – especially in Europe, but also in the United States –,
based on, or implicitly assuming the validity, of NPM.
In that sense, it is legitimate to speak of the demise of NPM, and to
already investigate what stopped it – all the more interesting because of the lessons
this may present for standard textbook economics (STE). Because after all, NPM was a
formidable, genuine paradigm, backed by the self-logic of the profession, the mightiest
donors, and most importantly, the zeitgeist, the sense of "coolness" it
had, and the catering to prejudices – based as often on genuine grievances as on mere
modern folklore – against bureaucracy and the state as such.
Here one can only speculate for the moment and look at the arguments
against NPM presented before. One of the key reasons why it could not last is that PA is a
very heterogeneous field of scholarship, combining scholars from a variety of backgrounds
and a variety of contemporary disciplines, such as law, political science, and public
administration proper. It was always possible to receive a chair, for instance, even if
one was fundamentally anti-NPM. In addition, the field of PA as a scholarly discipline is
quite small, and the pyramid of scientific prestige is very narrow at the top, so a few
very senior scholars and a few key publications really can make a difference.
A third reason is that there were many PA scholars and practicioners
from pre-NPM times who had never liked the concept, be it for good or – such in the
case of Continental lawyers and old-fashioned bureaucrats – for bad reasons. They
were only too willing to see it go, and they jumped at possibilities, like the
Neo-Weberian State (NWS), to be modern yet not to give up their organizational principles.
(This is why it is so important to see the post-post-NPM quality of the NWS, which is
neither pre-NPM nor post-NPM in the sense of anti-NPM, and to take the
"neo"-elements seriously.)
Before this background, the plain and empiricially observable fact that
NPM simply does not work, even by its own strict set of criteria – that it does not
deliver, that it does not create greater business efficiency, let alone state
effectiveness, that it is expensive, disruptive, and in the end useless, that it is
heavily ideological, overly simple, diametrically opposed to economic growth and
especially development, and politically charged by a specific perspective, that of
neo-liberalism – could have the effect that it toppled as a paradigm.
In comparison to economics, what that means is that what is usually a
negative feature of PA, its interdisciplinarity and thus lack of clear method, and its
small scope, were actually very beneficial in this case, because NPM never created, on the
scholarly level, the kind of institutional rigidity that STE was able to achieve. It was
always much more easy to make a career in PA as an anti-NPM scholar than it is as an
anti-STE scholar in economics. But still, there were and even are a lot of vested
interests in NPM, and thus, it may be encouraging from a Post-Autistic Economics
perspective to see that a prevailing paradigm may fall – mainly, in the end,
"just" because it does not work.
Conclusion
The price paid for NPM reforms anywhere has been high:
the years following the Washington Consensus were dominated by reforms
based on the idea that less government is better, when the correct idea would have been
that better government is better. Privatization, deregulation, decentralization, and
simple cessation and abandonment of entire sectors of activity because of insufficient
resources, marked the reform agenda. … in more than a few cases, the result was a
rickety, disjointed government, defenseless in the face of problems for which it
nevertheless remains responsible to society, and whose credibility has been undermined by
the ideological devaluation that accompanied reform. (Echebarría 2001: 2, on Latin
America)
The key to succesful PA reform, vital as it is not only, but also, for
economic growth, as well as, if you will, for good governance, is to strengthen
administrative capacity and competence of a responsive and responsible state. The optimal
solution for this is a genuine post-post-NPM system, Weberian-based but with the lessons
from NPM learned, which – and this is not less right for being a cliché – puts
the human person into the center of administrative decision-making. And this is a
Neo-Weberian State, with attention to the specific local reality, and with the final goal,
as always, of the Good Life in the Good State. (See Drechsler 2003) PA, especially in
Europe, is on the best way thither. It remains to be seen when, and how, economics can
follow.
Note
