New Public Service Approach-Fadia and Fadia

The New Public Management has championed a vision of public managers as the entrepreneurs of a new,leaner,and increasingly privatized government,emulating not only the practices but also the values of business.

• Proponents of the New Public Management have developed their arguments largely through contrasts with the old public administration.
• In this comparison,the new public administration ofcourse will always win.
• In this better contrast is with what we call the 'New Public Service'.a movement built on work in course theory.
• The concept of the New Public Service emphasis the primary role of the public servant is to help citizens,articulate them and meet their shared interests rather than  to attempt to control or steer society.

• Public administration in the 21st century is undergoing dramatic change,especially in advanced economies,but also in many parts of developing world. Globalization and the pluralization of services provision are the driving forces behind these changes.
• Policy Problems faced by governments are increasingly complex,wicked and global ,rather than simple,linear and national in focus.
• And yet the prevailing paradigms through which public sector reform are designed and implemented are relatively static and do not fully encompass the significance or implications of these wider changes.
• While public sector reforms in the developing world are influenced by policy experiments and organisational practices originating in OECD countries,they tend to operate within the traditional Public Administration paradigm.
• Consequently,there is often a discrepancy between the thrust of public sector reform efforts in developing country contexts and wider shifts in the nature of governance and contemporary approaches to public management grounded in OECD experiences.

MODELS OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND APPROACHES TO PUBLIC SECTOR REFORM

• There are numerous studies of public administration and public sector reforms in advanced industrialized countries.
• Models of Public administration in developing countries have generally drawn on experiences in advanced countries and public sector reforms have often mirrored reform initiatives originating in OECD countries.
• Several frameworks have been developed to classify and analyse different approaches to Public administration and public sector reforms in advanced industrialized countries.
• Most of these focus on the transition from the old public administration to the New Public Management.

• Each of these approaches to public administration is associated with a distinct philosophy and conceptual framework,the traditional approach to public administration is predicated on a to down and elitist approach,in which public officials are instilled with values of hierarchy independence, and integrity,and are insulated from politicians and citizens.the focus in this approach is on struggle and organisational efficiency,epitomized by command and control and underpinned by a clear public sector ethos.

• In contrast,The New public Management approach is based on public choice theory and the principal agent approach in which public officials will be motivated  to serve by virtue of a commitment to the public interest and will respond to citizens expectations of a healthy and responsive public service.

The Old Public Administration:

influenced by the ideas of Max Weber,the prevailing approach to public administration for much of the 20th century drew on model of bureaucracy based on the twin principles of hierarchy and meritocracy.It was initially introduced as part of wide ranging bureaucratic reforms in the United Kingdom and Prussia in late 19th century to overcome patrimonial systems of administration where patronage and favoritism dominated government decisions and public appointments.This approach had a number of distinctive features.It relied on centralized control,set rules and guidelines,separated policy making from implementation and employed a hierarchical organisational structure.The watchwords were efficiency and effectiveness in the management of budgetary and human resources.

The key features of this model are -

• A separation between politics and elected politicians on the one hand and administration and appointed administrators on the other.
• Administration is continuous,predictable and rule governed.
• Administration  is continuous,predictable and rule governed.
• Administrators are appointed on the basis of qualification,and are trained professionals.
• There is a functional division of labor,and a hierarchy of tasks and people;
• Resources belong to the organisation,not to the individuals who work in it;
• Public servants serve public rather than private interest.

• This "command and control" approach to Public-Administration was the reference point for bureaucratic systems introduced around the world under colonial rule and then after independence in most commonwealth countries.
• Other countries introduced variants of this model ,primarily drawing on French and Japanese experience,where political factors influence public appointments under a centralized bureaucratic model.
• This approach worked well in a  number of countries,notably in Singapore where the post Independence political leadership built a high quality and efficient civil service along these lines.

A similar approach was followed in China in the context of a one party state.But many post-colonial states experienced a decline in the quality of governance and the effectiveness of public administration in subsequent years as neo-patrimonial pressure asserted themselves and state resources and public appointments were subject to the personal influence of political leaders and their followers.

The New Public Management

The new Public management refers to a series of novel approaches to Public Administration and management that emerged in number of OECD countries in the 1980s. The NPM model arose in reaction to limitations of the old Public administration in adjusting to the demands of a competitive market economy.While cost containment was a key driver in the adoption of NPm approaches,injecting principles of competition and private sector management lay at the heart of the NPM approach.The key elements of the NPM can be summarized below-

• An attention to lessons from private sector management 
• the growth both of hands on management in its own right and not as an offshoot of professionalism,and of "arm's length" organisation where policy implementation is organizationally distanced from the policy makers(as opposed to the interpersonal distancing of the policy /administration split;
• A focus upon entrepreneurial leadership within public service organisations
• An emphasis on input and output control and evaluation and on performance management and audit
• The disaggreagtion of public services to their most basic units and a focus on their cost management and
• The growth of use of markets ,competition and contracts for resource allocation and service delivery within public services.

The NPM approach took root in the UK,New-Zealand ,the USA and Scandinavian from the mid 1980s. Its theoretical foundations lay in public choice and principal agent theory which claim that individual self interest drives bureaucratic behaviour. Competition ,delegation ,performance and responsiveness offer yardsticks to regulate bureaucratic behaviour and generate improved outcomes. NPM resulted in significant changes in the public sector ethos and approach,especially the cultivation of new management practices,marketisation and contracting out of core services to private companies and non profit organisations and the creation of "arm's length" executive agencies responsible and accountable for implementation.A Greater focus on management by results replaced a public sector orientation governed by inputs and outputs,while management increasingly pervaded the public sector.
NP M approaches were also adopted by number of non-OECD countries,often as part of public sector reform programmes supported by international aid agencies,but their influence was uneven.Despite claims of universality,few governments in developing countries implemented wholesale NPM reforms,but some experimented with creating executive agencies,citizens charters and performance management models.

Prominent examples include the semi autonomous tax agencies in Africa and Asia,several of which generated impressive results in terms of revenue targets and reducing corruption.Contracting out service delivery results in terms of revenue targets and reducing corruption.Contracting out service delivery to private and not for profit providers in health ,education and water and sanitation became fairly widespread but implementation was patchy and results were mixed because of problems of regulatory capacity,quality and access,leading to a complex and fragmented mosaic of service provision.

In practice NPM reforms in developing countries were adopted very selectively,often alongside organisational structure embodying the old public administration. Commentators questioned the appropriateness of NPM reforms in the context of weak capacity and political support,emphasizing the existence of supportive institutional and political conditions as a condition for successes,and of building core public sector capacity as the priority for public management reforms.


McCourt in 2013 highlighted the use of citizens charters in India,introduced in 1997 in the context of an action plan for effective and responsive government,as one example of an NPM reform designed to improve government responsiveness. By 2001,68 citizens charters had been formulated by Indian central government agencies and 318 at sub-national level.As reported  by McCourt,"they were posted on government websites and were open to public scrutiny.But the implementation floundered in the face of a series of problems,including the perception that the initiative was seen as coming from the top with minimal consultation ,employees affected received little training or orientation ,staff transfers disrupted implementation,the charter concept was not properly understood by clients,and some charter service norms wee either too lax or too tight." Similar concerns bedeviled the citizens charter movement in the UK,which also ran into criticism on account of perceptions that they were management driven and did not reflect the priorities

New Public Governance

In the face of the conceptual and practical problems encountered with the old Public administration and the New Public Management approaches number of theorists have developed fresh conceptualization of public management that depart from earlier schema.
These approaches don't yet form a coherent paradigm and they have different frames of reference,but some commonalities can be identified that set them apart from earlier traditions and provide the basis for a coherent alternative.

The New Public Governance(NPG) approach proposed by Osborne and Gabler adopts a very different starting point from the two earlier public management traditions.In contrast with the emphasis on bureaucratic hierarchy and administrative interest as the defining feature of the old public administration and the managerial discretion and contractual mechanism associated with NPM,the NPG approach places citizens rather than government at the centre of its frame of reference. In a similar vein Bourgon calls for a New Public administration theory that is grounded in the concepts of citizenship and the public interest ,expressed as they shared interests of citizens rather than as the aggregation of individual interests determined by elected officials or market preferences .The centrality of citizens as co-producers and the delivery of services fundamentally distinguishes the New Public Governance approach from both the starlit approach associated with the old public administration and market based NPM approaches,rather than simply proposing a new form of public administration.


NPG incorporates a number of features of this emerging literature :the state is both plural in that public service delivery is undertaken by multiple inter dependent actors and pluralist in that multiple processes and inputs shape policy making.In this respect Bourgon highlighted the fragmentation of policy space with the emergence of multiple actors and jurisdictions along side growing inter dependence  between actors operating at local,national and global levels.Government is treated  as just one actor alongside others engaged in policy deliberation and service delivery and is no longer assumed to be the sole of predominant force shaping public policy and implementation.According to Denhardt and Denhardt "the policies that guide society are the outcomes of a complex  set of interactions involving multiple groups and multiple interest ultimately combining in fascinating and unpredictable ways.

The NPG approach emphasizes inter organisational relationships and the governance of processes in which trust,relational capital and relational contracts serve as the core governance mechanisms,rather than organisational form and function\.In this respect NPG runs counter to conventional approaches to public administration,which tend to emphasizes intraorganisational processess within the domain of government as distinct form inter organisational processess between government and private and non-profit actors.

In Practice there are several distinct strands of thinking that constitute the NPG approach ,each differing in the emphasis they give to core governance mechanisms. Until now the contextual frame of reference for this set of approaches has been the United States of America and a few group of approaches has wider application in providing a stronger foundation and conceptual reference point for public sector reform in developing countries than earlier models.

The New Public Service:

In Janet and Robert Denhardts 2003 book The New Public Service, the authors offer a synthesis of the ideas that are opposed to the New Public Management presented by Osborne and Gaebler. Their model for governance builds upon and expands the traditional role of the public administrator, which they call the Old Public Administration, and contrasts with the New Public Management. Following the structure of Reinventing Government, the Denhardts divide their argument into seven principles. These are:

• Serve citizens, not customers
• Seek the public interest
• Value citizenship over entrepreneurship
• Think strategically, act democratically (In comparison to Osborne and Gaebler, Denhardt and Denhardt assert that there is a difference between thinking strategically and entrepreneurial government.)
• Recognize that accountability is not simple
• Serve rather than steer (This involves listening to the real needs of the people and the community, not just responding in the manner that a business would to a customer.)
• Value people, not just productivity(Reich 1988, 123-24, quoted in D&D 96)

Here, the role of the public administrator is much more complex. He or she cannot simply act as a manager in the business sense by performing cost-benefit analysis. As Denhardt and Denhardt explain, In the NPS, the public administrator is not the lone arbiter of the public interest. Rather, the public administrator is seen as a key actor within a larger system of governance including citizens, groups, elected representatives, as well as other institutions the role of government becomes one of assuring that the public interest predominates (p.81). They go on to further articulate this point with a quote:

The public manager's job is not only, or simply, to make policy choices and implement them. It is also to participate in a system of democratic governance in which public values are continuously rearticulated and recreated.


Denhardt and Denhardt assign quite a bit of responsibility to the public administrator, and at the same time stress the importance of public participation and community decision-making. The exact allocation of responsibility and power is unclear. Osborne and Gaebler are much more explicit on the relationship between government administration and its citizens, because they use the customer service model from business. The administrative role is further streamlined by moving as many choices as possible out of the political arena by converting those policy alternatives into market choices.