The “steering state” model: The emergence of a new organizational form in the French Public Administration

Abstract

Since the 1990s, a new organizational form of the administrative system in France has been steadily redefining relations between central administrations and local units of the state. Labelled "the steering state" or the "managerial state", this new paradigm hinges on separating the strategic functions of steering and controlling the state from the operational functions of execution and policy implementation. The making of this new form of state organization involves two parallel processes: political and cognitive. For one thing, the adoption of concrete measures for "government at distance" results from power struggles between three major ministries (the ministries of the Interior, Budget and Civil Service). For another, a new legitimate "categorization of the state" is being formed in the major committees involved in the reform process of the 1990s; it is carried forward by top civil servants and inspired by the ideas of New Public Management.

Citizens' Contrasting Aspirations About Their Political System: Entrustment, Participation, Identification and Control

“…The French State is judged as too costly, "too generous and too social" (Christian, male, 71, former military officer) and other citizens as prone to "abuse" the generosity of the State. This goes hand in hand with the notion of "managerial, " or "steering state" coined by specialists of public policy (Clarke and Newman, 1997;Bezès, 2007).…”

Understanding Organizational Reforms in the Modern State: Specialization and Integration in Norway and France

“…Because all reorganizational issues are linked and interdependent, reform design, when it emerges, is more likely to be cross‐ministerial and transversal than sector based. This is all the more likely as centripetal and centralist administrative actors—the Finance, Interior/Home Office, and Civil Service ministries—are more powerful actors (Bezes 2007) in the French context than their corresponding ministries in the Norwegian system. These actors have been eager to impose their transversal and general views on the whole system.…”

“…Within the constraints spell out by external pressures, the existing national historical-institutional context and different constitutional features, political leaders have varying amount of leeway to launch and implement organizational reforms. Many researches emphasize this crucial weight of political strategies in the choices for agencies Van Thiel 2004;Yesilkagit and Christensen 2010), while this political dimension has been less identified in mergers (for an exception, Bezes andLe Lidec 2010, 2011) where dominant explanations have insisted in the objectives of reinforcing coordination. The political administrative executives' identities, resources, and capacity for rational calculation and political control are to a great extent constrained, but also enabled, by environmental and historical-institutional features.…”

“…Contrary to their Norwegian counterparts, French political reformers have been consistently reluctant to support organizational choices devolving functions to authorities further away from political control. Significantly, the various official commissions for reforming the state, created in the 1990s, never strongly advocated the idea of differentiating the French administration into autonomous administrative units or agencies (Bezes 2007), while other NPM recipes were more popular. Generally speaking, French politicians have been hostile to every organizational change likely to decrease their political control.…”

Performance measurement as a policy instrument

“…Quantifying approaches go well beyond neoliberalism and it can be difficult to distinguish between the different logics at work. The emergence of managerial practices classified under the term 'new public management' can also be explained by the strategies of bureaucratic elites struggling to regain their capacity to inspire action (Bezes 2007). Reinforcing bureaucracy and rationalization is not necessarily linked to neoliberalism; this does not exclude one specific type of neoliberal instrumentation.…”