Modernising government

This chapter analyses a number of key challenges for implementing public administration reform. It highlights these challenges and discusses possible tools to address them, drawing on past and present reform experiences in several OECD countries. It is based on OECD analyses of public administration reforms and other literature, looking primarily at two policy domains: decentralisation and public employment reforms. The focus is on the reform process rather than the nature of the reforms themselves. The chapter is structured as follows: the first section provides a general description of public administration reforms and the general challenges faced by reformers. It briefly overviews experiences in public administration reform in the last three decades in several OECD countries. The rest of the report is organised according to the three phases of the reform process: planning, implementation and sustainability. Although these phases do not always – or even usually – unfold in such a neat sequential pattern, it is analytically useful to distinguish them in this way, since they present different challenges. For each of these phases, the key challenges for implementing public administration reforms are identified, and a set of possible tools to address these challenges are described, together with specific examples of tools some OECD countries have used to address similar challenges.