Improving Public Service Delivery: The Crossroads Between NPM and Traditional Bureaucracy

Abstract

This article analyses a New Public Management (NPM) style of reform recently introduced in Portuguese public administration. The reform introduces new organizations to a method of delivering public services called ‘Citizen Shops’ (CS) (Lojas dos Cidadãos). Several public services are concentrated in a single building whose management follows the practices of the private sector concerning service delivery and opening times, rather like a ‘shopping centre’. ‘Citizen Shops’ is a kind of agencification and is an attempt to avoid the constraints of civil service red tape and bureaucratic resistance to change. The author argues that the extent to which new ideas were imported from NPM was limited and constrained by the institutional framework and the culture prevailing in Portuguese bureaucracy. Citizen Shops reproduced the hierarchical and centralized nature of service delivery and followed the traditional patterns of control. The prevailing structure is an important constraint on NPM development.