ABSTRACT
During the 1980s and 1990s, some states, such as the UK, New Zealand and Sweden, underwent extensive, radical reforms in their state administration – their structure, their systems of control and the way they accounted for their activities. In short, the states were given new administrative forms – a phenomenon that was characterised early as a ‘new public management’ (Hood 1991). Some of these new forms became popular even in less active states (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2004).
