Assessing national reforms through global indicators: case study / Evaluacion de las reforms nacionales mediante indicators globules. Estudio de caso

This contribution investigates the extra-national dimension of policy assessment, with reference to the evaluation of national administrative reform policies at the global level. As many other public functions, policy assessment is not purely national in its character any more: differently from other fields of intervention, however, the implications of globalization in this case are not so evident. On one hand, this can be explained in terms of the prejudice according to which administrative systems would not be affected by globalization. On the other hand, this is due to the fact that global policy assessment implies to consider administrative systems as economic goods or commodities. In contrast with this view, we consider the object of this study as a privileged field of investigation not only to experiment the tools provided by the global administrative law but also to combine the economic perspective of globalization together with the legal one. An estimation of the real impact of the global assessment of national administrative reform policy requires to point out a series of preliminary questions. The first issue at the stake entails to focus on global bodies and their field of interest. Who, in the global legal arena, should care about national administrative reforms, and to what extent? The second set of inquiries involves mainly functional aspects. Why should ultra-national bodies concentrate on national administrative reforms? The third issue under discussion concerns the meaning of the global assessment itself in the global arena. How relevant is this function, how are collecting data, monitoring procedures and assessment decision carried forward? Whom are they addressed to? At a first sight, the relationship between globalization and administrative reform policy appear unidirectional, since it looks like it is only the former to influence the latter: through the examination of the global assessment mechanisms we want to reach a partially different conclusion, showing how globalization and administrative reform policy influence each other in a mutual way.