Agencification Processes and Agency Governance: Organizational Innovation at a Global Scale?

Abstract

During the last two decades the structuring and functioning of the public sector has undergone major shifts from a centralized and consolidated public sector to a decentralized, structurally devolved and ‘autonomizing’ public sector, including the disconnection of policy design, implementation and evaluation (OECD 2002; Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011; Christensen and Lægreid 2006). Systems of public administration have been disaggregated into a multitude of different kinds of (semi-)autonomous organizations, denoted as ‘agencies’ or ‘quangos’ (Flinders and Smith 1999; Pollitt and Talbot 2004). This disaggregation through ‘agencification’ is the result of a process of vertical and horizontal specialization, based on geography as well as different types of purposes, tasks, customer groups or processes (Christensen et al. 2007; Roness 2007). In this process of agencification and autonomization, the responsibilities and autonomy of public organizations are redefined (structural aspect). Moreover, the way in which they are controlled by government, including the mechanisms of accountability, is redesigned — mostly from ex ante to ex post , and from input-based to result-based rationales (functional aspect). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.