Public Policy and Administration

Central to New Labour's ambition to transform public policy and public services was the development of joined-up government'. This article considers the experience of joining-up' at the local level, through one programme of reform, the ‘local government modernisation agenda’ (LGMA). Drawing on published research from evaluations of the LGMA this article argues that three key strategies for joining-up' locally are evident in the policies of the LGMA: empowerment, endorsement and enticement. Each strategy contains a particular vision of joined-up' local governance and what should shape it. However in practice each strategy was diluted, undermined or challenged by the existence of alternative perspectives. The article proposes that there are powerful undercurrents within the policy environment that help explain these tensions, in particular the desire of some interests to maintain prevailing central-local relations. It also highlights cross-currents that might have a greater impact on the potential for realising joined-up' local governance such as the comprehensive performance assessment. The article concludes with some reflections on which strategy is most likely to be effective in the current policy and political environment and examines the ‘fit’ of newer policy instruments such as Local Area Agreements with this proposed strategy.

From 1998 the Government launched Beacon award schemes in local government, schools, the National Health Service, further education and central government. The schemes were distinctive in that they all shared the assumption that organisational learning could be advanced through a competitive process of identifying successful organisations and recruiting them to disseminate their good practices. Drawing on a number of evaluations of the different schemes, this article identifies three tensions in the operation of the Beacon model. We conclude that the relative persistence and success of the Beacon idea, in local government at least, is more a function of its effects on aspiration and morale than its concrete contribution to learning and improvement.

Current analysis of the public administration's dysfunctions in Belgium bears remarkable resemblance to the analyses made by numerous authors and commissions in the past 150 years. In this article, we provide an overview of the major administrative reform initiatives in Belgium between 1848 and 2004. We focus on a number of books and reports from the period between the mid-19th century and the First World War, that were the foundation for many analyses in the 20th century. The interbellum saw the introduction of several reform commissions, and the appointment of a Royal commissioner who would introduce some of the most radical reforms ever in the Belgian civil service, the influence of which can still be felt today. After the Second World War, the focus of the reforms changed to efficiency, and later to economy. In the late 1980s, ‘citizen ‘and ‘client’ became a central concept in the reform discourse. Even though the administrative reforms and reform initiatives in Belgium since 1848 are quite diverse, there is a striking consistency in the problems that have been identified as causes for administrative malfunctioning: the influence of politics and ministerial cabinets, the size of the administration, and the administration's inefficiency.

This article examines the impact of the UK's post-1999 system of territorial devolution on charging policy for public services. It seeks to document emerging territorial differences in charging policy and practice and explain them with reference to differences in devolution settlements and to territorially variable political, cultural and social contexts. It concludes that devolution has already led to significant territorial variations in charging policy and practice and that the Celtic territories' policies seem increasingly differentiated from those of England.

This article adds to the literature on public services inspection by tracking the evolution of the BV inspection process within the service specific context of English public library provision. Drawing upon a range of policy documentation and a longitudinal content analysis of the highest and lowest scoring BV library inspection reports, the article draws attention to the reports' coverage of the libraries' procedures for income generation, competition, outsourcing and public-private partnership. This focus is used both as a means to examine the argument that contemporary public sector reform measures have led to the increased liberalisation and commercialisation of public libraries and to check the stability of the inspection processes over time. The findings from this analysis reveal that although the content of much of the early policy documentation and initial inspection reports lend support to the increased commercialisation and liberalisation argument, a slightly more balanced picture emerges when this analysis is extended to include the findings from more recent library inspection reports. In reaching these conclusions, however, broader question marks about the longer-term stability of the inspection process are also raised.