Practices and experiences of monitoring in the centres of government 
in the European Union: improving routines together with enhancing governance

Pertti Ahonen

21 June, 2000

Summary

The purpose of the paper, as reflected in its structure as well, is to deal with three basic questions. First, the concept of ”monitoring” is pondered as relevant for the project, the relevant project part and the relevant project section and subsection. Second, the paper consists of five cases analyses, on France, the European Commission, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Finland. Third, the paper includes generic conclusions as lessons from the conceptual consideration and the case studies.

Introduction

The nature and the types of monitoring

“Monitoring” is a difficult concept. First, its meaning is not unequivocal even in the English language. Second, its meaning in English is to an extent dependent of the context where the term is used. Third, the term is oftentimes difficult to translate into other languages, and equivalents between languages are hard to define.
A context for the concept of “monitoring” in administrative learning early established was control exerted in government and in public administration (see Figure 1). There, the so-called passive functions of “monitoring” or “supervision” were parallel to the so-called active functions of “auditing” and “inspection” on the one hand, and on the other to the enforcement of correctives as far as deemed necessary (Figure 2). “Evaluation” has more recently become a function that can be compared to that of auditing and inspection. The “passive” and the ”active” should not be taken here too loosely. Instead of referring to something of a lesser importance and effort, the “passive” reforms to systems set up and to the very high number of routinised detailed control measures that the systems enable. The “active” refers, on the contrary, to control based upon defining a particular setup such as one for a singular measure or project of auditing or inspection. In the final end the difference between the passive and the active aspects of the control is relative rather than absolute, because the active aspects tend to need the support of “passive”, that is systemic, aspects and arrangements as well to be able to take place.

Planning and
preparation

Control

Decision-making

Implementation (execution, enforcement, etc.)

Figure 1. A stylised process model of planning, decision-making, implementation, and control.

„Passive” aspects: supervision, accounting, documentation, MONITORING (etc.)

Substance of „control”

„Active” aspects: inspection, auditing, evaluation (etc.)

(Imposition of
correctives)

Figure 2. Passive and active aspects of “control”.

“Monitoring” or “supervision” in the above sense may be embodied in systems of information and documentation. There, they are made up of regular making of entries in definite records, keeping the records once prepared in a safe place, ensuring rapid retrieval, and taking care that the trail from numbers and verbal explanations into documents back to the original transactions is preserved clear. Monitoring and supervision are built in as well in organisation designs. Monitoring and supervision are built into hierarchies between superordinate people and organisations on the one hand and on the other their subordinates. Monitoring and supervision are thus built into divisions of tasks between posts and their bearers, such as in the classic case of a cashier and a book-keeper monitoring each other due to the separation of the respective functions to two different bearers. 
The property of “transparency” is one of the frequently desirable results of monitoring and supervision built into organisations, whether it were subordinates whose actions are transparent to their supervisors, or whether the citizens were able to monitor what their elected representatives and the civil servants carrying out the representatives’ decisions are doing and accomplishing. It should go almost without saying that information and communication technologies involve building in supervision and monitoring into organisations in proportions unheard of before.
	There are numerous types of monitoring and supervision that have a long history. First, there is accounting and one of the principal procedures of any financial management as systematic recording of economic transactions. Superordinate bodies, here accountors, such as parliaments or boards, typically make their subordinates or here accountees, such as governments or managements of organisations accountable, that is, responsible to engage in reporting at regular intervals or on demand of the superordinate authority, whether the substance of the reporting were that of economic transactions or not. Accountants are experts servicing the accountability of the accountees for the accountors. 
	Within monitoring and supervision itself certain conceptual distinctions prevail. Monitoring and supervision may be backward-looking such as in the above cases of regular or extraordinary reporting. However, even there, the purpose of the reporting is forward-looking to enable corrections where irregularities are observed or improvement where inefficiency and ineffectiveness prevail. Monitoring may be explicitly forward-looking as well. For instance, in the French administrative culture and cultures influenced by it (e.g., international co-operation in Europe) it is commonplace that the government sets up units called “observatories” to monitor certain fields of policy-making to detect needs and opportunities for novel measures. Futures studies institutionalised to service a government either in its legislative or its executive branch come close to pursuing a similar end. Particular legal impact studies, as far as organised and pursued, come close to pursuing related ends.
	Finally, it is conceivable that monitoring or supervision are established as a function with a definite purpose to account for the progress of certain reforms. Should this be the case, further distinctions may prevail according to different particular purposes of the monitoring serviced by the information gathering that makes part of the monitoring activities. First, in a government context, the monitoring results may be called for immediate uses by ministers and high officials to contain imminent political crises or simply to reply to questions posed by such authorities and Members of Parliament. Second, monitoring results may serve real-time leadership and management of the reforms by enabling authoritative corrections of the course should aberrations and excessive risks be observed. Third, monitoring results may serve periodic and ultimate checking that reforms are indeed pursuing their purposes and goals and pursuing their official objectives towards reaching the latter. Fourth, the monitoring and supervision may service purposes of co-ordination such as that between ministers and ministries in a government. In the last case, in particular, monitoring has the character of a governance tool. 
	There is no neat arrangement of organisations or units thereof with tasks of monitoring and supervision. Many organisations and many of their officials may carry out monitoring not full-time but part-time, occasionally, and ad hoc. It is not ruled out that organisations and units thereof dealing with monitoring are themselves established only ad hoc, to be disbanded once the rationale of the monitoring has ceased. However, some amount of monitoring and supervision are part and parcel of the function of any superordinate organisation, part thereof or an individual civil servant in relation to the respective subordinate organisations or civil servants or political masters.
	Different countries have different types, shapes and modes governments with different constellations of legislative-executive relations, different arrangements of the Prime Minister’s position, role and prerogatives, and different arrangements of the other Ministers’ powers and position. All those arrangements have an important bearing for the actual content and impact that any given arrangement and function of monitoring may receive within a government. Panacea for monitoring problems in government are unlikely to exist. Careful contextual specification of even the best renowned arrangements, procedures, practices and techniques of monitoring innovated in any country are needed to make them fit well enough within any other individual government than the original one.
 
Procedures related to monitoring

Many ways are conceivable for organising monitoring and supervision, providing for its data and ensuring the use of its result. There are several other procedures commonly pursued by governments that may be closely related to monitoring depending on the particular governance context that is at stake.
First, we can mention regular official statistics. Should monitoring regard some policies in broad terms only or in a very long-term, or should certain effects of reforms mature only during years, official statistics may not be a too slow way to acquire monitoring information. Even in monitoring that must fix more attention to detail, the shorter term and policy effects that mature rapidly official statistics may have important supporting roles, especially as far they are supported with other data and other analyses and their results.
Second, monitoring may draw upon special studies specially commissioned from a variety of providers. They may range from particular government research institutes to universities and individuals scholars to national and international consulting companies. For instance, it may not be necessary of possible for a government to commission an evaluation in the constrained sense of checking if certain evaluation criteria have indeed been fulfilled, but a broader-based monitoring study may be more fitting to the purpose at hand.
Third, the government organisations and units in charge of the monitoring may themselves have sufficient, capable to staff to engage in the information gathering. This is part of monitoring in its purest form.
Fourth, monitoring may be rapid, real-time activity not divorced from the actual pursuit of policies, programmes, projects, and activities. There, the procedures of monitoring may rather be made up of particular permanent, routine procedures of co-ordination between those concerned by such means as regular circulation of documents for knowledge or acceptance, or regular meetings where potential disagreements can be detected and resolved to ensure consensual implementation even where some revision of the decisions first taken or intended were needed.
There are cases as well where we are likely to find a mix of two, three or all of the four conceivable ways of the information gathering. 
“Evaluation” and to a lesser extent such related words as “appraisal” and “review” have become popular in the OECD countries including those of the European Union. In the United States, there are further concepts such as “oversight” used in resembling contexts yet without making the concept of evaluation obsolete, either. As a matter of fact, there may be cases where it is not possible to make any clear distinction between, for instance, “monitoring” of a reform and “review”, “appraisal” and “evaluation” of the same reform. The distinctions became hard for that reason as well that “evaluation” exists in prospective “ex ante”, real-time “ex nunc” and retrospective “ex post” versions (CEC 1997). “Ex nunc” evaluation in particular may be hard to distinguish from monitoring or even planning. Ex nunc evaluation may not be easy to take apart of monitoring, either. There are other distinctions within evaluation as well that may lead to difficulties in distinguishing it from monitoring. An example consists of the so-called goal-free evaluation, which is made up of systematic information gathering and analysis without objectives first given as criteria against which to compare the state of affairs being evaluated. Instead, in the course of the evaluation activities a realistic view is supposed to arise in regard to the criteria as well against which the state of affairs should be judged.

Conceptual conclusions

It has become clear in the above conceptual review that it is not possible to consider “monitoring” only and alone as such let alone conceive of monitoring in any pure form that would be common to many countries. This is especially so, should we accomplish a reasonable empirical review covering several Member States of the European Union and institutions of the latter as well. On the contrary, it is necessary to accept it that in different countries different terms are used of the same procedures, and the same terms may refer to procedures that are different over the countries. Moreover, it is useful to consider procedures that come close to monitoring as well.
Given the fact that the field of monitoring is wide it is both necessary and useful to focus only on certain types of monitoring. These types have to do with monitoring particular reforms or fields of reform launched by a government. “Reform monitoring” might be a conceivable term to refer to the respective activities. Moreover, it is both necessary and useful to focus on “reform monitoring” that is retrospective on the one hand, but that, on the other, involves the prospective purpose in the utilisation of the monitoring results. 
Below, France, the European Union, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Finland receive a consideration each. The EU institutions receive a coverage because of the important effect that the principle of obligation des résultats (the obligation to reach the results that membership and related commitments presuppose irrespective of the particular way of reaching the results) has upon the Member States and the pre-accession states. Here, the actual or the prospective membership exerts a definite impact upon each respective government and administration despite that the Union cannot legislate or regulate the structures and the procedures of those countries’ government and administration as such. Next, the two large Member States France and the United Kingdom receive a consideration because of their sheer size. Germany could not be made target of the analysis because of its federal nature. The turmoil of Italy’s political system and its structures made, in turn, that Italy was dropped from the consideration as well. The Netherlands is included because of its foremost position in introducing evaluation all over its national government. Finally, Finland is taken up because of its systematic approach to monitoring and evaluation public sector reforms. In the concluding part of this paper some aspects of other countries than those considered in detail below will be introduced.

France

	A high official organ and arena of French government policies consists of the State Council, Le Conseil d’État. The President of the Republic chairs the council meetings. The other participants include the Prime Minister, the ministers, and the ministers with delegated powers. State secretaries of the President and the government are present as well. Other state secretaries attend when there is need thereof.
	The programme of the State Council derives from the Working Programme from the government. The cabinet of the Prime Minister and the General Secretariat of the government update that programme about bi-annually. There are weekly detailed work programmes for the eight next meetings of the State Council. The President decides on the ultimate agenda weekly. All in all, the work of the government appears as meticulously programmed in France. 
	There are many co-ordinating arenas of negotiation at the centre of the French government. In effect these arenas are in the same arenas for monitoring government policy-making. There are as many as 1 500 – 2 000 inter-ministerial meetings annually. The Prime Minister’s cabinet calls them to convene. Monitoring on-going policies and reforms makes one part of the agenda of those meetings. There are inter-ministerial committees to carry out monitoring in inter-sectoral policy fields. The Prime Minister’s cabinet calls these committees to convene under his or her very chairmanship. As far as the President and the Prime Minister are from the same political party, there may be as few as some 20 annual meetings of all ministers, but in periods of the so-called cohabitation, when the party affiliations differ, there may be more than 100 such meetings.
	It is the French Prime Minister’s cabinet that monitors and co-ordinates the work of the inter-ministerial committees, the inter-ministerial meetings  and the ministers’ meetings. The cabinet may ask the state secretary of the government to carry out further monitoring. In the more administrative and routine side of the French government policy-making, the General Secretariat of the government monitors the legal preparation following out of government decisions. 
	In the French system the Prime Minister’s cabinet is made up of political appointees. The cabinet’s foremost strategic function is to enable the inter-ministerial meetings. The General Secretariat is made up of career officials headed by the State Secretary of the government. The foremost function of the secretariat is to ensure the good organisation of the government’s work including the preparation of the government’s work programme, to provide secretariat support for the inter-ministerial meetings and committees, to take care of relations with the Parliament, and to monitor the issuing of legislative proposals. The secretariat heads the administration under the Prime Minister of about 4 000 people.
	Each French minister has a political cabinet to support his of her decision-making. Each French government may decide upon which strategic tools the ministries have at their disposal to prepare their policy framework, to proceed in their planning, and to ensure that there are the necessary resources at hand. France, by the way resembling the Netherlands, has a scientific board in the context of the Prime Minister to guide evaluations of particular policies that the governments wants to have carried out. There is an inter-ministerial committee to guide such evaluations as well.

The European Union

In the European Union institutions, particular practices for monitoring ongoing reforms are not strongly institutionalised. However, as part of their duties many Commission administrations and some of the committee-type organisations joining member state representatives to control the powers the Council has awarded the Commission come close to doing monitoring. The latter field of the so-called comitology is far too extensive to deal with here. Moreover, it is unique in that it arises from the federal or multi-national nature of the Union and is therefore not exemplary for individual states to design their own arrangements and procedures However, it is worth noting that a certain type of the comitology committees and procedures are made up of committees explicitly called “monitoring committees”.. 
It is relevant that from the debt of the European institutions’ design to administrative traditions of the French type arises that within the European Commission resembling co-ordination is being pursued with the one carried out in France. Features that can be mentioned include:

•	The role of the Commission’s Secretariat as a Directorate General primus inter pares with a co-ordinating role and the role of the Secretary-General at the top of the Secretariat
•	The co-ordinating role of the Commission President’s Cabinet and the President’s chef de cabinet in calling meetings to convene, such as the typically weekly meetings of the chefs de cabinet of all Commission Members
•	The fact that since the Santer Commission the Commission has worked to plan its work with a longer horizon than one year only
•	The role of the new Economic and Social Committee, established to replace and upgrade the Forward Studies Unit  of the Commissions’ Secretariat in the year 2000

Auditing is a function in the European institutions that has potential to service ends of monitoring. The European Court of Auditors, it is true, focuses on questions at the systemic level. In effect, improvement of monitoring systems regarding various policy fields is a common emphasis in the Court’s reports, with a stress, as expected, on systems of public financial management. Evaluation is an activity that is variably institutionalised in various parts of the European institutions or that is required by European norms as an activity to carry out in the Member States once European programmes are carried out there. At instances, the evaluation comes close to monitoring. 
There are established traditions of evaluation in a few large European policy fields: the structural funds programmes of regional development, European development co-operation policies, and European research and technological development policies. The co-ordination of evaluation activities that the Commission has worked to institutionalise in the Budget Directorate in the recent years has not so far been able to tackle fully the earlier established practices and institutions of evaluation. Moreover, the increasing powers of discretion of General Directors in the Directorates in internal matters of general and financial administration may not be particularly conducive to a strong and independent general evaluation function within the Commission. In some individual Directorates General evaluation may, on the contrary, well expand and flourish.
There is, finally, the aspect that the European institutions have not put the streamlining of their own administrative apparatus in the forefront before the mid-1990s, but focused upon entering ever further policy fields. The enlargement process launched by the demise of the Soviet Union – the long-time neutral states Finland, Sweden and Austria since 1995 and ten-odd countries of Central and Eastern Europe in a few more years – has received emphasis as well instead of overhauling the administration that must bear the charge of implementing the reforms. However, it is hard to predict how soon fundamental reforms are possible. Reasons for this include the tensions between the domain of the Commission, traditionally in charge of the so-called community tasks, and the typically newer tasks rather carried out in intergovernmental interaction through the Council and related procedures. It is true that the Prodi Commission started by announcing early during its first year in office at the turn of 1999 and 2000 the so-called Kinnock and in part Kinnock-Scheyer reforms However, it is too early by the mid-2000 to predict to what extent those reforms will end up being the internal revolutions in the Commission’s administration as the respective plans imply them to be.

United Kingdom

	Britain’s cabinet is large, with both senior and junior ministers. Britain’s cabinet is the prime example among the world’s cabinets of an emphasis of cabinet work in committees and subcommittees, which have in the recent years typically numbered between 20 and 30. Note that the decisions of the ministerial committees have the same authoritative standing as decisions of the cabinet plenary meetings.
	Britain is the likely origin of the practice, now widespread in the European Union, that a policy reform is first introduced in a Green Paper for discussion. The policy proposals of the Cabinet will e written in a White Paper. 
	The British cabinet relies on its Cabinet Office in several important aspects of its decision-making. The Secretary of the State who leads the Cabinet Office is the highest career civil servant in Britain. The officials of the Cabinet Office are career civil servants seconded to the Office. The Office is internally divided according to its basic functions.
	The Prime Minister’s Office, the “Downing Street 10”, is separate from the Cabinet Office. The PMO’s function is to support the Prime Minister’s role as the head of the cabinet, the chair of the ruling party, and an MP. It is interesting that the majority of personnel in Downing Street 10 are career civil servants. The PMO includes the Prime Minister’s policy advice experts, some of whom are career civil servants, whereas some are special advisors nominated into temporary positions resembling those of civil servants. A few of the advisors with the most political tasks supporting the Prime Minister are devoid of such a position, however. Other ministers can nominate certain special advisors as well. Finally, the central office of the ruling party renders support to the political functions of the Prime Minister and the other ministers.
	Monitoring and evaluation activities have a variable history in Britain’s government. A high tide of planning brought about a Policy Analysis and Review Unit, closed in the 1970s, and later on there was a Central Policy Review Staff CPRS, closed at the beginning of the 1980s after the fundamental change in government. In early years of Mrs. Thatcher as Prime Minister, the focus of government policy-making was on micro-level management, cutbacks, and doing away with undesired parts, functions, activities and possessions of government. Individual experts were at few important instances commissioned by the government to design reforms. The National Audit Office, which was reorganised in 1983, and investigation committees of Parliament, have assumed certain vigorous roles in monitoring and evaluation. Towards the end of Conservative governments ruling in 1979-1997 systematic monitoring and evaluation of reforms gained in strength. As opposed to preventing reform monitoring and evaluation as one minister did on the National Health Service in the early 1990s, later the Major government commissioned several partial evaluations of the so-called Next Steps reforms of the British national government and evaluations of the government’s quality enhancement programmes. It is evident that the Blair government has wanted substantially to strengthen the monitoring and the evaluation of policy reforms and government policies in general. This includes new institutional solutions to this end.
	Since taking office in 1997 the Blair government has launched quite a few important policy reforms. The Downing Street 10 website includes a statement of policy objectives for 177 separate policy items, falling under 10 groups, from “education” and “prosperity” to “modern government” and “leadership abroad”. At its beginning, the Blair government launched a reform in the Cabinet Office. The government integrated the Office of Public Service with the CO. The government established a Performance and Innovation Unit in the CO as well. The CO’s Efficiency and Effectiveness Unit seems to work in part towards related ends. Another of the units in the CO is the Better Regulation Unit. In the same context, a Centre for Management and Policy Studies was established in the context of the CO yet not within it. In Downing Street 10, in turn, there is a particular Policy Unit to render expert advice to the PM and the other ministers in policy issues, with a mixed staff of civil servants and political appointees. A particular Political Office at Downing Street 10 maintains relations with the ruling party.

The Netherlands

	At the turn of the 1970s and the 1980s the Netherlands were suffering from an economic crisis, often called the “Dutch disease” at that time. Despite well elaborate government systems of economic and other planning and policy-making, a well-elaborate welfare state, a high degree of social and political tolerance, a traditionally strong and diversified industrial base and an established central location to pursue global business, the economic development of the country was lagging. Since the late 1980s, on the contrary, the Netherlands have been flourishing. What happened?
	The Dutch governments were able to introduce a series of reforms, each of them limited but all of them with a formidable joint effect, that slightly tuned down the welfare state and ensured that the welfare sector stays within reasonable size limits. Problems of unemployment were dealt with variable solutions ranging from allowing the de facto retirement age go down and decreasing the de facto working hours of the employees. The growth of government both in GDP and budget terms and in terms of personnel was curtailed.
The Dutch government and the Dutch system of government differs in certain important ways from their counterparts in many other Member States. The Prime Minister and his or her role is well visible, and there have been strong leaders among recent Dutch Prime Ministers as among the earlier ones, but the Dutch Prime Minister is still only a primus inter pares. The Ministerie van Algemene Zaken or Ministry of General Affairs he or she leads is small, with only some 300 employees. The Dutch political system seems to possess the feature that tolerance towards overt and open disagreement even between ministers of the same party is quite high. Adversary procedures of parliamentary investigation on policy failures are considered part of the normal business of government despite that they are certainly painful for the government and the ministers concerned. 
The Dutch governments are small in size. In practice they are made up of some sixteen ministers only distributed into thirteen ministries, although political state secretaries have been nominated to ten-odd ministries and can be likened to junior ministers. Nowadays the Dutch government falls strictly into a strategic core, importantly the ministries, independent agencies surrounding them, some other public bodies, and a wide sector of QUANGOs which, according to the Dutch tradition, take care of many such welfare state functions that the state provides for in some other Member States. This is cosmetics, because welfare functions are carried out very widely with a frequent statutory basis, and it is not cosmetics, because the QUANGOs are not parts of any national, regional or local government and because the reliance on the QUANGOs provides certain particular flexibilities.
	Both related and unrelated to the overall reforms in the 1980s, the Dutch government developed an interest in comprehensive evaluation of its social and economic policies. First, there was a wide set of particular, separate evaluations, more exactly 30-odd policy sectors that were analysed in the early 1980s. In the particular Dutch case, these evaluations could be built upon a foundation of decades of world-renowned economic policy analysis and strong analytic capacity in the field of many other social issues as well, often supported by the flourishing social sciences and specialised research institutes spread in the country. Next, the national audit office Algemene Rekenkamer started vigorous evaluation activities, which had certain spill-over activities for the expansion of evaluation elsewhere in the government. The audit office has continued as an evaluator in a special capacity even after the spread of evaluation activities has moved their emphasis elsewhere. 
Finally, evaluation became part and parcel of the regular affairs of the Dutch government. This happened on the basis of a 1991 directive by the Dutch government on the regularisation of evaluation in government. The directive made each minister responsible for evaluation in his or her field of responsibility. Importantly, evaluation activities were integrated by the directive in the general process of government public financial management including the budget process. Evaluation results came to be presented as part of the general periodic information that each ministry must render on its dealings. To co-ordinate the evaluations, there is a unit of 20 people in the Dutch Finance Ministry, which relies on the support of a scientific board of eight professors to enhance the quality of the evaluations as well. Actual management of evaluations in each ministry is taken care of by their finance units.
	Dutch evaluation came to be divided into three types. First, there is estimation and utilisation of indicators of results and effectiveness. Second, there are special evaluation studies, which must fulfill scientific criteria such as the validity of the analysis and the results, the reliability of the data, and the adequacy of the controls upon the conclusions to be drawn built into the research designs of evaluation. Third, there are management audits and evaluations focused on particular questions to boost managerial efficiency in particular public organisations and to resolve crises that they may be going through. 
According to the Dutch government principles, the expansion of evaluation should proceed in each government organisation bottom-up in the sense of starting from the estimation and utilisation of indicators that serve budget-making. Next would follow efficiency indicators and ultimately effectiveness indicators that observe goal-achievement, positive and negative side-effects and the sustainability of the positive effects of policies. 
	It is interesting that a self-critical spirit characterises the Dutch government approach to monitoring and evaluation. Despite that by as early as the mid-1990s no fewer than 80 central policy fields had been evaluated, there was the observation that reforms had not been well analysed. Instead, large, politically important or crisis-prone policy fields had received the main emphasis, commentators pondered. The particular role of the national audit office Algemene Rekenkamer has involved quality assurance of monitoring and evaluatio, which is another feature worth noting. The audit office has been engaging in many re-evaluations of evaluations that have been carried out to ensure ex post their quality. 
	There are some critical issues as well that can be raised in regard to the Dutch government’s evaluation policies. Evaluation does not seem to provide a vigorous tool for monitoring and evaluating the implementation of the government’s political programme, although a general evaluation culture may well work towards the same direction. The Dutch evaluation does not cover questions of a long to very long term such as questions typically dealt with in future scenarios and other futures studies commissioned by such Member State governments as France and Finland and the European Commission. 

Finland

Finland stands out unique in that a systematic project if not on monitoring administrative reforms then on administrative reform evaluation sprung up in the mid-1990s. Interestingly, that project was really defined ex post, that is, after most of the reforms being evaluated were under way, or, some of them, finished.
According to studies – such as one by Professors Christopher Pollitt and Geert Bouckaert published in early 2000 – Finland does not stand out as the most vigorous reformer of her public administration and here public sector, but she is in no way a laggard, either. A high tide of administrative reforms ensued during the Finnish political governments that held office in the electoral periods 1987-1991 and 1991-1995. The former brought Finland’s conservative party the National Coalition to the government the first time since 1966 including that the PM’s portfolio was won by that party for 1987-1991. The other large coalition party were the social democrats. The next government, one between the Centre Party with an agricultural tradition, holding the PM’s portfolio, and the National Coalition, in 1991-5, continued the high reform tide. 
Finnish public administration reforms of 1987-1995 included:

1.	There was the combined reform of contracting for results between higher and lower organisations and budgeting for results involving drastic reduction of the number of budget divisions per each government organisation and greatly increasing discretion of those organisations in the use of the budgeted funds. 
2.	There were privatisations of government companies, and there was the introduction of the new public corporation form of public organisations since 1989. Moreover, the budgeting for results brought many government organisations – such as universities – towards much more financial independence. However, the deep cutbacks started in 1993 – in the universities alone, some 25 per cent of the expenditures over a few years – made it hard to single out the separate effects of the reforms. 
3.	There were reforms bringing the position of the civil servants closer to private sector employees, such as reducing the pension benefits, raising the earliest possible general retirement age, increasing working hours, and enabling government organisations to engage in layoffs where budget funds were insufficient. Actual layoffs of civil servants were few, however.
4.	The national government’s statutory grants to the municipalities were fundamentally overhauled since the beginning of 1993. The previous subsidies involving strong spending incentives due to their definition as a share of the acceptable costs of each subsidised activity were replaced with a new system. There, a large part of fiscal disparity between the municipalities was abolished with particular fiscal equalisation grants, and the major part of the subsidies came to be defined on the basis of indicators of needs such as the size of the population demanding such services as basic education, basic health care, or kindergarten services.  
5.	The national government made an end to its long-time tradition with strong central agencies with policy-making, subsidy-awarding and regulatory tasks. The policy and subsidy functions were generally moved to the ministries, and most of the agencies were either privatised, turned into public corporations, or reduced into expert agencies serving the ministries, and sometimes having to compete with private providers for contracts with the government.

The following features of the reforms can be taken up:

•	It depended on the type of the reform how the reform planning took place. The control and budgeting for results reforms were carried out after planning in civil servant working groups. This indicates that the reform challenge was seen as technical despite its many substantive effects on policies, general management, and human resource management. 
•	Privatisations were carried out as defined in the government’s coalition agreements of 1987 and 1991. However, some of the early bold plans of the end of the 1980’s did not come true in the way planned nor at the speed originally projected. Finally the government grew cautious in giving away valuable property such as in the case of its telecommunications company Sonera, which is still almost 50 per cent government-held in mid-2000. The remaining holdings equal to some one half of the outstanding government debt of ca 50 per cent of the GDP. The reforms bringing about many of the public corporations involved the unions, which were cautious at first being afraid of massive layoffs which never materialised, however. Interestingly, the Finnish government replaced its traditional and slow reform practice of first setting up a government commission in reforming the municipal subsidies and making and end to the central agencies. In both cases a one-man task force was nominated, a reform proposal ensued, and a reforms ensued soon thereafter.
•	It does not seem that very rapid nor systematic reform monitoring was carried out while the reforms were going on. Instead, the government commissioned separate studies from various makers – universities, individuals, government’s own research and consulting organisations, and private organisations. The results of the studies were generally mixed, although the overall picture was positive: a general shared belief ensued that the reforms had generally had positive net effects. The deep economic recession Finland went through since 1993 generally precluded singling out the separate effects of the reforms in such fields as control and budgeting for results or the municipal subsidies from the effects of the cutbacks. 

In the final end, the Finnish government commissioned the aforementioned Professor Pollitt with his British team to do a summary study on the Finnish public administration reforms, published in 1997. Before that, Professor Frieder Naschold of the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin had been commissioned by the Finnish Ministry of Labour to do a related study, that involved comparisons between the Finnish reforms with reforms carried out in other countries. The Pollitt and the Naschold studies confirmed each other’s results and the results of the separate evaluation studies carried out by other authors on the Finnish reforms. Finland stood out as an intermediate yet vigorous reformer. The overall net effects of the reforms stood out as positive, but the picture was generally blurred by problems in the rationale of many of the reforms themselves. For instance, efficiency-oriented reforms without training public managers nor without enabling employees to reap a share of improved efficiency and productivity tended to be taking on the organisational atmosphere. There were confounding effects as well, such as those from the public sector cutbacks carried out in many different ways and with varying depths in various parts of the national government and the local governments. 
We can ask why not so much separate monitoring was introduced to ensure that the reforms indeed were carried out as planned. The answer is that Finland could build upon many decades of high stability and a well-established and competent administration. Implementation rate of reforms can be expected to be high in such circumstances. Moreover, the aspects of a small, homogeneous country with a unified instead of federal administration contributed as well.
During the government ruling in Finland in 1995-9 and again since 1999 with a Social Democratic prime minister and the National Coalition as the other large coalition partner the pace of public administrative reform slowed down. However, this is no necessary indicator of less interest in reform as such, but it possible that not very much urgent remained to reform. An important project, started in 1996 and continuing in another capacity in 2000 has focused upon reforming the centre of the Finnish government. It has remained largely intact despite the hefty reform wave and despite that its tasks and its action environment have largely changed as a result of the other reforms. Although the reform does not involve monitoring, it is worth mentioning that after three Finnish professors – Pertti Ahonen, Ari Salminen and Markku Temmes – had prepared a preliminary report three international experts reported as commissioned by the Finnish government on the reform of the government centre in June, 2000. The international experts were B. Guy Peters, Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, USA, Geert Bouckaert, Professor at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and Derry Ormond, the Director Emeritus of the OECD PUMA public sector development function. The expert reports continue to stress the importance of:

•	Strengthening the strategy-making and strategy-implementation capacity of the Prime Minister and the Office of the State Council under the Prime Minister but servicing the entire government instead of boosting the PM’s role
•	Strengthening the role of the government’s programme as its leading strategic planning tool
•	Focusing the ministries better upon policy and political priorities
•	Crucially improving policy co-ordination between the ministries
•	Institutionalising continuous improvement at ministries, including introducing suitable ad hoc ways to design, carry out, monitor and evaluate the improvement reforms

Conclusions

Dependence of monitoring procedures on the system of government and administration

	As a matter of fact, the current EU Member States fail to share any one and the same system of government and administration. The United Kingdom stands out as unique among the Member States in that her traditional first-past-the-post electoral system makes her a de facto two-party state. As a consequence, the ruling party tends to have an absolute and oftentimes strong majority backing of the MPs in Parliament. This, in turn, enables the government, and in particular the Prime Minister, to exert a crucial impact upon the type, the shape and the direction of government policy-making and the path of reforming the policies and public administration. Moreover, the British Prime Minister can exert de facto wide discretion as to which type of support organs he or she preserves or establishes to support his or her decision-making role. There is that aspect as well that in the British system more than in almost any other political system of the Member States there are many instances that the Prime Minister has been able to exert a crucial impact upon changing people holding other ministerial portfolios in the cabinet. All in all, although the British solutions to support the Prime Minister have been in many ways exemplary and well worth consideration by other governments willing to reform themselves over the years, there are limits as to their transferability to Continental Europe’s political systems. Moreover, structurally the British system facilitates rapid and comprehensive reforms and their implementation, which greatly reduces monitoring needs both during and after the implementation of the reforms in the first place. However, should the need arise to engage in monitoring, evaluation and related pursuits, establishing them by Prime Minister’s order is comparatively easy in the British system.
	France stands out as another rather unique case. This arises from the semi-presidential character of the French Vth Republic established in 1958. There, it depends on such factors as the political affiliation of the President on the one hand and on the other the Prime Minister if the two office holders work in unison or if there is a period of the so-called cohabitation, when the two office holders work on the basis of different party political mandates. France is a country with so-called large governments with a core of political ministers proper and numerous junior ministers, and a tradition of political cabinets supporting the ministers in their roles. However, there are definite limits to the voluntarism of the ruling top of the French “political class” to engage in reforms. France has a tradition of the best elaborated career civil service of the world’s all countries. In a long tradition, les grandes écoles have turned out technical specialists, and since World War II a particular École Nationale d’Administration has provided the ultimate career-oriented professional training for a good part of the coming French élite in public administration, in politics and in a large part of business as well. In those circumstances the prediction that rapid reforms can be implemented by political decisions is not self-evident by far. However, French governments have launched, implemented, monitored and evaluated large-scale reforms, although France has not stood out as the main representative of the visible neo-liberal and New Public Management reform wave as has been the case with the United Kingdom, but oftentimes the position of France has been rather the contrary. It is still noteworthy which types of rationalistic, elaborate procedures France has established for the purposes of monitoring and related purposes at the very centre of here government. Interestingly, resembling procedures can be found in the European Commission, which is hardly a coincidence given the features of French administrative heritage built into the European institutions in their early days since Jean Monnet, a previous head of the French Comissariat du Plan, became the first President of the High Authority of the European Coal and Steel. Community in 1952.
	Size of a country is another factor determining the type, nature and shape of reforms and their monitoring, especially as far as concerns the size of population. The largest Member State, Germany, not analysed above, differs from the two above Member States in that respect as well that Germany is a federal state, with the Länder being in charge of many policy fields instead of the Bund. The constitutional division of powers between the Bund and the Länder precludes that the Bund alone could initiate and implement many of the reforms that a are part and parcel of the domain of the central government in more centralised Members States. United Kingdom and France, importantly, have a tradition of being quite centralised despite the fact that constitutionally the U.K. has been a federation of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. It is only the Blair government that towards the end of the 1990s started a process of definite political decentralisation focused upon Scotland, in particular. As a matter of fact, decentralisation, and most probably monitoring and evaluation of its consequences, are an important aspect in the agenda of the Blair government. In France régionalisation with elected representatives within the regions, oftentimes resembling the traditional French regions, was introduced in the 1980s. However, the functions of the regions are limited, and France is still far from a federation and has preserved many of her established features of centralisation upon Paris and the centre of her government. Spain can be taken up as an interesting case of a quite large Member State with strong to intermediate features of true political decentralisation and a development that has definitely gone towards the prediction that Spain may rather soon evolve as a true federal state. Since the re-establishment of democracy in Spain there has been little doubt that Catalonia, in particular, has wielded wide powers of political self-governments, but interestingly, further and further other regions have been gradually following suit. However, this paper cannot have dealt with Spain as far as to giving a case study on that country.  
	There are further differences between the Member States, and these differences must be taken up to make the similarities clear and to distil out that which is capable of generalisation and potentially transferable to pre-accession countries as “best practices” of monitoring. Most but not all governments of the Member States apply the principle of an extended government in that there are two types of ministers. Those of the highest standing are limited in number, but there are junior, deputy or vice ministers or political secretaries of state as well, making the total size of governments approach one hundred in a few Member States. There is a further, related aspect that in many but not all Member States there is the tradition that political ministers have personal cabinets to support their role. In rough terms, large and extended governments are to be found in large Member States and small and limited ones in the smaller states, especially in Europe’s north and north-east, although there are some exceptions as well. Systems with political cabinets supporting the Prime Minister and the other ministers are to be found in Europe’s south and south-west, whereas they are absent in Europe’s north and north-east. Here, Britain stands out as a special case with her system centred on the Prime Minister and particular supports to his or her role. Finally, where the governments are small and where political cabinets are absent it should go almost without saying that the political ministers are dependent upon civil servants, who tend to be career people instead of political appointees, although mixing career and political appointment has been encountered as isolates cases as far as in the central governments of Sweden and Finland. All in all, without the loyalty and the commitment of the civil service corps many a reform of public policies and public administration may not be possible in countries where civil servants are strong in comparison to politicians. However, where they are strong must be found out separately case by case, because this feature is not revealed by such features as the extent of the government of ministers or presence of absence of political cabinets.
	There is the further aspect of the strength versus the weakness of local government autonomy vis-à-vis the national central or regional governments as well. Although one might imagine that in non-federal Member States the national government is all-powerful, the case is far from so in any systematic, generally applicable way. Importantly, the Nordic tradition of strong municipal governments precludes many a reform that the municipalities do not accept in such Member States as Finland, Sweden and Denmark. On the contrary, a well-known facilitating aspect of the fundamental Thatcherite reforms in Britain was that the British local governments had no such inalienable autonomy that would have prevented many of the deep privatisation steps or certain other definite policy steps by that the government carried out since 1979. In this respect a tradition of centralisation of power in the British national government was an enabling factor in the reforms as opposed to countries where local government autonomy may have prevented similar rapid measures.
	The above differences between the systems of government of the Member States and the caveats to draw rapid generalisations should not be seen as discouragement for government reform in the pre-accession states. On the contrary, singling out the differences provides very valuable knowledge of the impact of the particular type, shape and context of each government on which types of arrangements may provide workable in such a government, and on which are the likely limits of those arrangements in the particular government systems of the pre-accession countries. In brief, knowledge of the differences is strongly instrumental for properly contextualising and fine-tuning the arrangements to improve centres of government once there is an aim of their country-to-country transfer. 
	There is the aspect as well that different Member States have different stories to tell in view of lessons to learn with elaborating procedures and practices of monitoring in pre-accession states in view. Therefore:

•	The French solution stresses monitoring by the means of a multitude of inter-ministerial meetings and committees, although evaluation is not absent, either
•	The European Commission has its convention of regular meetings between the political cabinets of the Commission Members as a way of monitoring, but the Commission has been developing its evaluation function as well
•	In the United Kingdom monitoring is definitely a function that the Prime Minister and the Cabinet Office and the Prime Minister’s Office working for him have pursued
•	The Dutch solution is particulary strong in evaluation, the strength of which, joined with particular features of the Dutch system of government, compensates well for the relative lack of monitoring in the narrow sense
•	Finland stands out as a Member State that has carried out a particular large project on monitoring important public administration reforms, although monitoring has been evolving through strengthening the political programming of the government’s policies as well

General trends in reforming centres of government

	A general emphasis in all practically all OECD countries has in the recent years been upon ensuring that the “centre of government” has an adequate strategic grip on the line of policy-making and the type, shape, nature and development of the systems and procedures of public administration and the entire public sector. Typical foci of development include streamlining the central office of the government, whether named the Prime Minister’s Office or else, streamlining the government’s master programme towards a strategic and operationalisable document whether the government be a coalition of not, and elaborating particular support units, functions and procedures for the strategic decision-making role of the government. These questions hinge on the way how each Member States has structured its government, and they hinge on how its has organised its overall public financial management as well. The general trend in the Member States has gone towards alienating certain business functions long affiliated with government either to the private sector or at the arm’s length from government into government companies or public corporations, although different Member States have had their own, unique interpretations of the type, shape and extent of that trend. 
	There has been a trend towards defining part of the centre of the government as its strategic core, this typically meaning the ministries. Instead of having the ministries administer and implement, they should now engage in building the guiding policy vision, define strategies, , plan, and evaluate if the vision is pursued, if the strategy is coming true, and if the planned objectives are realised. Around the strategic core, government organisations of implementation and administration would extend. All that can be decentralised might move to self-governing regions, self-governing municipalities of public interest NGOs. 
	Public financial management procedures have typically been harnessed for supporting reforms and developments of the above type. Result contracting is applied in other Member States as well than Britain, Finland and Sweden between ministries and lower government agencies, between the central government and its and its public corporations, and within many a public organisation between its management centre and its various units redefined as result units. Budgeting for results is known and applied widely as well. Binding more or less of future funding to results reached is the ultimate step taken in some Members State governments in the national level, the regional level or the local level, or two or all of those levels.
	Beside that the centre of government has been developing towards a small but hard strategic core of government policy-making in several of the Member States, relevant developments have been taken place in a unique special administration as well. This is government auditing. There are important differences as to how government auditing is organised in each Member States, but all Member States acknowledge the importance of a supreme national audit institution that is independent of the influences of its auditees. Quite literally this is not fully so in all the Member States in regard to the formal arrangement of the position of the national audit institution. However, this does not have to preclude a high degree of de facto independence. 
	As part of a global trend really started as early as in the 1960s in the United States, supreme government audit institutions have come to occupy a formidable role in monitoring and evaluating policy reforms and reforms of public administration in many Member States. Such a trend has been more discernible in Europe’s north and north-west than in her south. Rather similar conclusions can be drawn as to the UK’s National Audit Office, the Dutch General Accounting Chamber Algemene Rekenkamer, the Swedish National Audit Office riksrevisionsverket, the Finnish State Audit Office and the Danish State Audit Office. All these institutions audit widely the efficiency and effectiveness of reforms both during the reforms and once accomplished, nor have they withheld suggestions that reforms be started as far as they find they have detected reform needs. In Germany, the Federal Audit Court as well has an established role in auditing efficiency over and above regularity, and the President of the Court functions as the Federal Commissioner of Effiency questions. All in all, in about one half of the Member States the supreme state audit institutions have a well-established role in reform monitoring as part of their general orientation towards observing efficiency and effectiveness in government and making suggestions for their improvement. 

Lessons with a particular view on the European Union pre-accession countries

	It is unlikely that any panacea can be found for the pre-accession states for the purpose of monitoring important reforms of social and economic policies and public administration. However, this does not mean that important lessons could not be learned from comparisons between the Member States. 
	First of all, the pre-accession countries are different in size and the structure of their government. There are definite wide differences, for instance, between the unitary state of Estonia of a population of 1,5 million one part of whom are not actually citizens and Poland, which has a population of 40 million equally as Spain and which has been introducing decentral features in her sub-central government. The pre-accession states are different as well in the respect that they have been able to establish national systems of government, administration and policy-making that are stable and solid enough for democracy and EU membership proper. Between six and ten of the present applicant states have reached quite far in this respect, including, for instance, Poland, Estonia, Hungary, and the Czech Republic.
	However, there are rather more similarities between the pre-accession states in their political and governmental systems than there are between the established EU Member States. The typical electoral political system of a pre-accession state gives each such a country a few effective political parties that must typically join into a coalition to ensure parliamentary majority. Both as a result of pre-transition heritage and examples in many of the Member States the pre-accession states typically have governments that include both a core of ministers and junior ministers, and cabinets supporting ministers are common as well. In the more political level, it is common in the pre-accession states that each government must step on a narrow line of pursuing reforms in the same as it must work to avoid losing its constituency by frustrating large parts of the electorate, whether they be farmers, those who lost a lot in the transitions, the civil servants, or the country’s thriving businesspeople. On the contrary, in the established Member States the absence of any traces of transition involves a different definition of the political force field. In public administration, hardly any pre-accession state has fully accomplished a new, fully smoothly functioning, competent and adequately resourced public administration at all levels from the centre to the municipalities, but not untypically, important frictions prevail.
	The following conclusions can be spelled out:

1.	The pre-accession states meet, equally as the established Member States but in circumstances that continue to be different in many respects, the challenge of ensuring a sufficient strategic capacity of the centre of government. This challenge is two-fold. It involves solid enough institutionalisation of the capacity itself, and it involves solid enough definition, implementation and monitoring of the substance of the strategies that are being pursued. 
2.	The pre-accession states will have to engage in a balancing act of establishing a very centralised government system with an all-powerful central co-ordination unit under the Prime Minister, and a system that provides nurtures the discretion of each minister and each sector ministry as well. Some degree of duplication of the division into ministries within the Prime Minister’s Office or equivalent may be defensible in some of the pre-accession states, but a high duplication degree may be in the final end symptomatic that the line ministries are not allowed to fulfil their mission.
3.	The pre-accession states benefit of high-quality considerations of the Prime Minister’s function in the Member States. In most Member States, the role of the Prime Minister is, despite of its being that of the topmost de facto political leader, indeed that of a leader, a mentor, a coach, a facilitator, the top supervisor and the top monitor, but not that of an inspector, auditor, let alone the decision-maker on most conceivable policy issues in the various fields of social and economic policy-making. 
4.	The pre-accession states must unavoidable take a stand as to the role of political nominees versus career civil servants in the strategic core of government policy-making. No pre-accession country seems to be a de facto two-party system impose by the electoral system in the way of the United Kingdom. This makes that the political nominees will have to rely upon career civil servants even more than has been the case in Britain, where such reliance has been strong yet oftentimes contested. However, in the same the political nominees have a legitimate call for supporting experts who have the character of political nominees themselves. This is another field where the “politician-bureaucrat” relation must be handled with care with another balancing act. Somehow each pre-accession state should make the political nominees and their political staffs work fruitfully together with career civil servants and vice versa. Here, time is likely to work for the benefit of the pre-accession states in that legal and informal conventions are likely to become established once years pass since the beginning of the “transition”.
5.	The pre-accession states may find strengthening the Prime Minister’s Office of equivalent desirable to keep close scrutiny on the various policy-making fields. Should they indeed feel so, they would benefit of learning from experiences in Member States where such strengthening can have been kept within certain limits without compromising the policy-making results. A conceivable practice involves institutionalising a multitude of frequent to very frequent and perhaps very elaborate negotiation and consultative procedures between those concerned, importantly the ministers or the ministries and their representatives. Where the electoral system of the country in question makes that typical governments are coalitions, those procedures are apt to nurture a consensus between the coalition partners better than less transparent or less formalised ways of decision-making and consenus formation.
6.	The pre-accession states meet not only the challenge of adding new functions to their centres of government, but as well shedding off functions that are not crucial for the strategic role of that centre. Should the latter not take place, the centre of government would be seriously overburdened up to harming its actual capacity to perform well. 
7.	In the same as the pre-accession states meet the challenge of shedding off functions from the centre of government, they meet the challenge to include and integrate there functions that find their suitable place there. 
8.	Each government of a pre-accession state meets the challenge of developing the government’s programme into a strategic medium irrespective of the documentary form – typically a written programme document of a number of points, perhaps to be followed up in some definite way during its implementation. It is desirable that the programme is capable of operationalisation as far as possible and capable of revision during the government’s period in office. That is, it is advisable to define goals and objectives to pursue as well as means to use in the pursuit, indicators and measures to check the progress, and ways and means to monitor and evaluate the progress. 
9.	The experience of established EU Member States and that of other OECD member countries as well suggests that different fields of economic and social policies and different aspects of public administration may have to be monitored and evaluated in different ways. There are topics where experts well-versed with such hard methods as those of economics and statistics perform well; there are topics where substance experts in such fields as education, health care, social insurance and pensions are needed; and there are topics where so-called soft methods and qualitative approaches are needed such as in nurturing leadership capacities in government. In many cases even where the topic is as such “hard” such as reforming government budgeting and accounting hard data are inachievable for that very purpose, but softer and more qualitative approaches are needed. 
10.	A likely result of the above is that monitoring and evaluation are likely to develop in an uneven way in the pre-accession countries. However, this should not be seen as a drawback only. The situation has been the same in the established Member States and the other OECD member countries, and it has been the same in the EU institutions as well. We know relatively to quite well how to monitor and evaluate in development co-operation at the project and programme level or in the same levels in large parts of regional development policies, for instance, but we know it is hard to evaluate, for instance, the sustainable, long-term quality of university teaching or the long-term effects of preventive basic health care. 
11.	Monitoring and evaluation of reforms is likely to bring forth both aspects of success and those of failure. Because the political opposition is likely to bring out the failures, it is, rather fortunately, in the best interest of any ruling government to engage in vigorous and quality-assured monitoring and evaluation to ensure that not only the failures but the positive accomplishments and the learning that may have occurred receive attention as well. Openness, wide coverage and transparency of monitoring and evaluation are therefore, all in all, desirable features of reform monitoring and evaluation. 
12.	Each government of a pre-accession state meets the challenge of ensuring a sufficient monitoring of its foremost economic and social policy reforms and its foremost public administration reforms. Each government meets then challenge as well to do so by the means of monitoring arrangements that are flexible and if needed ad hoc instead of establishing permanent monitoring units where ad hoc units would do. Alternatively, the pre-accession states may choose to make the transitory monitoring a transitory task of some of the their administrations, which can turn to other functions once the reforms and their monitoring have been fully accomplished.
13.	Beside monitoring, each government of the pre-accession countries meets the challenge of taking a stand as to functions that are related to monitoring, such as ex ante, ex nunc and ex post evaluation, futures studies, particular policy studies and legal impact analyses.
14.	Each government of a pre-accession state meets the challenge of tapping the resource of government auditing for monitoring and evaluating reforms. Once regularity and legality auditing are solidly in place, government auditing can be geared to cover questions of efficiency and effectiveness as well. This cannot happen very rapidly, but once government careers will gain in comparative desirability among talented people, the situation is very likely to improve.
15.	Flexibility could be sought from contracting reform monitoring and evaluation projects to individual academic and consulting experts, universities and their units, the government’s own research institutions, and private consulting organisations. This is opposed to a strategy where a government relies entirely or almost so on having it all made within the government itself.