From Policy to Practice: Operationalising NPM

Abstract

Policy design does not tell the whole story of the reform programme. Its implementation and how it may differ from the original set of measures have to be integrated into the picture. As can be expected from the implementation of such a broad and ambitious administrative reform programme, outcomes from the White Paper did not always match expectations and led to some unanticipated consequences which illustrate the difficulty of operationalising NPM. In this chapter, the focus is on implementation in order to go beyond the rhetoric and evaluate how many of the NPM ideas were actually used in practice at a macro-level.