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Abstract

This paper was first presented in the form of the Braibant lecture at the IIAS/DARPG Annual Conference, New Delhi, 12 February 2025. I have amended it slightly to make it suitable for publication in IRAS, but it remains what is essentially an edited speaking note. Please be aware that some sections draw heavily on previous Braibant lectures in order to make comparisons. I have endeavoured to indicate this wherever it occurs. Those who have heard me speak at various international conferences over the last two years will recognise some of my reoccurring themes here as I have sought to gather together a range of attitudes to administrative change and governance.

Keywords

Administrative reform comparative public administration

Introduction

It is a great honour to have been invited to deliver the 2025 Guy Braibant lecture, and I thank the organisers, the Indian Government's Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievance and the International Institute for Administrative Sciences, for the opportunity. It is, however, a little daunting when you observe the list of distinguished previous speakers; it is a list full of outstanding practitioners and academics, not least of whom was Guy Braibant himself, an impressive legal scholar and practitioner as well as an administrator, writer and at one time Director General and then President of IIAS. It is fitting that the lecture series is named after him and if you read the first lecture in this annual series, delivered by Braibant, it is clear just how perspicacious he was and how he distilled many of the existing issues and trends in public management and projected them forward. He was clearly looking towards the next generation of administrative reforms, as well as learning from the past. He recognised the temporal nature of politics and policy and like many French politicians and administrators of his generation, was not seduced by the pretentions of the Anglosphere to have reinvented politics, but sought to learn the lessons and harness them within a French and European context and explore what global lessons, if any, could be drawn.

Aims of the lecture

We can see from the work of successive speakers, that the lecture series has taken a lead from IIAS and gone from being predominantly attuned to Western public administration, to becoming global in its focus. Braibant was given the title, ‘The past and future of public administration’ for his lecture (Braibant, 2002: 333–343). It is similar to this year's. In it he noted several things:

the need to recognise new technologies and how to apply them in public administration;

the need to recognise the singularity of different systems – what works in Chicago may not work in Cape Town for a variety of reasons, one of which is:

the past. We all live in palimpsests. As the great observer of the human condition, the Anglo-Indian writer Ruskin Bond wrote, ‘The past is always with us for it feeds the present’ (2008). It is our interpretation of the past that changes and how we both reimagine and celebrate certain parts of it.

Braibant discussed many of those things we still obsess over:

rule of law;

honesty

transparency; and

efficiency

But of course, these things are discussed in different ways in different countries and at different times. We need to recognise the temporal, cultural, geographical and political nature of public administration. Understanding the relationship between political power and public administration which emerges from this contextual mix is key to understanding and forming the next generation of administrative reform.

Subsequent Braibant speakers, as well as those at political science and public administration conferences over the last three decades, addressed these and returned repeatedly to public administration's role in supporting and protecting the rule of law, both on behalf of citizens and for the state and public service itself (Bourgon, 2007; Fraser-Moleketi, 2012; Kim, 2017; Konig, 2003; Pollitt, 2015).

To summarise some of these:

rule of law;

public service;

integrity, probity and impartiality;

a need for flexibility;

recognise the interaction between politics and policies;

new forms of accountability;

citizen centred services;

value for money;

a skilled and responsive service workforce;

exploration the assault on big government – Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi notes that cuts and privatisation hollow out the state and therefore hollow out democracy; and

politics and economics that are never far apart.

But of course, as noted, all of these are context specific and value for money and the rule of law mean different things in different places.

The late, great Christopher Pollitt once observed, citing directly from the 2013 work of Drechsler, ‘What we had called global public administration is actually western public administration’, and more particularly the Anglosphere. Yet, he argued, what we are currently living through is the end of the domination of the Anglosphere in public management. And it is this that I wish to take as one of the anchoring points for today's lecture, as we explore what could be the next generation of administrative reforms and ask how we could empower citizens.

As noted, for those of you who have kindly attended various talks I have given over the last two years, there will be a recapitulation of some of my central points. But what I seek to do here for the remainder of this lecture is to bring several of these together into a coherent whole and address the main theme of this conference: empowering citizens. Obviously, there is much that I will need to leave out, but I intend to reference previous Braibant speakers and lead off from where their insights have taken us.

As noted there is not the time or space to conduct a global comparison of different systems, so I ask your indulgence to pick up a few illustrative examples to make some general points. First, what do we mean by empowering citizens?

How do we define citizen? In many countries undocumented migrants are not citizens yet occupy that country's public policies and use public services.

What are the rights and duties of citizens under the rule of law and the constitution?

What is the role of public administration in this? The view of ‘the state’ has traditionally been very different in US and British law and academia to that of France, China or North Africa.

Ought the public administration itself be representative? See for example the work of Riccucci and Van Ryzin (2017), Riccucci and Saidel (1997), Johnston (2023), Johnston et al. (2023), Meier (1993), Meier and Bohte (2001), Meier and Hill (2007) and Meier and Nicholson-Crotty (2006) amongst many others and many kinds of contested representations.

What clients of government are deserving of help (Jilke and Tummers, 2018).

You will observe that the title of the talk and the notion of empowering citizens is a contested entity and that's before we get onto the relative roles and relationships between the executive, legislature and judiciary/judges, a fluid ever-shifting series of interactions. Does the rule of law mean the rule of lawyers/judges? If so, where does that leave democracy and accountability? So, context is the key to understanding and to effective action.

Let's begin with East Asia. Pan-Suk Kim, in his Breibant lecture and a range of subsequent publications (Kim, 2017; Kim and Massey, 2024), has argued that East Asian PA research is going beyond the current academic achievements built upon Western PA theories and practices, possibly because much East Asian and in particular Chinese work predates Western PA, sometimes by millennia. The East Asian academic community is making additional synthesizing efforts in recognizing its own Asian contexts, and is building its own theory and considering its own characteristics, separate to (but not isolated from) Western public administration (WPA). It is contributing to the development of new theories based on universal values for the rest of the world.

Chinese PA academia, for example the work of Yu, has broadened into new areas of research such as:

emergency management;

performance evaluation;

e-government;

service-oriented government;

social policy; and

urban management (Yu, 2012, cited in Kim, 2017, and translated into English).

Kim cites Ogden's (1989) proposal that three basic competing values underlie many decisions of the Chinese government:

traditional Chinese culture;

socialism; and

development.

Furthermore, argues Kim, as the political fashions change, the priority assigned to these values also changes. The three values are often shifting in priority and interpretation, depending on how they further Chinese rulers’ goals for China and the Communist Party.

Merit-based recruitment and selection rest comfortably within traditional Chinese values, but a purely merit-based civil service may challenge the socialist value of ideology over expertise. Thus, argues Kim, the development of Chinese civil service reform will reflect such shifting of values and power over the years (Lam and Chan, 1996). His most recent paper brings home the fluid nature of political and cultural influence here (Kim and Massey, 2024). The merit-based system of recruitment evolved in China over many centuries and predates the European use of merit based recruitment by at least three centuries, although it may be much more. Indeed, it was the East India Company and in particular Thomas Babington Macaulay who introduced a Chinese influenced version of the merit system first to India (where traditional Indian approaches probably modified it) and then to Britain and from there to the USA.

Chinese influence travelled not only west, but also east, with Kim noting its impact on Japan and Korea, and subsequently on their public administration research. For example:

historical perspectives on modernization and development;

the bureaucracy and civil service system;

local administration and decentralizatio;

disaster and emergency management;

aging population and social welfare policy; and

a macro-level regime or structural matters including administrative reforms (Akizuki, 2010; Nishio, 1983; Sato, 2001).

Kim has observed that the merit based system has led to:

government staffed by … elite public officials (which) has facilitated the rise of a strong administrative state, but the question of whether it did necessarily improve the quality of democracy in both Korea and Japan remains. Moreover, the advance of the developmental state has helped expand capitalism in both countries, while both governments have spear-headed the post-war economic growth in their respective countries. China, although in a different political system, may eventually face a similar problem as both Japan and Korea have. China's capitalistic socialism would enhance the power of bureaucracy and contribute to the development of state-controlled economies. However, the question of whether such rapid expansion would enhance democratic values remains.

Overall, Kim argues, Japan and Korea are advancing scientific research in the field of public administration. China is also moving quickly to an advanced level in such areas. Chinese, Japanese and Korean PA lead in a number of areas, including agile delivery of public service, but, given the title of this conference and this paper, we need more evidence of how it may develop the empowering of citizens, although work in China and Korea (not forgetting Singapore) on digital government and citizen access gives some clues as to how this may be developed.

Over many years and a large number of publications, Christopher Pollitt wrestled with these questions and sought to establish the nature of the dominance of WPA, which he claimed is now in decline. He argued WPA 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, he argued, leading business schools and international management consultancies, inter-governmental bodies such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (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). In short, universities, global non-governmental organisations (the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, etc.) and major consultancies all gave similar advice to states’ leadership regarding establishing institutions and delivering services and change, such as privatisation, co-creation and digital government. We see the impact of this homogenisation in the roll-out of what came to be known as New Public Management in the 1980s and 1990s, although the phrase is really a re-branding of the rise of managerialist approaches. We also see how damaging it was when introduced into some societies that were simply not structured in terms of public administration and governance for these reforms, in the former Soviet Union for example and several African and Latin American countries (Massey, 2010). Where it did appear to be a success, for example in Singapore, Malaysia and the Republic of Korea, it was because, although the labels remained the same – privatisation, executive agencies, co-production – the content was given a decidedly local interpretation. One size does not fit all!

Pollitt, argued that 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 and theories, especially those from business schools and private management consultancies. Pollitt argues that:

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, 2015). 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.

As I’ve just noted, 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. Australian public service commission, 2007; Gerson, 2020; OECD, 1995). In these regards the OECD was especially influential. A number of governments set up central units to promote reforms in the name of efficiency, effectiveness, quality or just modernization. Pollitt argued, along with others such as Hughes and Kettle, that some national officials found that 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. Christensen and Lægreid, 2001; Hughes, 2003; Kettl, 2005; Lynn, 2006, 2008).

The appeal of generic global, solutions was formidable. Consultancies can 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 according to these consultants, the best solution is already known. Governments export their own (alleged) successes to other countries, especially, but not exclusively, to ex-colonies or countries that are politically or economically dependent on them. Both prestige and commercial gain can be involved in such exports. But the dominance of WPA was never global or absolute, it was largely an illusion.

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. Pollitt again draws on the work of Dreschler to give one spectacular example. None of the Anglosphere states could claim to have had a major treatise on civil service organization written more than a 1000 years ago, but Wang Anshi's text Wan Yan Shu dates from 1058 (see Drechsler, 2013). As Pollitt argues, 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. As I’ve just noted, 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. 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).

Where Western influences may appear to be fairly plain, the actual ideas and practices have been adapted to their new context, 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), or the adoption of Executive Agencies in the Korean civil service. 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). These misgivings stem partly from significant cultural differences. These mean that the assumptions about relationships and practices that are built into most Anglosphere models may simply not fit (Drechsler, 2018, 2019). Equally, and perhaps more interestingly, other cultures may permit the success of approaches that would work much less well in the UK or the USA (e.g. Berman et al., 2013; Park et al., 2013). As I said earlier in this lecture, context in all its manifestations, is everything.

What is to be done?

The OECD in exploring ways of recruiting, organising and training public servants appears not to have moved far from the patterns and models of WPA. And in a similar vein, the UK civil service among others has continued to reform according to the kind of managerialist dynamics outlined above. There is much talk of ‘good governance’ and ‘best practice’, although ‘good practice’ is now the preferred term. But what is good government? The Council of Europe defined good governance in terms of 12 traits:

participation, representation, fair conduct of elections;

responsiveness to citizen demands and needs;

openness and transparency;

rule of law;

ethical conduct;

competence and capacity;

innovation and openness to change;

sustainability and long term orientation;

sound financial management;

human rights, cultural diversity and social cohesion; and

accountability (Council of Europe, 2008).¹

For the most part, these are rooted in WPA and do not draw upon Non-Western Public Administration (NWPA), although each of these traits can be reinterpreted in NWPA ways. The OECD's reports in recent years have also focused on leadership, leadership for reform, not innovation in the sense that Kattel, Drechsler and Karo (2022) analysed it in their recent book on why innovation needs bureaucracy. It is more of a harking back to old style German cameralist approaches aligned with modern managerialism:

focus on leadership capabilities (skills, competencies, behaviour styles) that are necessary to respond to complex policy challenges; and

the policies, processes and tools needed to develop these capabilities and support senior civil servants in using them.

In the UK there are new professional standards attempting to address these concerns. The central civil service has been restructured into the:

policy profession, which supports the government in its role in improving the welfare, security, and prosperity of the nation; and the

operational delivery profession, which is the public face of the Civil Service with over 250,000 members;

strategy – policy professionals solve problems and improve outcomes, working collaboratively with other professions;

change – policy professionals seek to initiate and lead change;

democracy – policy professionals have a key role to play in ensuring democratic account- ability, working effectively with different levels of government to make policy that works for citizens;

delivery – policy professionals also ensure effective delivery of policy, evaluating its impact and adapting as necessary (Cabinet Office, 2021).

Now, a confession: I’ve been researching and teaching this stuff to UK civil servants for decades and even I can’t quite follow all these changes and structures!

It is, I would argue, overly complex and will need to be simplified and streamlined. In other countries we have similar consultancy-induced complexity. It does seem though that the current reforms (2025) in the US are rather dramatic.

These standards exist within the structures of the UK Central civil service, some of which appear at first glance to overlap and repeat themselves:

Specialist professions

○ 28 professions organised into four types ‒ operational delivery;

○ policy;

○ functional professions;

○ specialist professions.

Functional professions

○ planning;

○ planning inspection;

○ science and engineering;

○ tax;

○ veterinary;

○ human resources – aligned to the human resources function;

○ internal audit – aligned to the internal audit function;

○ legal – aligned to the legal function;

○ project delivery – aligned to the project delivery profession;

○ property – aligned to the property profession;

○ operational research – aligned to the analysis function;

○ risk management – aligned to the government finance function (security) aligned to the security profession;

○ social research – aligned to the analysis function; and

○ statistics – aligned to the analysis function.

As noted, it may be argued that this is overly complex and builds in extra bunkers and silos as a barrier to innovation (Hood, 1991; Hood and Lodge, 2006).

We’ve seen that in many countries government is no longer the employer of choice (Bankins and Waterhouse, 2019). States are facing human resource challenges, amongst a host of other challenges because of:

demographic change and a falling birthrate in developed countries (Blau and Meyer, 1987; Burke and Ng, 2006; Henstra and McGowan, 2016; Ng and Johnson, 2015);

millennials’ values and attitudes that form different expectations about work (Lyons and Kuron, 2014; Twenge and Kasser, 2013; Twenge et al., 2010);

the war for talent (Kravariti and Johnston, 2020);

difficulties attracting and recruiting competent personnel, fewer applicants and increasing numbers of vacancies (Australian Public Service Commission, 2007; Ballart and Rico, 2018; Fowler and Birdsall, 2019);

reduced interest because of poor working conditions, low salaries and the retirement of the baby boomer generation (Sievert et al., 2022);

poor bureaucratic reputation (Bankins and Waterhouse, 2019);

workload burdens and stress (Fernandez-i-Marín et al., 2023); and

neoliberal reforms (Hinna et al., 2021).

Many of the issues facing governments around the globe may be described as wicked problems (Johnston and Massey, 2024; Massey, 2019, 2021, 2022; Massey and Johnston, 2016). There is no space to discuss this fairly well-trodden approach here, but to ask what to do about them. These are pointing towards the next generation of administrative reforms. The Australian Public Service Commission has suggested public servants need:

to be holistic in their approach not partial or linear in thinking;

to use innovative and flexible approaches, to blur the traditional distinction between policy development and programmes implementation as one way of making it easier to modify policies in the light of experience about what works and what doesn’t, and focussing on creative learning organisations;

to have the ability to work across agency boundaries – wicked problems go beyond the capacity of any one organisation to understand and respond to;

to increase understanding and stimulate a debate on the application of the accountability framework (2007).

Does the future involve more incorporation of citizens into making and delivering policy and if so how can we structure this? Much of Rod Dacombe's work explores effectively engaging stakeholders and citizens in understanding the policy problems at ‘street level’ in their own society and then identifying possible solutions (for example, 2010; 2021).

We can use theories by, among many others, Carole Pateman (1975), Archon Fung (2004) and Kooiman (1993) to incorporate deliberative and participatory democracy. Using a range of these theories we can see there are three broad justifications for increasing citizen participation in governance:²

First, much of the literature suggests that participation should be valued because it is inherently good. It provides a set of democratic benefits which are better for society than if policy decisions were made by officials in isolation. There are a range of initiatives around the world to explore this. The United Nations annual innovation/public service awards³ select a range of these each year to showcase precisely these kinds of initiatives and the work of Flemish Public Policy academics at the University of Ghent led by Bram Verschuere has engaged in impactful research in terms of giving access to elderly and excluded groups.

Second, citizen control over policy – the notion that participation increases the ability of citizens to control the actions of government and focus policy decisions on the most important areas. So this is a transparency and accountability perspective.

And, finally, education – that by engaging in policy (with multi-level government and third sector agencies), citizens become more knowledgeable, both on the particular areas they are involved in and in the mechanics and practicalities of government (for example, Verschuere 2009).

The literature on participatory and deliberative governance takes as its focus a range of democratic innovations, such as organisations that have been designed to increase citizen participation in the political decision-making process. Democratic innovations like this exist outside of the electoral process. This is about policy. They may also be framed as somewhat radical in nature, moving beyond the conventional.

We can see from this that we are wrestling with the notion of accountability within the policy process and public administration. There are different kinds of accountability and they vary once again according to political and cultural context.

answerability or explanatory accountability;

amendatory accountability – change ‘bad’ things;

redress of grievance – put right wrongs; and

sanctions – punish poor behaviour/poor performance (Massey and Pyper, 2005).

Of these redress of grievance is the most profound and most ancient in terms of written law in the Anglosphere and much of the world beyond. It goes back to the ancient Saxons and from them through ancient and modern England and then the UK, and was a foundational element of the US War of Independence and its subsequent constitution. It structures the relationship between politics and the administrative state, between the legislature and the executive, between the citizens and the government. It is the infrequently discussed core of good governance and is central to reform.

Conclusion

And so what we have is the need to understand where we are and plan for the future through three words:

penumbra – the shadows and shading between light and dark – few things are binary;

palimpsest – nothing in society begins on a plain piece of paper or velum; and

egregore – this is more than a paradigm, it is the collective mind of a community within which paradigms, data, customs, laws and history are understood (Massey, 2019).

Let us give the last word to Christopher Pollitt, taken from a letter he wrote to me just before he died and after he had agreed we could call our best article in IRAS annually after him: the Christopher Pollitt award for the best article. ⁴ He wrote:

My … aim is to say something about the field of scholarship in which I have spent three quarters of my adult working life. My belief is that, in parts of Europe at least, it is in some peril, and that we have a role to play. An EGPA survey and interview conceived by Geert Bouckaert was carried out … and showed that a strong majority of PA scholars believed both in the scientific study of the subject AND in its values and ethic of improved services for citizens from respected, well-trained and remunerated public servants. As do I. Yet today, we face rising populism, nationalism and racism. The authority, expertise and impartiality of civil servants is under attack on all sides, but what we see in academic PA is too often a retreat into scholasticism or, at the other extreme, a kind of highbrow management consultancy. Of course we need both these types, but we also need a solid core of PA scholars who practice independent, high-quality critical analysis of big things which are happening now and will happen in future (climate change, demographic change, migration). Scholars who will build and find funding for ambitious projects aimed at those issues, simultaneously growing networks of concerned scholars across disciplines and fields. And – most importantly – who communicate, not only in learned journals, but also on websites and blogs, radio and TV and the press. Many citizens really are interested in why their schools are failing or their police are corrupt, and far less so in what celebrity politicians said to each other yesterday. We should be a respected voice addressed to that appetite. (Bouckaert and Massey, 2018).

I don’t think I could put it any better than that.

Thank you.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Andrew Massey

Andrew Massey is Emeritus Professor of Government. His area of research on comparative public policy and administration,focusing on good governance.

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