Towards a new world: some inconvenient truths for Anglosphere public administration

Abstract

On the global stage, public management has grown up over the past 30 years as a topic dominated by the ‘Anglosphere’. Now there are reasons to believe that this era is ending. There are three main reasons for this. First, the dominance of Anglosphere ideas and practices was never as complete as it may sometimes have appeared. Second, the effectiveness of typical Anglosphere reforms has been problematic. Recent scholarship indicates that only a modest proportion of such reforms can show evidence of substantial success. Third, other regions of the world are becoming economically and politically more influential and self-confident, and, in some cases, they also have long administrative traditions of their own. Far from being a reason for dismay, this opening-up offers an opportunity for difficult, but potentially very rewarding debates that will need to run across different cultures and administrative traditions.

Keywords

administrative tradition Anglosphere cultures effectiveness public management reform

When I look at the names of those who gave previous Braibant Lectures, how could I fail to be both honoured and flattered to have been invited to give this one? Before I begin the substance of my talk, allow me to honour Guy Braibant, in whose name this annual lecture was founded. I met him a few times, and can honestly say that I fundamentally disagreed with him on a range of important issues! Far more important, though, was the fact that I listened to him and respected him as a powerful intellectual, and as someone who had devoted his career to the public sector and had thought very deeply about it. In a way this phenomenon of mutual respect and curiosity between people from different cultures with different opinions and different mother tongues is a core message of my lecture today.

My theme is a simple one, although what lies behind the surface is complex. My argument will be that, on the global stage, public management has grown up over the past 30 years as, internationally, a predominantly Anglophone field, but that now there are reasons to believe that this era is ending. It is ending in the practitioner world and, less certainly, also in the academic world. (However, I must immediately enter at least one caveat. I am not saying that the wider growth of English as a global language will cease or reverse. That is another issue entirely.) I am talking about the relative prominence of public management ideas and techniques of Anglophone origin. Some political scientists have referred to this ideational location or source as the ‘Anglosphere’, and I will borrow that term (Gamble, 2009; Wilks, 2013). The homelands of the Anglosphere are the UK and the USA, though in matters of public management reform Australia and New Zealand, and to some extent Canada, have also played important parts.

I cannot say whether the relative decline of the Anglosphere version of public management will happen slowly and incrementally or rapidly and dramatically. I cannot say exactly what will replace it. But I can give three main reasons why I think its influence is waining, and that is what I will now attempt to do.

The nature of Anglosphere dominance

First, I must briefly establish the nature of the dominance that I claim is now in decline. In a nutshell, I would say it was founded on the role and control of certain key institutions, that were the sources and carriers of key ideas and practices (Sahlin-Andersson and Engwall, 2002; Saint Martin, 2000). These were, particularly, leading business schools and international management consultancies, intergovernmental bodies such as the OECD, and certain units at the centres of national governments in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and the USA. This network created a process by which: ‘practices are turned into models that are distanced and disconnected from time and space and rendered general’ (Sahlin-Andersson and Engwall, 2002: 25).

As part of this, public sector organizations were increasingly seen not in specific functional and technical terms (an agency for issuing driving licences, a geriatric hospital, etc.) but simply as organizations in general, and therefore entities that were open to the application of the abstract models referred to above. This process of abstraction, de-contextualization and generic modelling is typical of late modernist thinking (Giddens, 1990). In short, management became seen as the answer to an increasingly wide range of organizational and political problems (Pollitt, 1993). In the Anglosphere and its diaspora, better management was increasingly regarded not merely as a set of prescriptions that transcended different sectors and hierarchical levels, but also a set of tools and models which crossed national and cultural boundaries. Generic models and techniques such as NPM, benchmarking, semi-autonomous agencies and Public–Private Partnerships (PPPs) began to break down ideas that national administrations were each special and to some degree unique, and to substitute the idea of a global wave of reform, with some ‘leaders’ (the Anglosphere states) and other ‘laggards’ (such as, say, France or Germany or Japan). Influential intergovernmental organizations like the OECD and the World Bank produced reports which legitimized such ideas, implying more-or-less universal ‘stages’ that needed to be passed through (e.g. OECD, 1995). A number of governments set up central units to promote reforms in the name of efficiency, effectiveness, quality or just modernization. Some national officials – especially in central agencies and units (often quite far from actual operations) – found they could make useful careers out of such reforms. Management consultants and a good number of academics clung to the generic bandwagon, suggesting that certain types of reform were global trends and that traditional bureaucracies had now become severely dysfunctional (e.g. Hughes, 2003: Kettl, 2005; Osborne and Gaebler, 1992).

The appeal of generic, and apparently global, solutions – of ‘universally applicable tools’ (Rovik, 2002: 126) – should not be underestimated. Consultancies can (and do) transmit them around the world, referring to ‘best practice’ and similar concepts. Generic management ideas minimize the need for expensive, time-consuming local research and the struggle to understand the fine detail of local contexts – because basically the best solution is already known. Rather like pre-fabricated buildings, they save time and money as compared with traditional, craft-intensive constructions. Governments can (and do) export their own (alleged) successes to other countries – especially, but not exclusively, to ex-colonies or countries which are politically or economically dependent on them. Both prestige and commercial gain can be involved in such exports. But these solutions are not static. Behind them lies a whole community or network of consultants, academics and other experts who are constantly busily inventing even better techniques and models – the new best practices – which can, in turn, be advertised and commodified. Some commentators have suggested that the average time cycle for major model shifts may be about 10 years (Rovik, 2002). In the ‘home’ countries of the Anglosphere – the UK and the US – the major consultancies have become major players in domestic reforms. For example, an investigation by the UK National Audit Office showed that in 2006–07 the UK public sector spent approximately £2.8 billion on buying in management consultants (National Audit Office, 2006). More generally, in Anglophone countries ‘Management consultants have become increasingly visible players in the process of public sector reform over the last twenty years’ (Saint Martin, 2005: 671).

Exactly how and why this dominance was constructed is a fascinating question, which has received some scholarly attention (Sahlin-Anderssen and Engwall, 2002) but could benefit from more. It is not, however, the main focus of this address, and will not be explored any further here.

In sum, we need to understand the dominance of Anglosphere public management thinking in terms of a developing international network of officials, consultants and academics who, with institutional support and the immense good fortune of having the English language as mother tongue, achieved a very strong position in the increasingly international marketplace for ideas. Dreschler puts the matter bluntly: ‘what we call global PA is actually Western PA’ (Dreschler, 2013: 2).

Now we turn to three reasons why Anglosphere public management thinking may be losing its hitherto dominant position.

First reason: dominance was never global or absolute

The first reason has actually been there all the time, but full realization of its significance has taken some time to grow. It is, quite simply, that Anglophone dominance was never total, or even as extensive as one might have thought if one had only read certain documents from certain governments and intergovernmental organizations. A massive and still-growing amount of scholarship has shown that some states held out against the flow of Anglophone ideas, some heavily adapted them and some implemented them very superficially but never in ways that would put down roots (Christensen and Lægreid, 2001: Guyomarch, 1999; Hood and Lodge, 2006; Lynn, 2006; Ongaro, 2010; Pollitt, 2007; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011; Premfors, 1998; Verhoest et al., 2012). As one prominent American scholar put it: ‘Despite the convergent rhetoric of managerialism, public management reform remains primarily a national (and constitutional) matter’ (Lynn, 2008: 253).

Thus, to take just a few important examples, Germany at the federal level has never been enamoured of Anglosphere-type reforms. In the late 1990s there was quite a lot of talk about the ‘Lean State’ but actual federal reforms have not followed Anglosphere orthodoxy at all (Derlien, 1998: Jann, 2003; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011: 279–284). Japan came very late to NPM ideas, and then implemented them in such distinctive ways that it is doubtful whether they can really be termed NPM (Nakamura, 2012; Yamamoto, 2004). Historically, as Westney discovered in her fascinating study of the Meiji period from 1859 to 1912, Japan had sometimes deliberately set out to borrow from the West, but had done so in a most selective and sophisticated way. France overtly resisted ‘Anglo-Saxon’ type reforms and, with the exception of some initiatives under President Sarkozy, has followed its own, more étatiste path (Bartoli, 2008; Guyomarch, 1999). Apart from a fading flirtation with the Copernicus reforms between 1999 and 2003, Belgium has never bought into large scale reform based on Anglosphere models (Hondeghem and Depré, 2005). Its reforms have been more piecemeal and specific, and the main political attention has been the continuing debate between the two language communities (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011: 238–246). The Mediterranean states of Italy, Greece, Portugal and Spain have, to varying degrees, attempted some individual reforms that were derived from Anglosphere ideas, but many of these have failed to put down roots and there are strong political, constitutional and cultural reasons why none of these countries is likely suddenly to become an enthusiast for NPM or any more recent OECD ‘recipe’ (Ongaro, 2010). Neither have any of the Nordic group of states gone overboard for such ideas. In none of them has contracting out or performance management or PPPs or the penetration of management consultancies gone as far as they have in the UK and US (Wilks, 2013). They have participated in international discussions, studied the Anglosphere package, and quietly taken what they want from it, adapting as they went along (e.g. Christensen and Lægreid, 2001; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011: 263–270, 305–312).

But perhaps this whole way of putting things is still too Anglocentric? Because a deeper truth is that many of these countries have not simply resisted Anglosphere ideas, rather they have not felt such a pressing need for them, because they have strong and still-evolving systems of thinking of their own. Continental European states such as France and Germany have their own ‘Napoleonic’ or ‘Rechtsstaat’ paradigms and practices (Drewry, 2014: 9–16; Lynn, 2006, passim). There should be no automatic assumption that these traditions are exhausted or defeated by the social and economic challenges of the contemporary world. There is no recognition, official or otherwise, that the UK and the USA are ‘leaders’ – indeed, they may well be seen as misguided and somewhat extreme exceptions. For those toiling firmly within the Anglosphere it can be hard to recognize that these are genuine differences of substance, not merely forms of backwardness.

I conclude this section with a relevant general observation from an American, Francis Fukuyama:

That there are no globally valid rules for organizational design means that the field of public administration is necessarily more of an art than a science. Most good solutions to public administration problems, while having certain common features of institutional design, will not be clear-cut ‘best practices’ because they will have to incorporate a great deal of context-specific information. (Fukuyama, 2004: 58)

To put this more philosophically, it may be that the whole way in which Anglosphere generic models have been framed is a weakness in itself. Perhaps applicable management knowledge does not – or cannot – exist in that form or at that level. There are certainly some persuasive epistemological arguments that tend in that direction (e.g. Pawson, 2013; Pollitt, 2013a; Tsoukas, 2005). But whether or not one goes along with these more fundamental doubts, it must surely be admitted that, widely though the Anglosphere models and techniques travelled, they never reached everywhere, and in many of the places they did reach they left only slight impressions.

Second reason: the success of Anglosphere models and techniques is increasingly questioned

The argument here is that a wider and wider audience has gradually been discovering that Anglosphere models and techniques often don’t work very well. They don’t produce the results claimed for them. Or, to put it more precisely, they work, but only in very specific contexts, which are not necessarily very widespread (Pollitt, 2013a). And they quite often have undesired side effects, such as blurring lines of accountability, the lowering of the morale of public service staff or even facilitating corruption. The frequent failures of reforms labelled as NPM or Public–Private Partnerships or contracting out have taken place not only in developing countries (Andrews, 2013: Manning, 2001) but also in the ‘home countries’ of the UK (Burton, 2013; Dunleavy and Carrera, 2013; Hood and Dixon, 2013; Pollitt, 2013b) and the USA (Light, 1997).

If we begin with the developing world, we can there see a very mixed 20-year record of Anglophone-style management reforms being recommended or imposed by international bodies or Anglophone governments themselves. More than a decade ago it was already being pointed out that such reforms were often unsuitable, and frequently failed in quite predictable ways (Manning, 2001). More recently the weight of evidence has increased, reaching the point at which one detailed analysis came to the conclusions that:

Fewer than 40% of the eighty countries receiving World Bank support for public sector reform between 2007 and 2009 registered improved CPIA [Country Policy and Institutional Assessment] governance scores in that period. A quarter of these countries actually saw such scores decline, whereas more than a third stayed the same. (Andrews, 2013: 13)

Andrews also observed that there were quite strong similarities of content between many World Bank reforms (despite major contextual dissimilarities) and that the highly Anglophone notion of ‘best practice’ had featured regularly. Even the World Bank itself, reflecting on its experiences, has observed of itself that:

[T]here has been a strong move away from ‘Washington Consensus’-style theorizing about PSM [Public Sector Management] reform, entailing claims about PSM reform contents that should work across a number of different contexts, towards the idea that ‘what works’ in PSM reform is highly context-contingent. (World Bank, 2012: 10)

It is certainly not only intergovernmental bodies like the World Bank and the IMF which have followed this road of pushing Anglosphere-sourced best practice solutions in contexts where fundamental features of the local context mean that it is fairly unlikely that they will flourish. Many other examples can also be found, such as agency reforms in Tanzania, Thailand and Latvia (respectively Caulfield, 2004; Bowornwathana, 2004; Pollitt, 2004).

But let us now turn back to the countries from which these ideas mainly came. Surely, public management reforms have enjoyed a higher success rate on their home ground? Mrs Thatcher, for example, is widely known for forcing through many efficiency-oriented reforms. Mr Blair was another non-stop reformer, heaping reform upon reform in a crusade to modernize the public sector and make it more joined-up, performance-focused and customer-flexible. It has therefore been a surprise to many that detailed recent scholarship strongly suggests that there was no general uplift in efficiency under the Thatcher and Major regimes (Hood and Dixon, 2013) and that the impact of Blair’s reforms on the productivity of government departments was highly variable, sometimes resulting in no real gain or even a decline around the period that the reform itself was being implemented (Dunleavy and Carrera, 2013). ‘Under both Blair and Brown public spending saw its biggest increase since the 1940s but this was not accompanied by proportional increases in productivity’ (Burton, 2013: 36). Another study, taking a historical approach, notes that five major UK public management reform white papers – in 1970, 1981, 1991, 1999 and 2011 – all shared certain characteristics. In particular, they contained no costings, set no measurable targets and made no formal provision for any systematic or independent evaluation of their success or failure (Pollitt, 2013b). They were, one might say, very big on promises and very short on evidence. Finally, the much praised PPPs have had very variable outcomes. For example, reviewing Public Finance Initiative schemes the Treasury Select Committee concluded that: ‘a great deal of public money may have been misallocated or wasted’ (Treasury Select Committee, 2011). PFI had been a favoured partnership vehicle both for the Major Conservative government (1990–97) and the Blair/New Labour administration of 1997–2009 (Burton, 2013: 76–77, 143–145).

Finally, we may note that a recent large-scale literature review of NPM-style public management reforms across the EU concluded that it has been a very hit-and-miss process (Pollitt and Dan, 2013). Fewer than 9 percent of the 519 studies analysed could show plausible information about changes in outcomes resulting from reforms. Only about a quarter had such information on changes in outputs. In this minority of studies where there was some serious information relating to changes attributed to reforms, the proportion of findings which indicated improvements (rather than no change or actual deterioration) was modest: 44 percent for improved outcomes and 53 percent for improved outputs.

In the US a detailed analysis of reforms to the federal government between 1945 and 1995 came to the following conclusion:

Candidates may promise that they will finally make government (1) more businesslike, (2) less wasteful, (3) more watchful, or (4) more efficient and less expensive, but there is precious little evidence that any of the 141 intiatives [Note: the reform initiatives analysed in the book.] … accomplished these lofty goals. (Light, 1997: 179)

At the same time what does seem to have happened is that the federal government has become extensively ‘hollowed out’, so that it no longer directly controls most of its own delivery or support services, but is bound by an ever-extending web of contracts and subcontracts (Peters, 2010). These have sometimes led to woeful results, most visibly, perhaps, in the Iraq war (Government Accounting Office, 2006; Pollitt, 2009; Scahill, 2007). More generally, this process has generated a considerable academic debate, with both critics and supporters of the ‘hollow state’ exchanging arguments and evidence.

Less dramatically, many of the attempts to install performance management within American government have not worked as was intended (Radin, 2006). Performance management has been one of the central motifs of Anglosphere public management thinking, but Radin shows that, in the American context, its application was frequently founded on a series of unwarranted assumptions. Using a very different approach, Moynihan (2008) similarly shows that performance management in the US has often not had the expected effects, although in some cases it has had positive impacts. The picture, therefore, is by no means one of complete failure; there have been many achievements worth celebrating. Yet the record is so varied as to suggest that the core reform ideas are not robust to many of the contexts in which they are applied – that they are flawed or incomplete.

Third reason: on a global scale, public administrations outside the Anglosphere are becoming more powerful and influential

This may be the most powerful argument of all. China, India, other Asian states and some of the Latin American countries are increasingly important voices in the international public administration community, and in many cases they have strong administrative cultures and traditions of their own. To mention one spectacular example, none of the Anglosphere states could claim to have had a major treatise on civil service organization written more than a thousand years ago (Wang Anshi’s text Wan Yan Shu of 1058 – see Dreschler, 2013). For these reasons alone they are less and less likely just to buy in to the latest ideas from the Anglosphere – especially as information about the high failure rate of Anglo-origin reforms becomes more widely known and recognized. They may borrow, but if they do they will heavily adapt, translate or transform – all in themselves processes of indigenous innovation. Of course they will continue to send fact-finding delegations to Anglosphere (and other) states in order to see what is happening (Christensen et al., 2008), but that will not imply any belief that they have to copy what they see there (it probably never did). Alternatively, they will develop solutions of their own to those problems which they deem most pressing (and which are unlikely to be very similar to those found most urgent in Western Europe or North America). Cheung may well be understating his case when he comments that ‘there are doubts as to whether the multifarious problems and structural paradoxes confronted by China could be readily tackled by transplanting Western concepts and practices’ (Cheung, 2012: 213).

It should be acknowledged that there have been long-standing debates both about how far non-Western states have imported Anglosphere ideas and also about how far, given contextual differences, they even could do. We cannot definitively settle either of those debates here, but some observations are in order. First, the debates about how far Anglophone ideas have been adopted is never going to produce a simple percentage answer. Most commonly, where Western influences may appear to be fairly plain, the actual ideas and practices have been adapted – to a greater or lesser degree – to their new context. Take, for example, the use of citizen evaluations of public services, which have been used in a very different way in China than in the Anglosphere (So, 2014). Thus there are always fine judgements to be made as to how far the resulting reform is ‘still Western’ and how far it is something new (see, e.g. Christensen et al., 2008). Second, the debate about how far Anglosphere ideas and practices will ‘fit’ is one where much depends on what level of abstraction one is operating at. If the claim is made that non-Western countries share the Anglosphere goals that the state machine should be trustworthy, efficient and effective, that may well be true, but it is hardly surprising (this seems, for example, to be the main claim made by Candler, 2002). It is an ambition pitched at such a high level of generalized abstraction that the only surprise would be to find a state that didn’t want such characteristics. What is far less obvious is that more specific mechanisms such as contracting out, performance management or PPPs will be globally effective means for the achievement of these broad goals. Here we may note that, both in the case of China and in the case of Brazil, many of the leading indigenous scholars have for some decades argued that direct Anglosphere transplants of techniques are not a good idea (Candler, 2002; Christensen et al., 2008). And some of the leading American scholars have also sounded notes of deep caution, including Fred Riggs, Gerald Caiden and, more recently, Francis Fukuyama (Candler, 2002; Fukuyama, 2004).

These reservations stem partly – but only partly – from significant cultural differences. These mean that the assumptions about relationships and practices which are built into most Anglosphere models may simply not fit. Equally, and perhaps more interestingly, other cultures may permit the success of approaches which would work much less well in the UK or the USA (e.g. Berman et al., 2013, Park et al., 2013).

How far has the process of indigenous theorizing and model-building yet gone? It is very difficult for Anglophones, with their limited and Europe-centred linguistic skills, to know. The impression is that a critical mass of public management scholars already exists in China and Japan, and possibly also in India and Brazil. At the time of writing, these groups still seem mainly to be engaged in debating Anglosphere ideas rather than generating theory of their own. This would be parallel with other fields in the policy-oriented social sciences (for international political economy, for example, see Cohen, 2014: 113–120). Yet indigenous theory may well already exist, in the mother tongue, that has simply not been picked up by Anglophone observers.

The relative ideational independence of these Asian and Latin American states has probably been further amplified, since 2008, by the very different fiscal climate that has developed in the UK and the USA, as compared with the BRIC states (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and certain other emergent economies. Briefly, the UK and the USA are having to develop management approaches to their own public sectors which will fit severely constrained public expenditure regimes – ‘more with less’ as the optimists put it, or ‘less with less’ as many critics maintain (see, e.g. Deloitte/Reform, 2013; KPMG, 2013a). No such constraints apply to the generally booming BRIC economies. If they wish to embark on large new public spending or investment programmes, they have the resources to do so. As countries in which ‘developmentalism remains the foundation of public governance’ (Cheung, 2012: 215; also Brown et al., 2012) they are more free – in both material and ideological terms – to deploy state power, authority and money to promote and pursue collective and community objectives.

Thus the guest editor of a pioneering recent issue of our own International Review of Administrative Sciences that focused on public administration in East Asia wrote that he and his fellow Asian authors:

Consider it long overdue that the Asian public administration experience should be more systematically understood, conceptualized and presented in the international literature.

In fact:

Globalization should not be a one-way street; it should be a process of recognizing cross-border, cross-cultural and cross-institutional experiences, from the East as much as from the West. (Cheung, 2012: 209)

These considerations apply as much to Latin America, India and the Arab world as to East Asia. My regret is that I have neither the knowledge nor here the space to give proper recognition to these other regions.

Conclusions and consequences

Before the first conclusion comes a caveat. We have a saying in English: ‘the baby should not be thrown out with the bathwater’. Much has already been learned, and much more remains to be learned from the endless wave of Anglosphere-inspired reforms over the past 30 years or so. This statement would be true both within the Anglosphere and outside it. In numerous cases public services have been improved in measurable and often obvious ways by the application of some of these ideas. Often intelligent local officials or politicians have taken broad ideas and re-shaped them, sometimes against the odds, to achieve beneficial change – both in the core Anglosphere countries and, sometimes, elsewhere. So my argument is not that Anglosphere-originated reforms should all be jettisoned, or reversed (which in many countries would be wholly impractical anyway). Neither is it that all the ideas which have come from the Anglosphere should henceforth be ignored, and that we should somehow substitute some other paradigm, from some other part of the globe. Little is to be gained by substituting one body of generic doctrines for another – as an international community we would all probably benefit from less hype, more humility and more attention to local context. There is much to be gained from further study of both the successes and the failures of the era of Anglosphere dominance.

Now to the first conclusion, which is a positive one. It is that the decline of the Anglosphere represents something of a liberation – an opening up of multiple opportunities. Reformers in different parts of the world will no longer have to work so hard to show why they are not doing what is currently being recommended by the OECD or the World Bank. They will have more space to argue that the specific contextual features of their country or their sector or their particular type of function require a tailor-made, locally informed solution. However, this is unlikely to happen without some argument and struggle. Unfortunately, some of the governments and international management consultancies which have been major players within the Anglosphere also continue to write as though there were one set of global trends and a correspondingly singular approach to solutions (e.g. KPMG, 2013b; PwC, 2013).

A second conclusion is that research and deliberation will be enriched by the increasing legitimacy and visibility of reform ideas coming from different traditions. Combining elements from different traditions – either theoretically or practically – will be a most fascinating, subtle and challenging task. I note en passant that the IIAS is one of the bodies most favourably placed to facilitate, sponsor and support exactly this kind of work. After all, the ‘I’ stands for ‘International’ and the ‘S’ for ‘Sciences’. One would hope that the future work of the IIAS would be cosmopolitan, inclusive and focused on learning across cultural and language boundaries – and in many directions, not just one.

A third implication is that there is a huge research task to be tackled in terms of identifying which kinds of solutions are most likely to bring benefits in which kinds of contexts (Pollitt, 2013a). The message that different traditions are important and that national or local contexts are extremely influential is definitely not a verdict that ideas and practices cannot be borrowed or transferred. It is simply a claim that this process of transfer is more complex than many in the reform community have previously allowed. New, cultural and context-sensitive frameworks and theories are necessary (for a plea for the same goal, but from Brazil, see Kiggundu, 2012: 753). The academic world already has a history of research into the conditions favouring and inhibiting policy transfer (e.g. Dolowitz and March, 2000; Westney, 1987) but this body of work needs to be greatly elaborated, and to move centre stage, instead of being a minority interest.

A fourth, but tentative implication is that for practitioners there may be advantages in focusing, wherever possible, on specific reforms for specific problems – in this organization or service or programme – rather than launching large-scale, complex, programmatic reforms. The latter do seem to carry higher transaction costs, more disruption and higher risks of failure. Of course they may have short-term political and presentational advantages, but if the downside was better appreciated the advantages might seem less seductive (Light, 1997; Pollitt, 2013b).

My argument has therefore been that we should welcome the space which may now be opening up to bring together ideas and practices from different countries and regions. We should populate that space with dialogues and trialogues and even decalogues between the different traditions, conducted with mutual respect and curiosity. We should have the courage to acknowledge the weaknesses, contradictions and limitations that seem to inhabit every set of administrative prescriptions. We should cherish independent commentators who are not closely tied to individual governments, consultancies, doctrines or single methods. We should seek out those who, by chance or design, have accumulated multi-cultural, multi-linguistic experience, and invite them to the table. The task will not be at all easy. The yearning for that great simplifier and seducer, ‘One Best Way’, should not be underestimated. Powerful players such as governments and intergovernmental bodies can sometimes squeeze out or ignore critical, independent voices, yearning for comfortable isomorphism. Yet it is possible to hope that the decline of the Anglosphere in public management thinking and practice could usher in something much richer and more genuinely global. That is a possibility worth working for.

Footnotes

Christopher Pollitt is Emeritus Professor at the Public Governance Institute, Katholieke University Leuven, Belgium. He is also a past Editor-in-Chief of IRAS/RISA, and of Public Administration. Among his best-known books are Public Management Reform: A Comparative Analysis (3rd edn, Oxford University Press, 2011) and Time, Policy, Management (Oxford University Press, 2008). He has also undertaken advisory roles for the EU Commission, the OECD and the World Bank, as well as for several national governments.

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