Administrations in Transition – Modernisation of Public Administration in Four Countries: Portugal, the Netherlands, Ireland and France

Also available in French
The European governments have embarked on important reforms for their public administrations in the course of the last two decades.
This present work, resulting from a research project commissioned by the Belgian Policy Research Department, brings together four national studies dealing with the processes of administrative reform in Portugal, the Netherlands, Ireland and France.
Research on the key factors for the success of the reforms constitutes a common thread in the four studies.
Rather than take a general approach to modernisation processes, the four national studies focus on the concrete and practical reforms already successfully implemented or in progress. This approach reveals a vast range of reforms, such as, for example, the participation of citizens, the civil services and civil society in the reform process in Portugal, the creation of a corps of senior civil servants in the Netherlands, the Strategic Management Initiative (SMI) in Ireland as well as the evaluation of public policy in France.
Through this publication EIPA hopes to enrich the on-going debate on the modernisation of public administration with an anthology of European experiences.