What Is the New Public Management?

Abstract

True, there is a defined (if unwieldly) set of ideas that usually gets conjured up whenever NPM is the topic of discussion: competition between public and private service providers; decentralization and delayering of government bureaus; more choice for citizens; benchmarking and output measurements; performance contracts and other financial incentives for public servants; creation of inter-nal markets; and assimilation; within the public sector, of private-sector management techniques including better risk-management. Yet despite this emergent consensus on NPM's specific content, several scholars have concluded that NPM embodies radically different, indeed conflicting goals (Kettl 1995, 14) or that it dis-plays a disparate, and at times contradictory, set of traits.... Indeed, sometimes the new public management seems like an empty canvas: you can paint on it whatever you like. There is no clear or agreed definition of what the new public management actually is .. . (Ferlie et al. 1996, 10). These statements imply that, notwithstanding the agreed-upon specifics, NPM seems prey to a lack of clarity at a more theoretical level.