Advancing the theory and practice of public sector reform through the analysis of social mechanisms

Abstract

The chapter explores how the analysis of social mechanisms may enlighten our understanding of policy processes, notably policies of reform of the public sector. The chapter develops a selective review of published case studies. A number of social mechanisms that may explain public sector reform process dynamics are detected; these include: actor certification; attribution of opportunity and threat; threshold-based behaviour; brokerage; appropriation of mobilising structures; as well as feedback mechanism and decreasing or increasing marginal returns. Mechanisms often operate in concatenation. The chapter argues that the analysis of social mechanisms can fruitfully be combined with the analysis of politico-administrative contextual features as influencing factors, an approach that has in many respectsbecome the common wisdom in the field. The two approaches should be seen as complementary: within this perspective, the analysis of social mechanisms brings the vivid fabric of social processes to the light.