Agencification

Abstract

One persistent theme in public administration is whether a government portfolio should be organized as an integrated ministry or as a dual organization composed of a ministerial department and one or several semi-detached agencies. ‘Agencification’ has, partly due to the New Public Management (NPM) wave, been high on the agenda of administrative policy-makers for two decades. Two decades of NPM reforms have made the agencification phenomenon highly topical and this also attracted considerable scholarly attention. Students have focused on the causes of agencification as well as its consequences. One noticeable bias in this literature is that the vast majority of the ‘agencification’ scholarship is geared towards administrative history, reform and change and less on the effects of agencification. Moreover, to the extent that this literature has explored effects of agencification, organization structures, procedures and legal capacities have served as key independent variables. A comprehensive understanding of agencification needs to answer three sets of questions: - What is agencification? - What explains agencification? - What implications does agencification yield?