Explaining reforms: post-New Public Management myths or political realities? Social housing delivery in England and France1
| DOI | 10.1177/0020852317746223 |
| Date | 01 March 2019 |
| Author | Martin Laffin |
| Published date | 01 March 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue Articles |
Review of
Administrative
Article
Sciences
International Review of
Explaining reforms:
Administrative Sciences
2019, Vol. 85(1) 45–61
!
post-New Public
The Author(s) 2018
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Management myths or
DOI: 10.1177/0020852317746223
journals.sagepub.com/home/ras
political realities? Social
housing delivery in
England and France
Martin Laffin
School of Business and Management, Queen Mary University
of London, UK
Abstract
This article examines the assumption that recent reforms in social and public services
can be understood as a transition from New Public Management to post-New Public
Management. English and French social housing delivery are selected as two cases
in which to test out this assumption, for ostensibly these delivery structures share
significant cross-national, post-NPM similarities – a movement towards a more
‘enabling’ or steering role for central government, the creation of coordinating agen-
cies, ‘decentralization’ initiatives, the extensive use of public–private arrangements to
finance social housing and the involvement of a wide range of extra- and semi-
governmental organizations. However, further investigation reveals that these reforms
of delivery structures have not been predominantly driven by an unfolding post-NPM
managerial or governance logic as the thesis assumes. Rather the reforms have been
driven by the partisan electoral and ideological goals of central government policy-
makers within the context of institutional legacies and entrenched social values.
1Paper prepared for special issue on ‘Post-NPM: myth, model, not meaningful at all? Exploring social service
reforms in Europe’, edited by Tanja Klenk and Renate Reiter.
Corresponding author:
Martin Laffin, Professor of Public Policy and Management, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road,
London E1 4NS, UK.
Email: m.laffin@qmul.ac.uk
46
International Review of Administrative Sciences 85(1)
Points for practitioners
New Public Management and post-New Public Management have become the conven-
tional wisdom on administrative reforms particularly in a comparative context.
This article argues that these ideas reflect an impoverished understanding of public
administration given that they assume that change occurs predominantly through the
unfolding of managerial and/or governance logics. These logics exclude the critical role
of the political parties and other socio-political factors, such as urban unrest, in driving
change. This Anglo-French analysis of social housing delivery demonstrates the signif-
icance of these political factors in how policymakers define social problems, re-design
and implement social housing service delivery systems.
Keywords
central
government,
central–local
relations,
governance,
local
government,
public–private partnerships, social housing
Introduction
New Public Management (NPM) and post-New Public Management (post-NPM)
have been widely applied to explain recent European reforms as the editors of this
special issue point out (Klenk and Reiter, this issue). Yet, despite their ubiquity in
the literature, these two ideas remain poorly defined as explanatory accounts of
public management change. This article takes its cue from the editors to test out
claims that recent public management changes reflect a transition from NPM to
post-NPM. The exponents of the post-NPM thesis assume that this transition
results from the unfolding of a managerial logic or/and governance logic
whereby policymakers have become disillusioned with the NPM model and
sought to organize and manage public services in a new, post-NPM way. They
argue that policymakers are increasingly recognizing the shortcomings of NPM in
practice – that NPM is too focused on the single organization, neglects the wider,
horizontal inter-organizational context, has led to fragmented service delivery
chains and so contributed to poor, horizontal communication and informational
deficiencies, and defines the user too narrowly as a ‘customer’. Consequently,
policymakers have turned, or are turning, to a post-NPM model which stresses
inter-organizational or lateral relationships, and decentralization; and issues of
coordination or ‘joined-up’ government; and questions narrow definitions of the
public service user (Klenk and Reiter, this issue).
This article questions this post-NPM thesis. The underlying argument is that
public administration research should go beyond the narrow focus of many public
administration studies on technocratic and managerial explanations and investi-
gate how partisan interests, other political interests, economic pressures in the
form of public sector austerity, and social events, like civil unrest, drive public
Laffin
47
policy and public management reform. The NPM and post-NPM literatures do
reference political interests but usually assign them very general agency. Specific
reforms or reorganizations, such as those involving agencification and decentral-
ization, are explained in terms of the influence of NPM or post-NPM ideas on
politicians and bureaucrats but the precise mechanisms are seldom specified.
One reason for the failure to go beyond generalized, managerial explanations is
that the literature generally focuses on generic public management reforms and
overlooks substantive policy issues which throw up significant redistributive ques-
tions. In contrast, this study focuses on a substantive policy area, that of social
housing delivery, in which critical redistributive issues are at stake. Thus the study
is able to show specifically how elected politicians’ party and ideological interests
have led them to modify and create housing delivery structures. It also points out
that Network Governance (NG), which stresses similar changes to the post-NPM
thesis, has similar explanatory limitations. NG maintains that the policy initiative
in contemporary society has shifted decisively to networks of actors and away from
political parties and service delivery bureaucracies. For instance, Sørensen and
Torfing (2007: 3) maintain that ‘the formulation and implementation of public
policy increasingly takes place in and through interactive forms of governance,
involving a plurality of public, semi-public and private actors’ and that ‘the state is
increasingly “de-governmentalized” as it no longer monopolizes the governing of
the general well-being of the population’.
The context and characteristics of English and French housing
The English and French social housing delivery systems have been selected as two
cases in which to compare explanations in terms of managerial logics versus the
electoral and ideological logics of party politics. England and France are Western
European countries of comparable population size and presently have a similar
housing tenure pattern (England, rather than the UK, has been selected as after the
1999 devolution, significant differences in housing and other policies have emerged
between England and the three devolved UK nations). Both are centralized coun-
tries, but each in its own way. England has relatively few, large local governments
and simple central–local relationships, France has 36,000 local governments and
complex governing levels (le millefeuille territorial), but much stronger, intersecting
central–local political links than in England. In England the strong Westminster
executive can reorganize most local governmental functions without facing serious
obstacles and has a history of so doing on many occasions, although some gover-
nance theorists (e.g. Rhodes, 2007) have argued that self-organizing networks
capable of challenging central government hegemony have emerged to displace
the traditional, hierarchical central–local relationship. In social housing, there
has been a shift away from council provision through housing associations
(see below). However, a housing network – including the housing associations,
their trade body (the National Housing Federation) and the professional body
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International Review of Administrative Sciences 85(1)
(the Chartered Institute of Housing) – exists but it remains on the policy margins
(Laffin, 2013).
In contrast, French central policymakers, in common with many southern
European countries, are more constrained by institutional, corporatist-type struc-
tures in reorganizing decentralized government and local service delivery (Ongaro,
2009: 250), and not least by local politicians who can veto reform through the
Senate and multiple office-holding (the latter has been largely eliminated from
2017). Central government has close, neo-corporatist relations with key organisa-
tions within society: ‘Through subsidizing voluntary associations, trade unions and
professional associations, public authorities (central and sub-national government)
bring social organizations into their public policy orbit’ (Cole, 2008: 140). Thus the
peak housing body, L’Union sociale pour l’habitat (USH) (USH, 2015), represents
social housing providers and related organizations, has a pact with government
and works closely with policymakers through the government-led National
Mobilization Committee and other channels; although these partnerships can
often resemble central co-optation, the expectations for consultation generated
often slow centrally initiated change (Ongaro, 2009: 250). But this housing part-
nership bears little resemblance to a governance network as it is ‘very hermetic’
and exclusionary (Driant and Li, 2012: 95). Rather these ‘institutionalised social
partnerships’ (Cole, 2008: 140) are rooted in French political culture and...
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