Public Management in Developing Countries

Abstract

Ten years ago public management in developing countries was reaching the end of a period in which the ‘Washington consensus’ model of a small state was dominant, with downsizing and privatization as its key mechanisms. With reform programmes in disarray and NPM an inadequate replacement, the subsequent decade has been one of ‘reculer pour mieux sauter’, with management dislodged from centre stage by a concern with the domestic and political determinants of reform. We have also seen the return of a poverty agenda, featuring education and health in central roles, to which management specialists have yet to respond fully. This review suggests the need for public management specialists to absorb a political analysis before returning to perennial management concerns.

Key words:

• Corruption
• decentralization
• developing countries
• governance
• NPM
• politics
• public management

Notes

¹ It is worth noting that the scale has been equally dramatic in industrialized countries. Staff retrenchment programmes were carried out between 1987 and 1992 – the height of the downsizing boom – in the public sectors of twenty-two of the twenty-seven member countries of the OECD, making it by some distance their most widespread Human Resource initiative (OECD 1994).

² It is odd that studies in this area going back over many years are always of decentralization rather than centralization, suggesting that the centre has unobtrusive ways of either hanging on to power or clawing it back.