ABSTRACT
New Public Management (NPM) emerged as an important reform wave in Anglo-American ountries in the early 1980s, subsequently spreading around the world as the received wisdom to a wide range of political-administrative systems (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011). NPM contains major elements from management theory and new institutional economic theory and advocates a combination of structural devolution, efficiency, market orientation, and consumer orientation (Boston et al. 1996). A variety of factors, including the failure to produce efficiency gains, an undermining of political control, concerns about coordination, and worries about the ability of public administrations to deal with threats such as terrorism and pandemics and with the global financial and environmental crises, led some of the trail-blazing NPM countries to embark on another set of public reforms in the late 1990s, characterized variously as post-NPM, whole-of-government, or joined-up government (Christensen and Lægreid 2007a; Gregory 2003; Halligan 2006). Post-NPM reforms did not replace NPM reforms, but instead partly merged with them and partly modified them in what can be described as a layering process (Mahoney and Thelen 2010). This layering process represents not only a complex and hybrid development, combining two reform waves, but also a cross between global reform ideas, like NPM and post-NPM, and national/local considerations, for which the term ‘glocalization’ may be used (Robertson 1995). We might also characterize this as a combination of de-contextualization and contextualization (Røvik 2002). These reform processes and the dynamic relationship between them involve many central aspects of government, but here we will focus on the balance between central political control and institutional autonomy (Christensen and Lægreid 2007b).
