Coordinating for Cohesion in the Public Sector of the Future (COCOPS)

Nathan Collins

Facts checked - Oliver Hughes

Last updated: 14.07.2025

The COCOPS project (Coordinating for Cohesion in the Public Sector of the Future) seeks to comparatively and quantitatively assess the impact of New Public Management-style reforms in European countries, drawing on a team of European public administration scholars from 11 universities in 10 countries. It will analyse the impact of reforms in public management and public services that address citizens’ service needs and social cohesion in Europe. Evaluating the extent and consequences of NPM’s alleged fragmenting tendencies and the resulting need for coordination is a key part of assessing these impacts.

General information

In eight related international research projects, COCOPS will map and analyse innovative mechanisms in the public sector to improve social and policy coordination, especially when the public sector is facing the public crisis. The research will contribute to our understanding of the impact of NPM by integrating sectoral and national analyses and to the development of future public sector reform strategies by drawing lessons from past experience, exploring trends and studying emerging public sector coordination practices.

COCOPS is funded under the European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme as a Small or Medium-Scale Focused Research Project. The project starts on Jan 1st 2011 and will run for 3,5 years. With a budget of nearly 2,7 million €, this is to become one of the largest comparative public management research projects in Europe.

Work Packages

The financial crisis in the public sector as an emerging coordination challenge

Objectives

To combine the evidence and insights from WP 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 as it relates to financial pressure on the public sector amidst the global financial and economic crisis
To gain insights into the impact of the crisis on the central parameters of the research project (e.g. the application of NPM, fragmentation, social cohesion and emerging solutions and trends)
To assess how the financial crisis affects government’s managerial and policy making capacity, in particular concerning resource allocation
To consult with and interview key policy makers and experts, both within and outside the project’s academic and practitioner advisory board, and compile and evaluate innovative approaches to handle the crisis
To formulate policy recommendations with regard to successfully cope with the long-term consequences of the financial crisis

Work description

WP 7 will draw on findings from the other packages and will collect additional data. It consists of two stages.

The WP starts with a thorough review of WP1 findings and the NPM literature, as it relates to savings in the public sector in the 1980s-90s. This material will be supplemented with a number of interviews of key actors involved in these savings to draw lessons for current policy-making with regard to challenges, successes and limitations of different savings strategies and on the expected effects of such savings on public sector reforms and public service delivery.

Work package leader:

Tiina Randma

Tallinn University of Technology

Institute of Public Administration

Estonia

NPM and the Size of Government Data

The changing role of government-the effect of NPM on government outlays

Savings and downsizing the public sector were a major justification when the international movement of public sector reforms began in the 1980s. Since then, New Public Management (NPM) has been the subject of extensive academic debate as to its successes and failures. However, empirical assessments of whether NPM reached its stated objectives are relatively scarce, mainly due to the difficulty of quantifying the impact of such reforms.

Several analyses of changes in government outlays and public employment have been performed in recent years, but these have generally been limited to a subset of European countries, or have covered only a limited time frame. In addition, some of the analyses have necessarily relied on unreliable data. Especially for Central and Eastern European countries, such analyses are absent, incomplete, or unreliable.

COCOPS Working Package 2 on govt outlays presents a cross-sectional (18 EU countries) and longitudinal analysis of data on government outlays, public accounts, and personnel statistics to describe and visualise trends in government outlays. To evaluate the effect of NPM on public sector size, we selected two major policies associated with NPM for study, outsourcing and decentralization.

We present the main findings of our research, including some downloadable figures:

Government outlays and administrative public employment

Outsourcing and decentralization trends

Outsourcing and decentralization effects on public sector size

Access here COCOPS working paper ‘Did new public management matter? An empirical analysis of the outsourcing and decentralization effects on public sector size‘

Nathan Collins

Author at Cocops

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Editor at Cocops

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