From governing society to governing itself: The French administrative state and the quest for managerial recentralization

Abstract

Why has the wave of new public management (NPM) reforms that swept the OECD world in the past 25 years been slower to take hold in France than elsewhere? Did it take the election of a new president who highlighted his distance from France's traditional bureaucratic elite to break the inertia of the French administration and bring civil servants to adopt a less legalistic and more business-like approach to public management? The idea that the French bureaucracy is ‘unreformable’ is a myth that Philippe Bezes successfully debunks in his brilliant book, Reinventer l’Etat. Les reformes de l’administration francaise (1962–2008). Going beyond the usual exercise of assessing public management reform in terms of success or failure, Bezes takes on key theoretical issues regarding institutional change and stability in political science. Situating particular moments of reform in a sequence of events and processes unfolding over time provides ample evidence of a substantial shift toward a neo-managerial model of state administration, one that crystallizes the state's growing concern for taking ‘care of itself’.