Since the end of the Second World War, and particularly since 1989, International Organizations (IOs) have played an increasingly visible role in international public policy transfer processes. Today, these transfers are no longer limited to the economic and financial fields but also apply to government expertise and practices that used to fall under State sovereignty. Though recent, the internationalization of State reform is a historically momentous development, as it challenges multilateral actors to evidence external legitimate models or construct them in an area that had once contributed to defining State power. This reform ambition, previously a cornerstone of the New Public Management movement, is now at the heart of the Good Governance principle.
Since the creation of the PUMA (Public Management Committee) in 1990, the OECD has been considered as a key actor in the internationalization of expertise on state reform, first through its abundant written production, but also due to its central role in the dissemination of expertise and the building of networks and expert organizations. How does the OECD ensure the adaptability of its expertise to various national and local contexts? Are its recommendations and activities “neutral” or are they marked ideologically? Most authors emphasize the role played by the PUMA (created in 1989) in the diffusion of models inspired by the New Public Management. They deduce that the PUMA Secretariat was ideologically conducted or that it adopted a strictly economically-oriented framework on public administration and services.
Leaving aside preconceptions on the purported hegemonic action of the OECD, our research retraces the genesis and development of the OECD’s involvement in the field of public administration. Based on archival sources and interviews, our study first shows, that unlike what might have been expected, the founders of PUMA were not ideologically oriented, nor economists by training. Their commitment to the legitimization of the “administrative issue” inside the OECD is best explained by strategic and organizational reasons. The research secondly broadens the perspective. To understand the adoption of NPM-inspired models of public administration by PUMA, it examines the importance of the interaction between the PUMA’s Secretariat and the member states’ national delegates, as well as of a phenomenon of “contextual saliency”, linked to the administrative reforms, which were under way in some of the most influent member countries from that time.
