Essay on the rise of New Public Administration

New Public Administration is an anti-positivist, anti-technical, and anti-hierarchical reaction against traditional public administration.

New Public Administration traces its origins to the first Minnow brook Conference held in 1968 under the patronage of Dwight Waldo. The 1960s in the USA was a time of unusual social and political turbulence and upheaval. In this context, Waldo concluded that neither the study nor the practice of public administration was responding suitably to the escalating turmoil and the complications that arose from those conditions.

Themes

1. Relevance:

Traditional public administration has too little interest in contemporary problems and issues. Social realities must be taken into consideration.

2. Values:

Value-neutrality in public administration is impossibility. The values being served through administrative action must be transparent.

3. Social Equity:

Realization of social equity should be a chief goal of public administration.

4. Change:

Skepticism toward the deeply-rooted powers invested in permanent institutions and the status quo.

5. Client Focus:

Positive, proactive, and responsive administrators rather than inaccessible and authoritarian “ivory tower” bureaucrats.

Though New Public Administration brought public administration closer to political science, it was criticized as anti-theoretic and anti-management. Robert T. Golembiewski describes it as radicalism in words and status quo in skills and technologies. Further, it must be counted as only a cruel reminder of the gap in the field between aspiration and performance. Golembiewski considers it as a temporary and transitional phenomenon.

Some modern authors define NPM as a combination of splitting large bureaucracies into smaller, more fragmented ones, competition between different public agencies, and between-public agencies and private firms and incentivization on more economic lines. Defined in this way NPM was an intellectual force in public management outside the USA from the early 1980s to the early 2000s.

NPM, compared to other public management theories, is more oriented towards outcomes and efficiency through better management of public budget. It is considered to be achieved by applying competition, as it is known in the private sector, to organizations in the public sector, emphasizing economic and leadership principles. New public management addresses beneficiaries of public services much like customers, and conversely citizens as shareholders.