Programme : “Administrative Mergers and Reorganisations in Europe”, 26th September 2008
French Political Science Association (AFSP)
Pluri-annual Working Group on
« Comparative Political Science of Public Administration »
(dir.: A. Cole & J.-M. Eymeri-Douzans)
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“Administrative Mergers and Reorganisations in Europe”
Second Seminar: 26th September 2008
Laboratory of the Social Sciences of Polity (LaSSP) –
Institute of Political Studies (IEP) of Toulouse, ‘Salle du Conseil’
Organizers: Julie Gervais & J.-M. Eymeri-Douzans
The importance of hierarchy and specialisation in large scale organisations leads to an orderly arrangement of units, both functionally and hierarchically distinctive. In all the European Union Member States, and since a long time ago, this Weberian process of differentiation/specialisation of the tasks of government (being defined as a politico-administrative set of activities) has lead to a common pattern in which the “core executive” of the State is divided into ministerial departments or ministries, subdivided themselves into directorates-general (directions d’administration centrale, divisions, Abteilung, etc.). This ancient departmentalisation is an important feature of public sector architecture and therefore the consequences of such a structuration in terms of functioning of the State machinery are an important issue for administrative reform programmes.
However the restructuring of public organisations is seldom investigated by scholars, especially among French political scientists. One explanation for this relative paucity of recent research in that domain may rely on the fact that such reshaping of the bureaucratic apparatus and “jeux d’organigrammes” (playing with organisational charts) are an ancient technique of government, which lack the attractiveness of novelty, unlike New Public Management reforms which have caused a lot of ink to flow among public administration academics. Moreover, administrative reshaping reforms which have occurred in the past two decades have often been hastily analysed as dependent variables and consequences of the worldwide diffusion of NPM.
On the contrary to that oversimplified thesis, we would like to explore within the present project the consequences of the observation that these organisational restructuring, from a comparative stance – comparing either various countries or different public sectors –, do not necessarily form the standardised output that would stem from a one and only consistent doctrine. Indeed, the two main tendencies followed by EU Member States as regards administrative reorganisations are rather contradictory. On the one hand, there has been a well-known movement towards intensive “agencification” (especially in the United Kingdom with the multiplication of Executive Agencies and “quangos” within the “Next Steps” program during the 80s, or in The Netherlands). This trend has been much less successful in France, for example, where it has been limited to very peculiar sectors such as health or food safety (creation, e.g., of the Agence Française de Sécurité Sanitaire et Alimentaire, AFSSA), and in view of strengthening (and not weakening) the role of “the State” in these politically sensitive domains. Such a trend towards downsized and tight-focused ministries and more or less autonomous and specialised agencies in charge of managing policy implementation and delivering public services under the pressure of a supposedly increased accountability can be analysed as a form of functional deconcentration, or even decentralisation. But, on the other hand, one of the usual forms of administrative reorganisation consists in an opposite trend towards the setting-up of vast “super-ministries” supposedly omniscient and all-powerful, whose creation is the result of the merger of various ministries, services, entities or grands corps. Such a trend can be observed in nowadays France as in other Member States.
It is worth underlying that the shift from one of these trends to the opposite has been observed within the same country at different periods of time. This phenomenon is topical in the UK, where there was during the 60s and 70s a large consensus among the two main political parties in favour of great and broad-scoped ministries, before Margaret Thatcher’s Government swung the pendulum in favour of slimmed-down core ministries, focused on strategic missions and surrounded by various executive agencies. A few years later, the Blair government swung back again, criticising the excessive fragmentation and implementing ‘joined-up’ government in order to solve coordination problems created by the multiplication of agencies. But these two trends also coexist in some countries within one single period, as it is the case in France where some specialised agencies have been created next door to massive super-ministries such as the Ministère de l’Ecologie, de l’Energie, du Développement durable et de l’Aménagement du territoire, or at the same time as mergers concerning large administrative entities such as the Direction générale des impôts (DGI) and the Direction générale de la comptabilité publique (DGCP), or the Agence nationale pour l’emploi (ANPE) and the Assedic network, while the the enormous Ministry for Economic Growth, Industry and Finance (called “Bercy” after its location in Paris) is being officially divided into two distinct entities.
It goes without saying that these opposite administrative reorganisations are of course justified by similar policy narratives related to the same rhetoric of the neo-manageralist “one best way”. It is always in reference to the same “three Es” (economies-efficiency-effectiveness) and in order to deliver “better-value-for-money” services to the public that those in power in our European states conduct either projects intending to merge administrative entities, or projects which fragmentise the public sector into multiple one-purpose agencies, or even reforms of territorial decentralisation/devolution to regional and local governments.
Therefore, an interpretation of these phenomena focusing on the effects of the “doctrine” of generic NPM impedes a real understanding of such apparently contradictory evolutions. Quite differently, this seminar will analyse a selection of European case studies in a comparative perspective, in order to better understand what is concretely at stake in these administrative reorganisations. By doing so, we intend to add a modest contribution to the ongoing discussions within our discipline as regards the contemporary “re-compositions” of the state in Europe.
As political scientists and not jurists, we will of course pay prior attention, while examining these issues, to the existing yet evolving “configurations” of power, to the rivalries, turf wars and administrative struggles, and to their consequences on the civil servants, and their modes of thinking and behaving at work. As a matter of fact, public agents appear to be both actors (either or alternatively initiators or opponents) who try to adjust the content of these reforms to their collective strategies and interests, and/but also the main targets and even the major “victims” of these organisational “re-compositions”.
The following questions will therefore frame this second seminar:
Ø What are the different types of concrete underlying rationale of administrative reorganisations in the European countries under observation?
Ø What are the policy rhetoric (or narratives) mobilised to justify and legitimise these reorganisations? What is (and what is not) explicitly rooted into NPM discourse?
Ø Under which conditions and to what extent do these restructuring have sustainable effects on the state apparatus?
Ø How do the multi-level structure of government, especially within federal states (Germany, Belgium, or regionalised (Spain) or “dual” states (UK) influence that type of reforms?
Ø What are the consequences of such reforms on civil servants’ careers, professional identity and administrative cultures?
Ø Etc.
Programme of the Seminar
English and French will be the two working languages of the seminar, which will be scheduled as followed:
First session: Three new case studies
Ø Chair: Alistair Cole, University of Cardiff, invited to the IEP of Toulouse ;
Ø Discussant: Jon Pierre, University of Gothenburg.
- 9.00 – 9.30: Introduction (Julie Gervais, LSE-Triangle & J.-M. Eymeri-Douzans, LaSSP-IEP).
- 9.30 – 10.15: « Spanish Ministerial Reorganisations: From Bureaucratic Functional Divisions to Republican Views of Society? » (Salvador Parrado-Diez, Spanish Distance Learning University of Madrid).
- 10.15 – 10.30: Coffee break.
- 10.30 - 11.15: « Fusions de corps au MEDAD : les recompositions néo-managérialistes de "l’Etat ingénieur" français » (Julie Gervais, LSE-Triangle).
- 11.15- 12.15: Discussion (Jon Pierre).
- 12.15- 12.45: Question time between the floor and all participants.
Second session: Discussion forum
- 14.30 – 17.00: General discussion between all the participants
Ø Chair : Jon Pierre, University of Gothenburg
- Tobias Bach (& Werner Jann), University of Potsdam;
- Alistair Cole, University of Cardiff;
- J.-M. Eymeri-Douzans, LaSSP-IEP of Toulouse;
- Julie Gervais, LSE-Triangle;
- Julien Meimon, CERAPS-LaSSP partner;
- Edward Page, London School of Economics (to be confirmed);
- Salvador Parrado-Diez, Spanish Distance Learning University of Madrid;
- Christian de Visscher, AURAP- Catholic University of Louvain (UCL).
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