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ABSTRACT
This article outlines three major trends in the process of state reform in Latin American countries. A first section discusses the theoretical fit between policy and management, and identifies some empirical examples that give way to various reform choices. It also examines the impact of paradigm change on public management reforms. The second part of the article proposes a broad historical periodization of state reform initiatives that identifies three distinct stages along the region´s experience. A concluding section underlies the pervasive impact of the digital revolution on the recent reform policies and its possible effects upon the administrative culture.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Ramos and Peters (Citation2021) agree: “In any attempt to address politics or governing in a whole continent, generalization is difficult if not impossible”.
2. Apter´s classic formula, “equity of allocation equals orderly choice”, is another way of looking at the central issues of the state agenda (Apter, Citation1971).
3. Oszlak and Gantman (Citation2007) came to this conclusion after reviewing an extensive literature and measuring the values of these three variables in 124 countries.
4. Although governance, development and distributive equity respectively emphasize political, economic and social aspects, they do not have a strict correspondence with these other classification criteria.
5. Lawrence, P.R. and Lorsch, J.W. (1967). Differentiation and Integration in Complex Organizations Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 1, June, pp. 1-47.
6. In fact, all of these policies were tried in Argentina under different governments.
7. Despite the critical review of Thompson´s classic work by Hargadon et al. (Citation2003), we find these three organizational levels as still very useful for classifying different types of reform efforts, as we shall see below.
8. The concept of “organization” should be interpreted widely to refer to the set of institutions that is usually required to produce certain outputs, on the basis of complex horizontal and vertical coordination relationships.
9. Among the most well-known paradigms that appeared during the past half-century, we should mention New Public Administration, New Public Management, Reinventing Government, Good Governance, Electronic Government, Open Government, Public Service Approach, and so on.
10. Between 1990 and 2004, the average yearly growth of per capita GDP was just 0.9, real salaries decreased and poverty reached new highs.
11. Lora (Citation2007) agrees: “unlike most of the first-generation economic reforms, which eliminated or simplified state intervention, institutional reforms are by their nature more complex, more uncertain, and more difficult to implement.”
12. A similar point is raised in Peters et al. (Citation2021). But quite in line with this classification, an earlier study (CLAD, Citation2010) had already pointed out that the Latin American state reform agenda within the previous 15 years included five major themes: democratization of public management, professionalization of the civil service, new management technologies (electronic government), management for development results and governance mechanisms.
13. Widely considered as an exogenously induced reform model, recent evidence persuasively demonstrates, however, that a network of Latin American experts formed in the 60´s and 70´s, initiated and developed these systems before, during and after the 90’s (Schweinheim, Citation2003).
14. If judged in terms of results, this proposition may be contended by observing that “first generation” reforms succeeded in massively privatizing public enterprises, decentralizing services or deregulating all sorts of activities. But the final outcomes and impacts of these policies contributed to the “disappointing” results of these “outward” reforms. Lora (Citation2007) considers that reforms during this third stage amount to a “silent revolution”.
15. In fact, a recent IDB Report indicates that government transactions in the region are still difficult. They are slow, prone to corruption, and end up excluding the people who are already worst off. Many of them are still carried out in person and on paper. Citizens waste time going from office to office and, in many cases, end up paying bribes to civil servants. Businesses lose productive hours and, with them, their competitiveness. The state gets bogged down in complex manual transactions and fails to connect public policies with target beneficiaries. But while it takes an average of 2.2 hours in Chile to complete a government transaction, the equivalent in Bolivia is 11.3 hours.