New Public Management

A variety of factors began to coalesce in the 1980s, calling into question some of the basic assumptions of public administration.

First, there was a resurgence of support for a less intrusive government that reduced the regulatory and financial burden on individuals and property holders. Second, the call for less government was advanced by those who were worried that the growing debt and escalating retirement costs by state and local government. Finally, the call for less government was fueled by a general philosophical belief that democracy was safer when government is smaller.

Taken together, these forces for change have resulted in movements that call into question the capacity for government to be the primary agent in solving society’s problems.

New Public Management (NPM), took the business or market model as the standard for measuring government success and has applied it in successive waves of administrative reform since the early 1980s.

There has been a concerted effort over the last three decades to reframe the model of public administration from a rule-centered system of accountability to one that makes government run more like a business. This movement, called New Public Management, strives to make the services provided by government more responsive and accountable to citizens by applying businesslike management techniques with a strong focus on competition, customer satisfaction, and measurement of performance.

The New Public Management agenda is based on a truncated view of the purpose of government. Government is not simply the agent of accountability to citizens or the agent of efficiency and effectiveness. It is also responsible for collecting the values of the community and creating integrated responses to these values across increasingly fragmented government systems.