Introduction
Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden—the Nordic countries—have often been portrayed as efficient, successful economies and democracies with exemplary welfare and security arrangements, and as model states when it comes to government reform. They rank consistently high in well-known indexes such as the World Bank Governance Indicators and the OECD Better Life Index. In 2013, The Economist portrayed the Nordic countries as the “next supermodels” of public sector reform, avoiding both the economic sclerosis of Southern Europe and the extreme inequality of the United States. With his metaphor of “getting to Denmark,” Fukuyama (2014) suggested that the world should look to the Nordic countries in order to build prosperous, well-governed, and liberal democracies. In his view, the Nordic combination of a strong state, well-functioning rule of law, and responsible democracy is a useful recipe for good government.
Since the 1990s, more attention has been paid to the importance of governance capacity, the quality of government, and a well-performing administrative apparatus in a bid to understand why some countries are more successful than others in looking after their citizens’ welfare and ensuring a high standard of living (Holmberg and Rothstein 2014). This attention to governance capacity and the related “institutional turn” in public administration research has highlighted the need to “bring the bureaucracy back in” (Olsen 2005, 2008). There are many dimensions of good government. In this book, we explore the nature of the government apparatus and its administrative capability, and address the processes, content, and effects of contemporary administrative reforms.
To grasp what “getting to Denmark” actually means, we need to understand the specific features of the Danish and other Nordic political systems. We explore why the Nordic approach to the public sector has apparently been so successful. We ask if and why other European countries should draw lessons for administrative reform from the Nordic countries. The central research question is whether there really is a specific Nordic reform model and what the main similarities and differences are between the five Nordic countries and between the Nordic countries and the rest of Europe. The book seeks to answer the following questions:The book is a coherent volume based on a unique data set and seeks to assess in comparative and quantitative terms the impact of New Public Management (NPM)-style reforms in the Nordic countries. The view is from the top, based on the assessments of administrative executives in nineteen European countries. The book presents results from a survey developed by a European research team in the largest comparative public management research project yet to be conducted in Europe: the COCOPS project—“Coordinating for Cohesion in the Public Sector of the Future,” funded by the European Commission’s Framework Programme 7. We present the first comprehensive analysis and survey results from the Nordic countries. The book also draws on other publications utilizing this unique data set—working papers and country reports from the COCOPS project (see http://www.cocops.eu/work-packages/work-package-3), edited books (Hammerschmid et al. 2016), and book chapters (Hammerschmid et al. 2014; Wegrich and Stimac 2014; Curry et al. 2015). The book project is supported by the Nordic Councils of Ministers.
- What reform trends are relevant in the public administrations of the Nordic countries, and how have they developed, and in what context?
- What institutional features characterize the state authorities in these countries today—are they similar or different?
- What characterizes the role-identity, self-understanding, dominant values, and motivations of Nordic administrative executives?
- What characterizes the processes, trends, and content of reform in the Nordic countries?
- What is the relevance of different types of management instruments, and is there a special Nordic “mix” of such instruments?
- How important are different elements of NPM and post-NPM reforms in these countries, and do they work? What are their perceived effects?
- How did the Nordic countries deal with the financial crisis of 2008?
- Is there a Nordic administrative model and how is the perceived performance?
- How can we explain the differences and similarities?
Public administration scholars have long underlined the need for more quantitative and rigorous comparative research, going beyond single-country, single-organization, and single-reform approaches. Studies of the effects and implications of different reform initiatives are especially scarce. Responding to such concerns, this book offers systematic evidence regarding the context, dynamics, and effects of public administration reform in the Nordic countries, with the goal of producing a comprehensive and systematic picture of public administration after twenty-five years of New Public Management (NPM) reforms.
Within the public management reform literature, the Nordic countries have for a long time been characterized as reluctant reformers or as “modernizers” more than “marketizers” (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011). In this book, we build on earlier work characterizing Nordic administrative policy, especially comparative research on administrative reforms in the Nordic countries conducted in the 1990s (Lægreid and Pedersen 1994, 1999) and later studies that placed the Nordic model in a European perspective (Jacobsson et al. 2004). These suggested that the Nordic model was still thriving and represented a distinct approach to administrative reform. One important question is whether this is still the case today. To what degree has the traditional Nordic model of public administration been supplemented by New Public Management reform initiatives, or what have more recently been labeled post-NPM reform trends? Are the Nordic countries moving towards a Neo-Weberian state model, as claimed by Pollitt and Bouckaert (2011), and if they are, what constitutes such a model? Are they increasingly moving towards a “management bureaucracy” (Hall 2012) or a “managerial state” (Clarke and Newman 1997), or are we seeing increased complexity and hybridity in a layering process of different reform trends (Pollitt 2016)? Have the Nordic countries always taken a Weberian approach?
The main contribution of the book is to analyze the current relevance and processes of administrative reforms and management instruments as well as the perceived impact of reforms on public management. It evaluates the effect of NPM on performance as well as on tendencies towards fragmentation in the public sector and the resulting need for coordination. In addition, it focuses on the impact of the financial crisis on administrative arrangements in the Nordic countries.
Central Concepts and Reform Trajectories: Divergence or Convergence?
Public sector reform indicates change. Not all changes are a result of reforms, however. Think of the changes driven by technological, demographic, or economic factors, for instance. In this book, we see reform as deliberate and intentional change, based on a plan or a program conceived by political or administrative executives. This understanding is narrower than non-intentional change. It also indicates that reforms do not necessarily result in actual change. Some reforms look nice in the world of ideas but run into problems when it comes to adopting or implementing them, and the effects may not be what the reform agent expected. We therefore need to distinguish between ideas and programs, decisions, implementation, and practice. One cannot assume a tight coupling between “talk” and action (Pollitt 2001; March 1986; Brunsson 1989).
There is also an important distinction between administrative reform and policy reform. The first kind focuses on the internal architecture of the administrative apparatus, such as formal structure and changes in procedures. Policy reforms address policy content and measures directed towards users of public sector services more directly. In this book, the focus is on administrative reforms and not on policy reforms or changes in general. Some administrative reforms can be “big bang” reforms, while others are more incremental. “Big bang” reforms are reforms that proclaim a new approach, for example the “modernization program” in Denmark launched in the 1980s (Ejersbo and Greve 2014), the “Big Society” promised by the UK government in 2011, and more recently the “Smarter State” also promoted by the Cameron government.
Both in the literature about public sector reform and in practice, there has been considerable debate about the central concepts and main governance paradigms and how they relate to each other. To put it briefly, concepts such as “marketization” and “managerialism” dominated the discussion in the 1990s and early 2000s (Hood 1991; Christensen and Lægreid 2011a). In his seminal article, Christopher Hood (1991) described how a new type of governance based on market-type mechanisms and use of managerial techniques from the private sector—New Public Management—had shaped and influenced developments in the public administrations of the UK, Australia, and New Zealand in the 1980s. There were similar accounts of reforms in the United States and Canada (Aucoin 1990). In the United States, the term “reinventing government” was used to describe the reforms under Clinton/Gore (Kettle 2000). Pollitt and Bouckaert (2011) picked up on this conceptualization and distinguished between, on the one hand, a core NPM group in Europe represented by the UK known as “the marketizers,” and on the other continental European countries like Belgium, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Italy, and Germany (below the federal level), which they termed the “modernizers.” This group also included the Nordic countries. Compared with the Nordic countries, the Southern European countries were characterized as “latecomers” to NPM reform (Ongaro 2009).
The impression at the time was that a new paradigm—NPM—was threatening the “old public administration” (see also Dunleavy and Hood 1994). The public sector was seen as bureaucratic, inefficient, and not responsive enough to the needs of citizens or business. The relatively simple answer was to break down the perceived monolithic public sector into smaller units and give them missions to pursue, while at the same time supporting them with managerial techniques from the private sector. Executive agencies flourished in the NPM era (Verhoest et al. 2012). A huge source of inspiration at the time were business books like Peters and Waterman’s In Search of Excellence (1982), which related how business processes could be honed and optimized if only organizations were allowed to pursue excellence. As NPM grew stronger, it evolved into what Donald Kettle (2000) termed “the global public management revolution” after he found evidence of marketization and managerialism in a number of countries around the world.
NPM was intended to streamline organizations and make them more mission-oriented. However, in this endeavor the reforms also made the public sector increasingly complex, with more and more organizations pursuing competing missions. Another issue that NPM had not bargained on was the growing occurrence of “wicked problems” (and the problems of attending to these), and it was also ill-equipped to deal with the major issues confronting governments around the world, such as climate change, environment, labor market policy, and healthcare (Head and Alford 2015; Lægreid et al. 2015). Governments were increasingly collaborating with both private sector companies and with non-government organizations (NGOs) in complex network structures. New ways of collaborating to meet common challenges turned networks and partnerships into potentially attractive structures for public sector managers. A number of scholars noted this trend back in the late 1990s, notably Rhodes in his book Understanding Governance (Rhodes 1997) and the Dutch “network scholars” (Kickert et al. 1997). Since the late 1990s, there has been considerable scholarly discussion concerning the extent and importance of such networks. Most scholars agree, however, that such trends have far from eradicated NPM.
Some of the debate on networks and partnerships was summarized by Stephen Osborne (2009, 2011) in his now well-known account of The New Public Governance (NPG). In the wake of this publication, NPG has become a convenient and short-hand abbreviation for many things: networks, partnerships, and collaborative structures and processes. The label has, however, yet to be clearly defined. Klijn and Koppenjan (2015), for example, use the term “governance network perspective” to portray a dominant perspective that is separate f...