ABSTRACT
It has been argued in many circles that in response to the increased complexity of society and the international environment, governments in many countries in Western Europe, in particular, have turned away from the use of a relatively limited number of traditional, more or less command-and-control oriented “substantive” policy tools such as public enterprises, regulatory agencies, subsidies and exhortation, and begun to increasingly use their organizational resources to support a different set of “procedural” tools (Peters 1998; Klijn and Teisman 1991) such as government reorganizations, reviews and inquiries, government-NGO partnerships and stakeholder consultations. However the chapter shows these trends are much less dramatic than often suggested by the network-globalization hypothesis and suggest a much greater resilience and continued high capacity of the state in the face of these two trends than is often alleged (Aucoin 1997; Lynn 2001; Hill and Lynn 2004). It suggests, among other things, that implementation styles are more difficult to change in many sectors than is often argued and provides additional evidence for the contention that previously existing governance modes condition the kinds of tool choices made if they are to survive the formulation process and be implemented in practice.
