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Convergence and Transfer: A Review of the Globalisation of New Public

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Article in International Journal of Public Sector Management · November 1998

DOI: 10.1108/09513559810244356

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 International Journal of Public Sector Management
Convergence and transfer: a review of the globalisation of new public management
Richard K. Common
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International Journal of Public Sector Management, Vol. 11 Iss 6 pp. 440 - 450
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 IJPSM
11,6 Convergence and transfer: a
review of the globalisation of
new public management
440
Richard K. Common
Department of Public and Social Administration,
City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong

Introduction
We are told there is a global revolution in public management. It seems that
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government everywhere, is being reinvented. The word “revolution” implies

sudden change but change in the public sector is rarely sudden. However, the
changes to public management that are being catalogued around the world
appear to indicate that we are witnessing a supposed paradigm shift in public
administration from bureaucracy to post-bureaucracy which stresses
managerial rather than administrative values. The new paradigm is often
referred to as new public management (NPM). Hood (1991 and 1994) thought
that part of the appeal of NPM was its applicability to any bureaucratic or
political setting. Dunleavy (1991 and 1994) also went on to warn that we are
witnessing “the decoupling of public services production from a single-country
context”. Holmes (1992, p.472) remarked that given the cultural diversity of a
cross-section of studies on administrative change, “one can only be amazed by
the commonality of not only language but also, more importantly, purpose”.
Are we witnessing the globalisation of NPM, or are we simply debating an
instance of policy convergence?

The globalisation of new public management: some possible

explanations
What do we mean by globalisation? There are many interpretations on offer, and
a full discussion is beyond the scope of this article. If we take globalisation to
mean the universal application of public policy then there are five possible
overlapping explanations for the globalisation of NPM: the NPM “missionary”;
the internationalisation of new right politics; the internationalisation of
privatisation; the role of international organizations; and increasing policy
transfer activity. The first four explanations I will deal with briefly. First, Hood
(1991 and 1994) had noted how NPM had quickly become a “self-serving
industry” to an army of consultants, business schools and advisers, who had a
vested interested in spreading NPM. The internationalisation of NPM could be
International Journal of Public
ascribed to a missionary zeal on the part of management “gurus” travelling the
Sector Management,
Vol. 11 No. 6, 1998, pp. 440-450,
world. The Economist (1995, p. 23) reported that Michael Porter of the Harvard
© MCB University Press, 0951-3558 Business School “has been asked by governments from Portugal to Colombia to
 do for them what he and his kind have done for private enterprise”. The case of Globalisation of
“reinventing government” deserves special mention. Following Clinton’s new public
endorsement, Gray and Jenkins (1994) reported that the text was commended to management
public administration academics by Sir Robin Butler, and by William
Waldegrave in his 1993 Public Finance Foundation lecture. Osborne (Osborne
and Gaebler, 1992) came over to the UK in 1993 to “preach” to ministers, civil
servants and local government officers. However, it is hard to imagine the spread 441
of NPM as being entirely due to the efforts of a few travelling salespersons.
Second, the link between the introduction of NPM and a global new right
project appears, at first, to be a strong one. Certainly, it appeared that the UK
Conservative governments pursued NPM with the most zeal, yet Wright (1994,
p. 112) points to “Swedish Social Democrats and Spanish and French socialists,
untainted by the same ideological motivations” who “have been only slightly
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less zealous”. Also, NPM was adopted by Labour governments in New Zealand
and Australia in the 1980s. McAllister and Vowles (1994) remarked how both
countries had social democratic parties in power yet both parties embraced the
kind of market liberalism associated with NPM. To explain this, McAllister and
Vowles argued that while voters were not anti-state (i.e. a redistributative state),
they became opposed to state intervention in terms of economic control.
However, politicians, particularly in New Zealand, latter suffered an electoral
backlash once NPM became associated with severe cuts in public expenditure.
Although Hood (1991 and 1994) and Dunleavy (1991 and 1994) thought it
debatable that NPM was ideologically neutral, it is possible that governments are
able to put an ideological gloss on NPM strategies to suit local political agendas.
For instance, efforts at contracting out local government services in the USA were
viewed as pragmatic responses to fiscal pressure, whereas in the UK the
contractorisation of local government was seen as a distinct part of the
Conservative Party’s agenda. Wright (1994, p. 117) argues that there are
differences between countries in terms of style, nature, timing and pace of reform
which are not correlated with the political colour of governments. For instance, he
sees the style of the UK programme as “imposed radicalism” compared with the
“evolutionary and internally generated programme of the Germans”. Timing also
acts independently of political ideology; Britain’s fiscal crisis was perceived
earlier than elsewhere, forcing the pace of reform which the Labour government
of 1974-79 had begun to address, with Thatcher later adding the ideological gloss.
Third, privatisation and NPM often appear to go hand in hand as policy
options. Government elites, when reworking the relationship between the public
and the private sectors may use the terms “privatisation” and “NPM”
interchangeably, especially where the appearance of managerial techniques may
be the organizational prelude to privatisation. Ikenberry (1990, p. 89) remarked
that privatisation policy could not be explained “simply in terms of national
governments responding to the interests and power of domestic groups”. Rather,
privatisation can only be understood by taking into account the international
environments that influence policy-making and similar conclusions could be
drawn for the spread of NPM. Although one cannot simply assume that where
 IJPSM one finds privatisation, one finds NPM, the appeal of market-type mechanisms
11,6 has become universal, according to Peters (1996, p. 21).
Fourth, international institutions such as the OECD, European Union, World
Bank, IMF have a role to play in the spread of NPM. For instance, the OECD’s
Public Management Committee produces a series of Public Management
Studies which clearly intends to facilitate policy learning between member
442 countries. For example, the foreword to “Managing with market type
mechanisms” (OECD, 1993, p. 3) is clear about one aim of the report, which is to
draw “some clear lessons in the immense field of public management practices
which attempt to blend the advantages of market arrangements with the proven
virtues of traditional public administration”. As the World Bank and the IMF
have an interest in ensuring “best practice”, it is more likely that managerial
techniques are likely to be imposed on countries. Also, international
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organizations have political agendas that cannot be ignored and Held and
McGrew (1993, p. 272) argue that “these organizations are at the centre of a
continual conflict over the control and direction of global policy”, and have
acquired “entrenched authority” over the years. However, these organizations
only impose policies on countries thus creating the appearance of
“globalisation”; governments whose finances are strong do not have to listen.

The global diffusion of NPM

Although each of these points of view have their merits, the globalisation of
politics generally appears to offer a neat explanation for the spread of NPM.
However, the term “globalisation” is both contentious and loose. At a basic level,
globalisation could simply mean the process of convergence, but globalisation
is not the same as convergence. Globalisation assumes that the exercise of
political authority and bureaucratic power is no longer constrained by the
boundaries of nation states. As McGrew and Lewis (1992, p. 7) note “modern
societies display an incredible permeability to transnational forces”. In the case
of NPM, this should not lead us to the conclusion that all countries will adopt a
global standard for public management. Furthermore, there is the danger that
“pressures for globalisation” produce unintended consequences if applied
uniformly across diverse political or administrative cultures.
Aberbach and Rockman (1988, p.484) warned that “there is always a danger
of stretching comparisons of historically diverse societies too far”, so it appears
that this particular global “revolution” in the public sector is in fact confined to
a small handful of English-speaking countries, notably the UK, USA, Canada,
Australia and New Zealand. James and Manning (1996, p. 144) add The
Netherlands and Sweden to this “core”. Also, to describe and account for the
diffusion of administrative change even within a European context does not
take us very far. For instance, the UK had resisted the historical trend towards
a civil service underpinned by administrative law yet it was France that was
some way ahead of Britain in the application of management theory to its civil
service. According to Chevallier (1996, p. 70), while British civil servants were
fending off Fulton, French civil servants were grappling with “the movement
 for rationalizing budgetary choices” which “constituted the first systematic and Globalisation of
coherent attempt to experiment with management theory”. On the other hand, new public
Germany’s “classic administrative system” proved to be more resistant to the management
introduction of management thinking.
However, a key rationale for administrative reform appears to be
“modernisation”, which Giddens (1990, p.63) claims is “inherently globalising”
and is itself, a process of globalisation. McGrew and Lewis (1992, p. 25) notes 443
that “modernisation” assumes convergence with some idealised Western
“lifestyle” but a less damaging and more useful association is with the
transition from “traditional” to “modern” societies, but this still does not
dissolve the term’s association with “Westernisation”. McGrew and Lewis
(1992, p. 26) settle for defining modernisation as “a functional expression for
those interlinked processes of secular social, political, economic and cultural
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change whose effects are experienced world-wide, albeit in a highly uneven

way”. Hofferbert (1974, p. 151) argued that one aspect of modernisation,
“democratization” “illustrates that the Western pattern is anything but
universal or inexorable”, and that many features of traditional society will
continue to persist virtually unchanged.
Is it possible that NPM is a symptom of the last gasp of modernism in public
administration? One of Hassan’s (1985, pp. 123-4) schematic differences between
modernism and postmodernism was between “hierarchy” and “anarchy”. Is
NPM simply about asserting the legitimacy of the state in the face of a gradual
rejection of modernism in the form of uniform, monopolistic and remote public
services? Or is it simply the state’s response to making sense and retaining
control of its organization following the apparent shift to post-Fordism or what
Harvey terms “flexible accumulation”? Indeed, it appears that the public sector
has “learnt” from a corporate sector that has shifted towards “leaner, flatter
structures, with a smaller central organization and a series of subcontracting
relations with external bodies”. NPM may be partially explained by structural
adjustments by the state to accommodate its new role in a globalised economy.
An alternative perspective is to treat NPM as an instance of policy convergence,
rather than the product of globalisation.

NPM as policy convergence

Policy responses to similar problems in countries that are at a similar stage of
economic development do indeed appear to be convergent. According to
Wilensky (1975, p. xii), convergence theory is “the idea that whatever their
political economies, whatever their unique cultures and histories, the ‘affluent’
societies become more alike in both social structure and ideology”. Kamensky
(1996, p. 248) argued that “the reinventing government movement originated
simultaneously in the early 1980s in foreign countries, as part of their attempts
to reposition their economies to cope with increasing global competition”. At
first, policy convergence may appear more likely between nations with political
elites of similar convictions. Waltman and Studlar (1987) concluded that policy
convergence occurred to some degree between the Thatcher and the Reagan
 IJPSM governments, while the Labour opposition preferred to look at Scandinavian
11,6 and German social democrat programmes. Also, public sector practitioners
were influenced by competitive private sector organizations. Hofferbert (1974,
p. 199) had argued that “the most industrial states find a reflection of the
managerial ethos in their governmental activities”, yet he cites a study by
Walker (1969) that found the poorer American states accept new policies “more
444 readily than expected, given their socio-economic development”. This suggests
that policy transfer, rather than “convergence”, had taken place.
Wright (1994) identified two international pressures for change germane to
the public sector and these pressures were described as the “so-called
managerial revolution” and the “generalised disgruntlement” at the
performance of the public sector. Bennett (1991, p. 31) argued that eventually
policy learning will take place between countries as a result of these “wider
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socio-economic or technological forces. States at the same level of development

face similar problems to which there are a number of feasible solutions”. Reform
programmes then begin to appear similar across a range of political and
administrative settings. Environmental pressures will trigger reforms within
governments, regardless of political ideology, and “modernizing elites within
public administration” will respond to these pressures. Zifcak (1994) developed
this theme into a sophisticated comparative account of government reform in
Britain and Australia. Hood (1991, p. 3) had also linked the spread of
managerialism in government to wider administrative mega-trends.
So far, it appears that the administration of a particular country engages in
reform strategies as a result of global socio-economic pressures impacting on
administrative elites. Policy convergence then takes place in an ideological
vacuum. Castles (1982) called this the “paradox” of the convergence thesis: that
the changing economic and technological environment is shaping a common
future for the public sector while the state attempts to accumulate power. For
the West, it appears that “the convergence and ‘end of ideology’ theses are
closely interlinked, not merely because both postulate increasing similarity in
society, state and politics”. Hood (1991) had argued that part of NPM’s appeal
was its ideological neutrality, “an apolitical framework”. Managerialism has
long had this appeal, and can easily cloak political agendas in the packaging of
practicality and common-sense. For states trying to solve policy problems
independently, if none of the solutions on offer appear to work, then they may
engage in a search for solutions in an international policy culture where NPM is
promoted as an applicable and neutral tool-kit.
Another possible reason for explaining NPM as policy convergence may be
linked to the decline of the “nation state” as a central unit in policy analysis. The
shift away from political accountability to managerial accountability in public
service delivery, implicit in NPM, may be a consequence of the diminished
legitimacy of the state. Wallace (1996) cites Weiler who “emphasizes the
immense shift in the balance of legal and jurisdictional authority between state
and European Union (EU) over the past 40 years”. Kapteyn (1995, and cited in
Wallace, 1996) also notes how “globalization has…enabled a variety of societal
 actors to have access to an international arena as an extension of or an Globalisation of
alternative to the state arena”. These processes may, in part, account for new public
convergence in the EU, but there are difficulties in using the decline of the nation management
state thesis elsewhere, particularly where the nation-state is being fortified
following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and its former satellites. Finally, as
Harrop (1992, p. 264) argues, “nations differ in the severity with which problems
arise and in the range of solutions which it is feasible for them to consider”. 445
Explaining the spread of NPM: policy transfer
Dolowitz and Marsh (1996) argue that voluntary and coercive policy transfer are
two extremes of a continuum. These labels help us to understand why transfer
occurs. Voluntary transfer is most likely to occur as a response to a particular
policy problem that requires a better solution than those already on offer. Coercive
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transfer occurs when an actor directly imposes policy on a government. However,

for many countries NPM may appear as an instance of indirect coercive transfer
when pressure to “modernise” their public sectors may force governments into
policy learning activity. Headey (1996) cites Shils (1962) who argued that the West
provided the “standards and models in the light of which the elites of the
unmodern new states of Asia and Africa seek to reshape their countries”. On the
other hand, elites may put an issue on the political agenda simply because another
country has adopted a particular policy which produces “a desire to jump on a
bandwagon”. This might be termed voluntary policy transfer.
Bennett (1991) also argues that states may consider policy-learning when
“domestic pressures are such that swift action is needed to deal with a problem”
because “incentives might be quite high to utilize a program from elsewhere as
a ready-made solution”. Here, elites may want to mollify political pressure for
reform by engaging in rapid searches for suitable “fixes”. As Kamensky (1996)
notes, “conventional wisdom has long suggested that governmental reform is
undertaken largely as a political symbol. But there is a difference between
reinvention and the traditional restructuring approach to reform. The former
focuses on incentives, the latter on structure”. This suggests long-run benefits
for administrative elites in terms of pressing for NPM-type reform
programmes, thus presenting them with bureau-shaping opportunities.
Do politicians have a role to play in the diffusion of NPM? Savoie (1994,
p. 178) declared that “Thatcher, Reagan and Mulroney spoke the language of
Peters and Waterman”, three politicians who, unusually, made administrative
reform a political issue. Wright (1994, p. 119) claimed that “political will and
durability are vital for reforming governments” and adds that “these
ingredients have frequently been in short supply”. He and Zifcak (1994) have
pointed to the favourable conditions in the UK that allowed the introduction of
NPM reforms. Also, according to Muller and Wright (1994, p. 3), the Thatcher
government had found political support from “internationalised and financial
groups” who were keen to change the regulatory structures of government and
the engineering of confrontation between Treasury and high-spending
departments. A similar tussle emerged in the USA over the work of the
 IJPSM President’s private sector survey on cost control (“the Grace Commission”). This
11,6 suggests that the introduction of NPM may actually be the consequence of
confrontation between political and administrative elites, or the result of
collaboration in its later phase. For instance, the first “phase” of NPM in the UK
involved the introduction of budgetary disciplines in the 1980s, but by the end
of the decade, a consensus appeared around a “softer” NPM concerned with a
446 focus on the customer and quality management.
As governments try to commit themselves to ambitious goals, pressure to
reform within the political environment means that policy learning “may occur
without a coherent intellectual understanding of causes and effects, and without
a complete mastery of the means considered necessary and sufficient to attain
the ends” while political ideologies act as “simplifying mechanisms” to justify
reform goals. “Civil service curbing” then acquires political symbolism and the
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methods used take the appearance of classic scientific management. In this

scenario, civil servants are reduced to “managers” in the most technically
limited meaning of the term. This strategy seems especially appropriate for a
political leadership wishing simply to diminish the role of government.
Kamensky (1996, p. 248) observes that “the political value of reinvention,
however, is unclear” and continues that “the politics of reinvention are seen as
less attractive because reinvention entails the distribution of authority” and “it
takes more than one term in office”. Earlier, I posited that political elites are in a
position to benefit from NPM type reforms, but Kamensky (1996, p. 248) argues
that because the political value of “reinvention” is so vague it should be
differentiated from earlier attempts at structural public sector reforms.
Kamensky’s claim is based on the length of time taken to effect administrative
change and “if it improves government too much”, politicians lose capital for
future campaigns. Also, as Pollitt (1995) pointed out, NPM is hard to evaluate,
and so politicians are likely to have incentives to distort the benefits of NPM
implementation. Despite the so-called globalisation of policy making, political
elites “for the most point are condemned to success or failure in terms of their
impact within an individual state”.
Heidenheimer et al. (1976) and Wilensky (1975) take the view that centralised
political elites are “better equipped to overcome resistance to the necessary
taxes and expenditures than elites in decentralized societies”. The reverse may
be true when politicians seek to reduce public spending and introduce
administrative reform. Heidenheimer et al. (1976, p. 272) go on to argue that “the
most essential and effective component of a successful pro-reform coalition is
probably a majority (or dominant) party allied with the leadership of the
bureaucracy. Such alliances are easier to create in centralised systems, in which
they can also command the resources necessary for the drafting and
implementation of thoroughgoing social reforms”. Despite the lack of clarity
over the potential political benefits of NPM, consensus between strong central
political elites and a weakened, decentralised administrative elite that faces
powerful incentives to reform, plus the “ready made” nature of the solutions
offered by NPM, take us closer to understanding why NPM is so contagious.
 The dynamics of policy transfer Globalisation of
Where lessons are drawn from however, are more a matter of “social new public
psychological proximity”. Rose (1993, p. 107) notes that Britain tends to ignore
nearby Ireland and France whereas “British policymakers often look across the
management
ocean to the US or Canada, or even further away to Australia”. This grouping of
countries being analogous to what may be described as the NPM “core”
community described earlier. In East Asia, the colonial legacy remains strong 447
enough for policy transfers to occur between former colonizing powers and the
territories they used to dominate. Halligan (1996, p. 292) also argues that “small
nations are more externally oriented” and will scan the international
environment automatically. However, this remains an over-simplification of the
dynamics which drive policy transfers.
At the “voluntary” end of the policy transfer continuum, policy transfer will
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occur where the policy culture allows a degree of interaction, so that policy-
makers are able to learn about reforms in other countries, which then feed into
the domestic policy-making process. Thus, “similar responses flow…from the
export of knowledge”. As Haas (1980, p. 369) observed, “once knowledge
escapes the political and economic control of its originators, it becomes a kind
of international public good”. However, a trans-global elite could effectively
control and direct the flow of knowledge about government reform with the
spread of NPM a consequence of policy diffusion, aided and abetted by the
enthusiastic management “gurus” travelling the world. Furthermore, NPM
appears to offer an example of the type of “accepted body of knowledge” where
there is general agreement on the cause and effects of managerial techniques by
a community of “experts”. NPM, like that of privatisation policy, appears to
have its own “international policy culture” within which there “is both a process
of emulation (copying successes achieved elsewhere) and learning (redefining
one’s interests on the basis of new knowledge)”.
May (1992, p. 333) argues that a distinction needs to be made between
“copying” and “learning” as “learning implies improved understanding, as
reflected by an ability to draw lessons about policy problems, objectives or
interventions”. Copying, according to Rose (1993, p. 30), is to enact “more or less
intact a program already in effect in another jurisdiction”. Bennett (1991, p. 36)
offers a further policy-learning scenario that involves “emulating the actions of
an exemplar”. For instance, Sweden was long regarded as the exemplar of the
welfare state, Germany and Japan for their economic and management success,
Britain as the leading exponent of privatisation. Prudent policy elites are more
likely to subscribe to another of Bennett’s policy learning scenarios; that of
“searching for the ‘best’” policy. Bennett cites Henig et al. (1988, p. 458) who
recorded more than 20 delegations from foreign governments who visited
Britain to learn about privatisation. Wright (1994, p. 108) claimed that Holland,
Denmark and Norway have studied UK NPM in particular.
For Rose (1993, p. 28) the object of policy learning is to find “a program that
‘works’”, but as Pollitt (1995) has argued, the key problem with NPM is the lack
of adequate evaluation of its effects. Also, the problems remain around the lack
of consensus about what NPM actually is, as well as its general applicability,
 IJPSM beyond a few core techniques. Jennings (1995) argued that the major initiatives
11,6 to government reform are built around shared sets of notions, which lie at the
heart of definitions of NPM, and this set of notions is shared by practitioners
rather than academics. On the other hand, privatisation appears a much more
clear cut operation and “easier to implement”. Hasty policy learning could lead
to the application of NPM techniques in a piece-meal fashion as political and
448 administrative elites struggle to cope with fiscal crisis, demands for greater
efficiency and increasingly sophisticated electorates.

Conclusions
The first strain of NPM that appeared in the 1980s as a response to the
inducements of conservative governments and the demands for budgetary
restraint took place within the context of administrative stability afforded by
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the established Western bureaucracies. Change appeared gradual rather than

radical, and the public sector could borrow and use private management tools
in an ad hoc or piece-meal fashion. However, as Kamensky (1996, p. 249) argued,
“re-inventing government is only one piece of a larger re-examination of
governance in response to changing demographics, technologies, global
competition, and public expectations”. Yet, the response to this re-examination
does not pre-suppose the adoption of market models or post-bureaucracy,
indeed Farazmand (1994, p. 76) has argued that more bureaucratization, not
less, will characterise the organizational response of many countries.
Furthermore, the incoherence of NPM means that any change could be
described as “new” and to conclude NPM has been globalised would be facile.
Certainly, it is interesting why any country engages in a particular reform
strategy but such questions are as much to do with national politics as they are
with the international arena. The globalisation of NPM remains a misnomer.
However, policy transfers of individual NPM techniques (performance
related pay, contractorisation etc.) appear to be on the increase. The language of
NPM is spoken in different parts of the world: quality management in
Singapore and Malaysia, performance appraisal in China, with decentralisation
being the most pervasive term. What appears to exist is a global policy
community that disperses NPM in a piece-meal fashion to receptive political
and administrative elites in individual countries. Academics and consultants
who are part of this community may tell us that we are witnessing a paradigm
shift but the reality for the majority of the countries of the world is the
strengthening and maintenance of bureaucratic government.
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