Reversing Government Reforms: Radical Change or Adaptive Adjustments?

Abstract

ABSTRACT The novelty of this study is its focus on reversing government reforms, a topic that has received little attention in the literature. It focuses on what characterizes the reversal processes with respect to their driving forces and results. Empirically, the study addresses attempts at reversing four administrative reforms in Norway in the period 2021–2024: The municipal reform, the county reform, the police reform, and the court reform, which were implemented in the period 2015–2020. A main conclusion is that it turned out to be very difficult to reverse these reforms, except for the county reform. The attempted reversions are better understood in terms of an adaptive perspective resulting in a gradual institutional change characterized by agility, incrementalism, and rebalancing rather than cyclical processes and pendulum swings between merging and splitting of government organizations. A main lesson is that announcing the reversion of reforms is very different from implementing them.

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