“Explorando una conversión. La Nueva Gestión Pública en la Organización para la Cooperación y el Desarrollo Económicos (OCDE), entre 1970 y 1980 »

Résumé 0

Though recent, the internationalization of State reform is a historically momentous development, as it challenges multilateral actors to evidence external legitimate models or construct them in an area that had once contributed to defi ning State power. This reform ambition, previously a cornerstone of the New Public Management movement, is now at the heart of the Good Governance principle. Through the PUMA (Public Management Committee), the OECD is considered as a key actor in the internationalization of expertise on State reform. More specifi cally, most authors emphasize the role played by the PUMA (created in 1989) in the diff usion of models inspired by the New Public Management. They deduce that the PUMA Secretariat was ideologically conducted or that it adopted a strictly economically-oriented framework on public administration and services. Leaving aside preconceptions on the purported hegemonic action of the OECD, the present research retraces the genesis and development of the OECD’s involvement in the fi eld of public administration. Based on archival sources and interviews, the study fi rst shows, that unlike what might have been expected, the founders of PUMA were not ideologically oriented, nor economists by training. Their commitment to the legitimization of the “administrative issue” inside the OECD is best explained by strategic and organizational reasons. The research secondly broadens the perspective. To understand the adoption of NPM-inspired models of public administration by PUMA, it examines the importance of the interaction between the PUMA’s Secretariat and the member states’ national delegates, as well as of a phenomenon of “contextual saliency”, linked to the administrative reforms, which were under way in some of the most infl uent member countries from that time.