The long and winding road towards the EU policy of support to Member States public administration reform: History (2000–2021) and prospects
| Published date | 01 January 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/09520767221117689 |
| Author | Edoardo Ongaro |
| Date | 01 January 2024 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Public Policy and Administration
2024, Vol. 39(1) 3–26
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/09520767221117689
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The long and winding road
towards the EU policy of
support to Member States
public administration reform:
History (2000–2021) and
prospects
Edoardo Ongaro
Faculty of Business and Law, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
Abstract
This paper provides an account of how the European Union (EU), and notably the
European Commission (EC), has become an actor in its own right in the field of the
reform of administration and public services management in Europe, by developing an
approach to support Member States in their initiatives to improve public administration
and public services. We qualify this process –occurred over the period 2000-2021, with a
tremendous acceleration in the second decade –as a twofold paradigmatic change:
because (i) this is a novel field of action for the EU itself; and because (ii) the very logic
driving the EU role shifted dramatically from a logic of conditionality (or compliance with
aspects of the acquis) in the early phase to a radically different logic of enabling and
facilitating administrative reforms, on the ground, in a later phase and prospectively. We
interpret the paradigmatic shift that has occurred through a combination of theoretical
perspectives: policy learning; policy entrepreneurship within the Commission; the
opening of an opportunity window for policy change to occur; and the consolidation of a
new policy sub-system in the field. We deem this change to constitute a step forward in
the process of European integration.
Keywords
Europeanisation, European integration, EU-driven public sector reform, multi-level
governance, policy entrepreneurship, public administration reform
Corresponding author:
Edoardo Ongaro, The Faculty of Business and Law, The Open University, The Open University Business
School, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK.
Email: edoardo.ongaro@open.ac.uk
Introduction and rationale
A twofold paradigmatic shift occurred in the governance of the European Union (EU) as
regards the reform of public administration in the Member States and across the European
administrative system (a political science notion which we use to refer to the admin-
istrative dimension of public governance in the EU, following Bauer and Trondal, 2015).
Over the course of two decades, the EU and notably the European Commission (EC), has
become an actor in its own right in the field of administrative reform and public
management, by developing a targeted approach of support to the Member States in their
initiatives to improve public administration and public services management, which we
may label the EU policy for support to public administration reform. In this paper, we
identify such change to have occurred over two decades; the seminal causes for change
were laid in the decade 2000–2010,
1
while change manifested itself in the second decade,
2011–2021.
We qualify this process as a twofold paradigmatic change, both because it involves the
EU supporting the Member States in a novel field of action for the EU itself, and because
the very logic driving the EU shifted dramatically from a logic of conditionality to a
radically different logic of on-the-ground support, facilitation and enablement of ad-
ministrative reforms and public services management development in and by the EU
Member States. The EU intervention in this field was initially fragmentary and different
according to the sector and funding line supporting it, and for some Member States, it
occurred notably through loans that were provided to countries which had run into fiscal
sustainability problems on strict fiscal, financial, and structural reform conditions (which
included reforms of the public sector). The clearest examples of a fiscal-based approach
can be identified as Greece (Kickert and Ongaro, 2019a,2019b;Hardiman et al., 2019;
Spanou, 2020) and Cyprus.
2
The EU approach later took a radically different stance:
under circumstances of a lower degree of urgency and based on learning from the Greek
experience, the intervention of the EU moved towards supporting cross-cutting mod-
ernization of the administrative system as a whole. This “new”role for the EC, and more
generally for the EU, was institutionalized notably with the establishment of Directorate-
General for Structural Reform Support (SRSS).
3
If the former shift –that is, the EU
acquiring a de facto role in Member States’reform of public administration - has already
been investigated in the scientific literature (see Ongaro and Kickert, 2020), the latter
development, which manifests itself in the EU having adopted a supporting, facilitating
and enabling role rather than a conditionality-driven role, is under-investigated: it is this
latter development (which has not, to our knowledge, so far been examined in the
scientific literature) which is accounted for in this paper.
As regards the process whereby the EU acquired a role in the Member States’reform of
public administration, Ongaro and Kickert, in their introduction to a special issue
published in the journal Public Policy and Administration devoted to the study of the
influence of the EU on administrative reforms in the EU Member States under conditions
of economic and fiscal crisis during the 2010s, minted the notion of EU-driven Public
Sector Reforms to capture the phenomenon of a key role played by the EU in some
Member States in the dynamics of public sector reforms at large and administrative
4Public Policy and Administration 39(1)
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