Innovation and institutionalization : challenges for the new public management in Mexico. The Administrative Modernization Program in Mexico City 1995-1997

Abstract

An important effort to reform Mexican public administration is currently being implemented at the federal level as well as in some local governments. The New Public Management (NPM) is being used as the main strategy in order to design a new public governmental system. However, Mexican institutional framework at the political level has been widely controlled by the President and some other political groups. This is the explanation why the use of NPM has fundamentally different objectives in Mexico than in developed democratic countries. That is, in developed countries it is typically used to improve existing institutional arrangements based on democratic procedures. However, in Mexico it is being used as an incremental strategy to change the political and administrative culture of the public. The NPM is being applied where there is a lack of solid institutional frameworks, loose rule of law, weak checks and balances, no civil service system, and ineffective accountability systems, all of them assumed to be existent by most of the NPM approaches developed in other countries.

This strategy NPM faces two basic dangers: Over-reliance on techniques over substantive reform. To forget that NPM techniques assume a democratic environment, where bureaucracy is already controlled through several agencies and institutions. In Mexico, the technocratic solution would be to think that the instruments of NPM alone would generate an effective bureaucracy without the necessity of developing institutions for control and oversight of the administrative system.

Underestimating the difficulty of changing the existing bureaucratic culture. NPM ideas are being implemented in organizations with strong cultures capable of resisting any attempted change. In the case of Mexico, having all other political and institutional variables, the possibilities of simulating behavioral change, but not changing the organizational culture is a very probable outcome of the implementation of NPM ideas.

A case study regarding the evaluation of the Mexico City's modernization program is used in order to support some of the ideas presented thorough out the paper.