ABSTRACT

Introduction Since the end of the civil war in 1989, Lebanon, a small country on the eastern side of the Mediterranean, engaged in a comprehensive reform of public administration. The reform aimed to instill values of good governance in public administration through the introduction of managerialism, an international best practice prevailing in the 1990s. Beyond managerialism as a technocratic, apolitical model, however, administrative reform was a complex multi-actor and multi-level process. This chapter examines the dynamics of Lebanon’s post-war administrative reform in the framework of this book’s theme on the gap between the technocratic definition of governance and the politics of its implementation.