Looking at public management in the subnational governments of Peru: a proposal for classifying studies from the Social Sciences and the usefulness of the historical perspective (1990-2022)

Abstract

The article proposes a classification of the literature produced from the Social Sciences, on the analysis of public management in the subnational governments of Peru between the years 1990 to 2022, a period marked by the decentralization process and the implementation of policies to improve the public function. The starting point is the vision of transnational institutions and then the perspective of administrative law that, in part, determined the direction of public management reforms and the discussion about them. Below, the core proposals of the classification are presented, which focus on: the incorporation of the analysis of actors immersed in the conflictive nature of State reforms and public management, the look at subnational governments in the context of modernization of the State, and the review of the approaches outlined to analyze the management instruments put into practice; to, finally, on this corpus, propose, for our part, the usefulness of the historical perspective due to its potential to contribute to a deeper understanding of the prominence that local governments acquired within the framework of these reforms over the last decades.