Exporting policy models: The role of international governmental organizations

An issue of increasing recent interest in the fields of policy analysis and public
administration has been the spread of certain ideas about governance and administration around the world, particularly what has been termed the new public management (NPM).The preoccupation with NPM has obscured the fact that there is a much larger variety of public management practices and theories than just NPM that have rapidly been adopted around the world, but the central question remains the same: what are the channels, mechanisms, and dynamics of what appears to be a growing convergence, or at least an intelligible global debate, around contemporary governance? At the broadest level, the answer to the question contributes importantly to our understanding of globalization. As Scholte (2005: 140) has argued, globalization “could not unfold without governance arrangements that promote the process.” Governments have to be willing to cooperate in international regulatory regimes (of which there are hundreds) that to some extent create a level playing field or a matrix of roughly similar or even identical rules to create a “space of flows.” But these governance arrangements at minimum presuppose certain things: a common discourse about complex policy regimes, even if that discourse does not necessarily lead to agreement; and some similarities in public management processes and institutions. At the same time, it cannot be expected that these discourses and processes will converge automatically or simply as a matter of osmosis. NPM, interpreted broadly, is associated with democratic institutions, even if some interpretations of NPM emphasize market-based policy regimes, and not all states are necessarily disposed towards democratization. So the puzzle behind the question is what are the dynamics of adoption, as well as convergence, around public management practices?