Comparative Public Administration
February 12, 2025
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The term new public management was coined by scholars from UK and Australia (Hood 1991 and Hood and Jackson 1991), who were working in the in the areas of public administration. Now, the origin of this new term was to propose a new point of view towards the organizational design in the public sector, however after a decade, the meaning of this term in discussions and debates became many.
Some scholars choose to define it as the introduction of new institutional economics to public management and some used it to refer to pattern changes in policy making. Before we make an effort to further understand the various aspects of New Public Management, let us see how it is different from the traditional public administration.
The new public management which emerged in the 1980s represented an attempt to make the public sector more businesslike and to improve the efficiency of the Government borrowed ideas and management models from the private sector. It emphasized the centrality of citizens who were the recipient of the services or customers to the public sector.
New public management system also proposed a more decentralized control of resources and exploring other service delivery models to achieve better results, including a quasi-market structure where public and private service providers competed with each other in an attempt to provide better and faster services. [For e.g. In UK the purchase and provision of healthcare was split up between National Health Services or NHS and Government funded GP fund holders, this increased efficiency as the hospitals now needed to provide low cost procedures to win both patients and funds.)
The core themes for the New Public Management were:
With changing times newer aspects were included in the NPM model mentioned above as well and what the scholars term as NPM model 2 was brought in. The critical aspects of this new model were:
Now, as more and more work was done in the areas of Human Resources and Relations and popular texts which stressed on the need of excellence, the importance of organizational culture, values, vision and the concept of Learning Organization introduced by Peter Senge (1990) influenced the new public management as well and therefore suitable changed were also suggested in the theory by the scholars.
So, basically the new public management was a radical movement to change not just the way a public sector functions but also the entire perception about it.
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