Beyond New Public Management: a Comparative Analysis of the Role of Inter- Organisational Mechanisms in Government Modernisation

A critical issue in government modernisation lies in defining and implementing mechanisms that can facilitate inter-organisational learning among different local authorities. These mechanisms should support bottom-up diffusion of locally-produced innovation, which in driving change in public systems seems to be a more effective way than top-down NPM-steered reforms. In this sense, there's the need to translate NPM general principles and guidelines into concrete facts, by implementing an operationalisation process to convert them into actions that take into account the peculiarities of the various national, regional and local contexts. This operationalisation process occurs during change and innovation processes in public organisations and therefore inter-organisational learning opportunities, tools and mechanisms is what should be developed at every level in public systems, creating vertical and horizontal links through which public authorities may share knowledge and innovations. Which are these inter-organisational mechanisms? How do they function? And what role do they play in innovation diffusion in public sector? This article deals with these questions, discussing first a framework for the study and comprehension of the mechanisms for the diffusion of innovation in the public sector, and then analysing the specific characteristics of inter-organisational learning tools. 1. New Public Management and the transfer and conveyance of innovation: Fundamental concepts – 2. Facilitating inter-organisational learning and the conveyance of innovation – 3. The principal mechanisms of transfer and conveyance of innovation-3.1 Innovation awards – 3.2 Benchmarking projects – 3.3 Partnership agreements and professional services firm networks – 3.4 Personnel mobility policies – 4. Conclusion The 90's witnessed the acceleration, on an international level, of the processes of administrative modernisation in the Public Administrations (PA) in the majority of industrialised countries (Pollit and Bouckeart 2000). The New Public Management (NPM) is the term utilised in current international literature and official documentation to synthesise the paradigm of administrative modernisation (McLaughin et al. 2001; Dawson and Dargie 1999). The NPM defines a theoretical framework on which to base programs for the radical reform of Public Administration systems. As a paradigm, the NPM has been successful in that it is essentially a conceptual synthesis of the modernisation experiences of the PA in diverse national contexts throughout the 1980's. A synthesis and a rationalisation which over time grew to include contributions arising from reflections on other issues which were assailing the public sector in the same period, the most important of which was undoubtedly the debate regarding the more or less …