State Reform in France: From Public Service to Public Management?

Abstract

The ‘Reform of the State’ is one of the recurrent themes in French politics, but it is deeply ambivalent. Understanding the causes or independent variables of state reform cannot be dissociated from understanding the core narratives that are used to justify the reform process. In this article we observe processes of state reform since the late 1980s through the lens of two rather different forms of justification that are labelled as public service and state productivity. Though there are some similarities between the two, they represent distinct ways of understanding the nature and scope of the State and the weighting of endogenous and exogenous forces driving the reform process itself. While state reform is a by-product of the public services narrative, it occupies a central role in that of state productivity. Crucially, for the purposes of this article, they take a different stance towards new public management, which is firmly resisted in the public services narrative as foreign to French political and administrative traditions, but forms a central theme in accounts of state productivity.

Key Words:

• Public service
• state reform
• new public management
• Sarkozy
• France

Notes

¹ Interview, budgetary reform division, Finance Ministry, July 2005.

² Around 15 Interviews concerning the LOLF were carried from 2004 to 2006 in the French Finance, Education, Interior, Culture and Defence ministries, as well as in the Court of Accounts.

³ New article 2 of decree no. 2004–374, 29 April 2004, modified by decree no. 2010–146 of 16 February 2010.

⁴ Hence the departments now house the new departmental units of the General Public Finance directorate (decree of 16 June 2009).