The Civil Service Response to Modernisation in the Devolved Administrations

Abstract

Since 1999 devolved administrations with elected bodies have been set up in the United Kingdom (Scotland, Wales and, though intermittently suspended for political reasons, Northern Ireland). Because the staff of the administrations remain linked with the British civil service, they are influenced by Britain-wide trends in public management, and especially programmes of modernisation and organisational change. Devolution involves a balance between pro-modernisation forces and of resistance to modernisation, and the three devolved systems show different patterns of response. They use the rhetoric of modernisation, but their strategies tend to be more cautious and politically constrained than at the UK level.