Auditing as Governing: Administrative traditions and auditing logics in Sweden, Norway, Australia, and New Zealand

Auditing—ensuring that public resources are spent appropriately, efficiently and in accordance with political decisions—has always been a vital concern for governments. The reforms that took place with the rise of the new public management (NPM) doctrine in the 1980s and 90s was, however, new in its scope and form. By this reform agenda, sustained by domestic as well as international actors such as the OECD’s public management reform sector, the IMF, and the World Bank, auditing went from being a tool to see “where the money goes” to auditing as governing, or auditing as a way of steering and managing public organizations as well as individual employee performance. In order to deepen the understanding of the rapid audit expansion and the critique that has followed upon it, this paper explores how auditing has developed as a tool for governing in the public sector in four countries with different administrative cultures; Sweden, Norway, Australia, and New Zealand, from the 1990s and onwards. Combining organization theory and historical institutionalism, the paper focuses on supreme audit institutions and analyzes the processes by which auditing policies and practices evolve and integrate over time, as well as how these changes alter the myths and symbolic representations of auditing. In doing this, it demonstrates the impact and consequences of administrative traditions as well as the process of administrative convergence, i.e. how countries learn from each other’s experiences and how they adjust these reforms to their own national settings.