This brief commentary questions some of the usual assumptions made about the differences between public management reform in the developed world compared with the developing world. It suggests that reform failure is common in both, as is a lack of evidence about the final impacts of reform. In both cases the best available evidence indicates that management reform is an iterative and exploratory process that needs local, contextualized knowledge as well as formal expertise. The World Bank’s Better Results from Public Sector Institutions offers an interesting analysis of this situation, and puts forward useful insights. The real test, as always, will be whether these ideas can be implemented.
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