La reconfiguration de l'administration centrale

Abstract

<titre>Reconfiguring Central Administration Jacques Chevallier </titre> The article looks at how French central administration is slowly and patiently being reorganized in an effort to remedy the three major dysfunctions from which its structures have traditionally suffered&#160;: the continual regrouping of ministries, the excessive enlargement in staff and functions of ministerial cabinets, and the heterogeneity of the internal organization of ministries. With the emergence of new needs and criteria for action, remedies applied in the 60s &#8212; fusion of ministries and recourse to ministerial secretaries-general &#8212; did not last long. The reorientation of the state around strategic functions and the carrying out of the subsidiarity principle in fact forced central administration into a radical revision of its role, all the more necessary due to the increasing importance of the efficiency standard for public action and its main concrete manifestation, the 2001 Finance Act. Successive reforms, introduced since the beginning of the 1990s have undeniably had positive effects, such as the generalization of the distinction between strategic and operational functions and the reorganization of certain services (regrouping of directorates and reappearance of ministerial secretaries-general). Two important difficulties nonetheless persist&#160;: the first is the force of inertia of the traditional organizational rationale; the second is the difficult coexistence between this latter, based on a management approach, and the organisational rationale issuing from recent reforms and based on planning.