Public Sector Reform in Denmark: Organizational Transformation and Evaluation

Public sector reform in Denmark has not been studied extensively, despite the country's tireless reorganization efforts and track record of trying new ideas. This article thus seeks to fill a gap in the literature. It does this by examining the reorganization of the public sector in terms of the transformation of organizations, and by assessing how successive governments have evaluated the initiatives taken with the aim of knowing whether or not reorganization has worked. The discussion shows that reorganization has been incremental and pragmatic, and that governments have rarely evaluated their reorganization efforts in any systematic way. One of the primary reasons for this has been the desire of politicians and top civil servants to have political and administrative flexibility and freedom to seize on strategic opportunities, unconstrained by the findings of detailed evaluations.