NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT

New Public Management

New Public Management

Introduction

We are told there is a global revolution in public management. It seems that government everywhere, is being reinvented. The word “revolution” implies sudden change but change in the public sector is rarely sudden. However, the changes to public management that are being catalogued around the world appear to indicate that we are witnessing a supposed paradigm shift in public administration from bureaucracy to post-bureaucracy which stresses managerial rather than administrative values. The new paradigm is often referred to as new public management (NPM). Hood (1991 and 2004) thought that part of the appeal of NPM was its applicability to any bureaucratic or political setting. Dunleavy (1991 and 2004) also went on to warn that we are witnessing “the decoupling of public services production from a single-country context”. Holmes (2001, p.472) remarked that given the cultural diversity of a cross-section of studies on administrative change, “one can only be amazed by the commonality of not only language but also, more importantly, purpose”. Are we witnessing the globalisation of NPM, or are we simply debating an instance of policy convergence?

Economic and Social Changes in terms of New Public Management

What do we mean by globalisation? There are many interpretations on offer, and a full discussion is beyond the scope of this article. If we take globalisation to mean the universal application of public policy then there are five possible overlapping explanations for the globalisation of NPM: the NPM “missionary”; the internationalisation of new right politics; the internationalisation of privatisation; the role of international organizations; and increasing policy transfer activity. The first four explanations I will deal with briefly. First, Hood (1991 and 2004) had noted how NPM had quickly become a “self-serving industry” to an army of consultants, business schools and advisers, who had a vested interested in spreading NPM. The internationalisation of NPM could be ascribed to a missionary zeal on the part of management “gurus” travelling the world. The Economist (2005, p. 23) reported that Michael Porter of the Harvard Business School “has been asked by governments from Portugal to Colombia to do for them what he and his kind have done for private enterprise”. The case of “reinventing government” deserves special mention. Following Clinton's endorsement, Gray and Jenkins (2004) reported that the text was commended to public administration academics by Sir Robin Butler, and by William Waldegrave in his 1993 Public Finance Foundation lecture. Osborne (Osborne and Gaebler, 2001) came over to the UK in 1993 to “preach” to ministers, civil servants and local government officers. However, it is hard to imagine the spread of NPM as being entirely due to the efforts of a few travelling salespersons.

Second, the link between the introduction of NPM and a global new right project appears, at first, to be a strong one. Certainly, it appeared that the UK Conservative governments pursued NPM with the most zeal, yet Wright (2004, p. 112) points to “Swedish Social Democrats and Spanish and French socialists, untainted by the same ideological motivations” ...