MODELS AND CONCEPTS OF MODERNIZATION OF GOVERNMENT

Abstract

Modernization changes the basic target, functional, structural principles of building public administration, thereby there is a paradigm shift in understanding its place and mission in the state-market-civil society relationship. The bureaucratic model of public administration belongs to the old paradigm, the new government and network models belong to the new paradigm.

These models are contradictory intertwined under the influence of globalization and decentralization on modernization processes in public administration, which creates new problems in adapting administrative hierarchies (bureaucracies) to global challenges and the requirements of devolution. The problem arises of integrating new horizontal connections (networks) into traditional vertical structures. At the same time, the problem of the state’s ability to increase the efficiency of officials’s actions in conditions of rapid environmental transformation is exacerbating. In addition, there is a problem of scale, traditional for public administration, i.e. the correspondence of functions and resources at different managerial levels to the nature and volume of existing tasks. The solution of these problems at the transit stage largely depends on the nature of the emerging institutional paths and the reform strategy, its focus on maintaining a balance of stability and changes based on the experience of previous transformations. The managerial model of priority for many reformers, with its inevitable decentralization carried out in an institutional environment that has not reached the necessary level of self-organization and accountability, will obviously entail the progressive loss of autonomy by the state bureaucracy from special interest groups. Strengthening the role of informal managerial practices in the face of non-established norms of administrative ethics will not provide unbiased impersonal law enforcement.

However, criticism of the new government does not make the choice of bureaucratic or network models justified. The priority is not the choice of one or another theoretical model of modernization as its goal, but the process of developing a policy for its implementation. The criterion of manageability, reflecting the development of modernization abilities of public administration, provides guidance for institutional construction.