Top-down versus bottom-up is one of development’s enduring tensions, not least in public service delivery. In Malaysia, public services have traditionally been animated from the top down. Bottom-up forces in civil society have strengthened recently, but so too have top-down forces, and their...

This article uses a case study of public recruitment in Nepal as the vehicle for a discussion of the value of three current public management models: an anticorruption model, a psychometric selection model and the new public management (NPM) model. The political context of Nepal and the role and...

<title>Abstract</title> Ten years ago public management in developing countries was reaching the end of a period in which the ‘Washington consensus’ model of a small state was dominant, with downsizing and privatization as its key mechanisms. With reform programmes in disarray and NPM an inadequate...

<title>Abstract</title> This article uses a case study of public human resource management (HRM) in Malaysia to explore policy ‘transferability’, proposed as a refinement of Dolowitz and Marsh's policy transfer framework. HRM in the Malaysian civil service is found to be relatively performance-orientated,...

<title>Abstract</title> Politics and governance have become central to explanations of the widespread under-provision of public services in developing countries. Political analysis offers an understanding of what might otherwise appear to be exclusively managerial or capacity problems. The articles in this...

This paper identifies six models of public service reform that have been practiced in developing countries over the past half-century. It critically reviews their implementation, discussing them as attempted solutions to problems that have arisen in the policy process in different countries. The...

This article starts from a crux in Alan Thomas's model of development management: that values-based development management may require the coercion of employees whose values are different. It uses a case study of Sri Lanka's attempt to inculcate the value of impartiality in staffing, focusing on...