What is New Public Management, and how effective is it?

The use of consultants for public policy analysis can be clearly linked to New Public Management. New Public Management (NPM) is generally “used to describe a management culture that… suggests structural or organizational choices that promote decentralized control through a wide variety of alternative service delivery mechanisms, including quasi-markets with public and private service providers competing for resources from policymakers and donors.”¹ Thus, NPM ideas are at the heart of the practice of public organizations hiring private contractors to assist with/carry out policy analysis.

However, “NPM’s focus on disaggregation and competition automatically increased the numbers of administrative units and created more complex and dynamic interrelationships among them, compared with previous PPA systems.”² Consequently, “Some NPM reforms touted specifically as increasing transparency have ended up instead creating bizarre new layers of impenetrability…”³ Thus,

NPM boosted policy complexity and impaired to some degree social problem-solving… In addition, increased policy complexity has negative effects on levels of citizen competence… The more difficult it is for citizens to understand internal state arrangements and to operate appropriate access points to represent their interests politically and administratively, the more their autonomous capabilities to solve policy problems may be eroded.⁴

Also, according Chang (2008, p. 169-170), some NPM-inspired reforms increased corruption by increasing the number of contracts with private sector and thus increasing opportunities for bribes.⁵ Similarly, Nield (2002, p. 198) considers NPM an antithesis to the ideal public servants who have a number of incentives to neutrally perform their job regardless of the politicians in power at any one time.⁶

Notes

1. http://www.mh-lectures.co.uk/npm_2.htm

2. http://jerrybrito.pbworks.com/changes/f/Digital%25C2%25A0Era%25C2%25A0Governence%25C2%25A02006.pdf

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Chang, Ha-Joon. (2008). Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the secret history of Capitalism. Bloomsbury Press USA.

6. Nield, Robert. (2002). Public Corruption: The Dark Side of Social Evolution. UK: Anthem Press.