How can administrative reforms be better adopted?
Due to the recent financial crisis, governments are trying even harder to implement administrative and managerial innovations. And they are looking at how other governments are managing their financial and human resources. But how do administrative reforms – where change takes place despite resistance to it – spread from one country to another in the developed world? Research and literature on this topic has until recently been very limited. The 'Diffusion of administrative and regulatory innovations in OECD and EU member states' (Polisinnovations) project set out to help fill this gap in our knowledge. Team members used a mixed-method approach that included qualitative analysis for tracking the process of institutionalisation and event history analysis. The latter was based on a dataset covering 38 countries from 1968 to 2006. Study results show that policy diffusion is a multi-faceted process with early adoption a major predictor of the extent of implementation. Other outcomes revealed little evidence of interaction and communication among countries that have adopted the policy based on their learning experience. It would appear that governments do not take up administrative innovations without having implemented similar innovations in the past. The study further showed that adoption of administrative reforms, such as regulatory impact analysis, depends on how they are communicated, transformed and interpreted. However, a major factor is administrative capacity – the ability of governments to identify and overcome any problems. Polisinnovations work showed that the latter leads to better performance in implementing innovations.
