What is the New Public Management? And how has it expressed itself in the workings of public bureaucracies in the Caribbean?
Introduction
During the last twenty years, various public administrations of countries in Europe, North America, Latin America and the Caribbean, were characterised by a practical reform movement defined by Hood (1991) as the New Public Management (NPM). This is documented by other scholars such as Gernod Gruening (1998)[1], and Paul Sutton (2003). Throughout the literature, it is evident that the process of reform have been subject to different terminologies: Managerialism – Pollitt (1990); Market Based Administration – Lan and Rosenbloom (1992); Entrepreneurial Government – Osborne and Gaebler (1992).
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Implementers of The Movement
The NPM movement began to develop in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. The first movers were the United kingdom, which was reformed by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and communal governments in the US under Ronald Reagan which suffered heavily from recessive developments and tax revolts of their citizens. Later the national governments of other Commonwealth countries, mainly New Zealand and Australia joined, after news the reform successes in these countries, and administrative reforms got on the agendas of almost all OECD countries.[7]
Philosophy of the New Public Management
Some of the major philosophical underpinnings of the NPM were outlined by Teehankee (2003) and are very pervasive throughout the literature: • Management culture that emphasizes the centrality of the customer • Transparency with regard to resource allocation and results • Organization that promotes decentralized control through a wide
Under the NPM umbrella, public sector has also been experiencing a shift to greater competition. The need to remove monopoly of service delivery and create contestability, through privatization, public tendering, and term contracts, justifies the adoption of competition principle (Dunleavy 1994; Hood 1991). Insisting to do bureaucratic provision on public services instead of contracting them out, knowing that private sector can deliver them better, it is believed would only force governments to lose comparative advantages on price, efficiency, and effectiveness (Dunleavy 1994. p.49). This way, governments are able to fulfil their responsibility in providing services and the financing, while simultaneously stimulate greater competition among providers under market dynamics. However, it is hard to instigate public service ethos in private parties. Therefore, the capacity of private entities to act consistently with the public interest is greatly questioned in this scenario. Are concerns such as public health and safety, environment sustainability, and social equity likely to be sacrificed underneath market mechanisms? When power is shared with organizations which have business objectives apart from government’s goals, the fundamental issue is how to detect which missions they are carrying out. Many public services being delivered by third parties are targeted for vulnerable sections of the community which can pose a higher risk of potential abuse, neglect, exploitation, and
Today the new public management (NPM) model is the leading worldview in the public sector. The political climate and ideology during the 1970s and 1980s served as an impetus to migrate away from the old public administration approach and implement new policies and procedures that would be of better service to the public interest and collective good as well as restore trust and value in the bureaucratic process. Thus, during the mid-1990s, the new public management worldview was realized to apply common practices used in the private sector to the public sector. The goal of this approach was to achieve the same level of efficiency found in the private sector and remove some of the redundancy, lack of transparency, and lack of accountability in bureaucratic government to better serve the public interest. David Osborne and Ted Gaebler’s Reinventing Government (1992) served as a catalytic novel in the progression of implementing private practices in the public sector. Under the NPM framework public administrators
Kernaghan, K. 2000. The Post-Bureaucratic Organization and Public Services Values. Interational Review of Administrative Sciences 66. 2000, pp. 92-93.
The paper will look further investigation on current system of public sector management. As a result, the bases of public sector governance has improve innovative policy and a development of innovative concepts. It will also highlight the significant of innovation in a present day in term social, economic and political changes as well as the flow of information technology in the 21 century to reform a public administration. The second part two of essay will highlight the best approach to streamline management practices and capacities of public servants to consolidate all procedures of resources management. Therefore, policy innovation has become one of the essential conditions for transformation of public governance. On top of that, this essay aiming to provide an overview of the barriers to policy innovation within the public sector, companies
Since Wilson, the nature of public administration has undergone three distinct areas of thought: the politically based Old Public Administration, economically based New Public Administration, and democratically based New Public Service (Denhardt &
"Classical Organizational Theory deals with the 'systematic processes necessary to make bureaucracy more efficient and effective.' Name three scholars that are credited with the development of classical organization thought that most correctly fit into this definition of Classical Organizational Theory. What were the basic arguments articulated by each in their contributions to the development of Classical Organizational Theory?"
On a macro level, public administration and business management are similar in their overall functions. “At the broadest level, some organizational theorists contend that administration is administration whatever its setting, and that the problems of organizing people, leading them and supplying them with resources to do their jobs are always the same (Kettl, 2012, p. 38).” In his paper, “Public and Private Management: Are They Fundamentally Alike in All Unimportant Respects?,” Graham T. Allison explains that in comparing public and administration and business management, “it is possible to identify a set of general management functions (Allison, 2012, p. 4).” Regardless of their end goal, each administration must form strategies by setting goals, priorities and creating procedures. Public and private organizations must manage internal components by organizing staff, defining job responsibilities, hiring and managing personnel and creating budgets. Furthermore, they must manage external constituencies such as other agencies, the press and public (Allison, 2012, p. 5). His observations stem from Wallace Sayre’s famous words, “public and private management are fundamentally alike in all unimportant respects (DiIlulio, 1993).”
Approaching Public Administration – Core Debates and Emerging Issues Edited by Roberto P. Leone (Wilfrid Laurier University) and Frank L.K. Ohemeng (University of Ottawa); 2011, Emond Montgomery Publications
For some time, researchers have been interested in the consequences of creating larger public organizations. A common trend in recent efforts to develop the public sector is changing the size of public organizations. On the other hand, small and large organizations put different requirements on the work of their managers. Management involves both internal efforts targeted at improving the way inputs are transformed to outputs.
In the late 1970s, the old government model faced a series of crisis, which lead the Western governments to a new approach usually known as the New Public Management(NPM). As Pollitt, Thiel, and Homburg stated, the New Public Management is apparently focusing on efficiency, results, and customer oriented(2007). It is a new approach to reach a more efficient way to deliver public service(Lane, 2000, P8). In the UK government public management reform, it is worth to underline its idea of evidence-based policy. Evidence-based policy in the UK was first introduced by the white paper on Modernising government:
In the following paragraphs, I will explain the dominant theory in public administration practice and elaborate on the major theoretical assumptions of the Old Public Administration. As stated in the question, the world has transformed through globalization, information technology, and devolution of authority since the latter part of the last century. The dominant theory in public administration has been replaced from the traditional rule-based, authority-driven processes of the Old Public Administration with market-based, competition-driven tactics in the New Public Management, beginning in the 1980s (Kettl, 2000, p. 3). This was an effort to privatize government and streamline public administration to maximize efficiency and productivity. Heavily relying on market mechanisms to guide public programs, public administrators in the New Public Management are encouraged to “steer, not row,” meaning they should not bear the burden of delivering services, but instead define programs that others will carry out, through contracting or other means (Denhardt & Denhardt, 2011, p. 13). Core values of the New Public Management include using private sector and business approaches to the public sector, squeezing as many services as possible from smaller revenues, market style incentives, providing customers more choices, and focusing on outputs and outcomes instead of mainly processes.
Public organizations and the public administrators have an important duty of promoting and maintaining democratic government especially by ensuring good governance. Social and economic development can be achieved through good governance. Collaborative governance is a primary component of good governance (Ansell & Gash, 2008). Admittedly, public management reforms are fundamental to improving the abilities of various nations to address issues that touch on democratic government. Some of the
The purpose of this paper, An Understanding of Public Administration, is to provide the reader with an overview of the field and its application towards public programs, agencies, groups and other associations. It also provides a clear definition, introduces some principles associated with public administration along and how it is used in American society. Public administration allows public policies and actions, decision-making ability and day to day operations of an agency to be executed effectively in our
Before compare the two different models TPA and NPM, I will illustrate what is the