【正文】 me accounts, almost everything that changed over the past quarter of a century is attributed to NPM. In virtually every jurisdiction, noheless, NPM, as public management reform, was at least originally about achieving greater economy and efficiency in the management of public resources in government operations and in the delivery of public services (Pollitt 1990). The focus, in short, was on ‘management’. Achieving greater economy in the use of public resources was at the forefront of concerns, given the fiscal and budgetary situations facing all governments in the 1970s, and managerial efficiency was not far behind, given assumptions about the impoverished quality of management in public services everywhere. By the turn of the century, moreover, NPM, as improved public management in this limited sense, was well embedded in almost all governments, at least as the norm (although it was not always or everywhere referred to as NPM). This meant increased managerial authority, discretion and flexibility: ? for managing public resources (financial and human)。 ? for managing publicservice delivery systems。 and, ? for collaborating with other publicsector agencies as well as with privatesector agencies in tackling horizontal – multiorganizational and/or multisectoral – issues. This increased managerial authority, flexibility and discretion was, in some jurisdictions, notably the Britain and New Zealand, coupled with increased organizational differentiation, as evidenced by a proliferation of departments and agencies with narrowed mandates, many with a single purpose. “Agencification’, however, was not a major focus reform in all jurisdictions, including Canada and Australia where such change, if not on the margins, was clearly secondary to enhanced managerial authority and responsibility (Pollitt and Talbot 2020). The major NPM innovations quickly led to concerns, especially in those jurisdictions where these developments were most advanced, about a loss of public service coherence and corporate capacity, on the one hand, and a diminished sense of and mitment to publicservice ethos, ethics and values, on the other. Reactions to these concerns produced some retreat, reversals, and rebalancing of the systems in questions (Halligan 2020). Nowhere, however, was there a wholesale rejection of NPM, in theory or practice, and a return to traditional public administration, even if there necessarily emerged some tension between rhetoric and action (Gregory 2020). The improvements in public management brought about by at least some aspects of NPM were simply too obvious, even if these improvements were modest in parison to the original claims of NPM proponents. At the same time that NPM became a major force for change in public administration, however, it was acpanied by a panion force that saw political executives seeking to assert greater political control over the administration and apparatus of the state, not only in the formulation of public policies but also in the administration of public services. Accordingly, from the start, at least in the AngloAmerican systems, there was a fundamental paradox as political executives, on both the left and the right sides of the partisanpolitical divide, sought to (re)assert dominance over their publicservice bureaucracies while simultaneously devolving greater management authority to them (Aucoin 1990). The impetus for this dynamic lay in the dissatisfaction of many political executives with the ‘responsiveness’ of public servants to the political authority and policy agendas of these