Public Management

Keshav Raj Pande

Lecturer
Central Department of Public Administration
Tribhuvan University

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 Contents

 Old Public Administration

 New Public Management

 Global Public Management Reform

Public Management 2
 Global Public Management Reform
• Donald F. Kettl of the Brookings Institution sees what he calls the “global public
management reform” focusing on six core issues:
1. How can governments find ways to squeeze more services from the same or a smaller
revenue base?
2. How can government use market-style incentives to root out the pathologies of
bureaucracy; how can traditional bureaucratic command and- control mechanisms be
replaced with market strategies that will change the behavior of program managers?
3. How can government use market mechanisms to give citizens (now often called
“customers”) greater choices among services—or at least encourage greater attention
to serving customers better?
4. How can government make programs more responsive? How can government
decentralize responsibility to give front-line managers greater incentives to serve?
5. How can government improve its capacity to devise and track policy? How can
government separate its role as a purchaser of services (a contractor) from its role in
actually delivering services?
6. How can governments focus on outputs and outcomes instead of processes or structures?
How can they replace top-down, rule-driven systems with bottom-up, results-driven
systems?
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(Adapted from Kettl, Donald F. 2000a. The Global Public Management Revolution. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1-2.}
Chapter 2
Old Public Administration…

It is fair to say that the following elements generally represent the

mainstream view of the Old Public Administration:
• The focus of government is on the direct delivery of services through
existing or through newly authorized agencies of government.
• • Public policy and administration are concerned with designing and
implementing policies focused on a single, politically defined
objective.
• Public administrators play a limited role in policymaking and
governance; rather they are charged with the implementation of
public policies.
• The delivery of services should be carried out by administrators
accountable to elected officials and given limited discretion in their
work.
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 Old Public Administration…

• Administrators are responsible to democratically elected political

leaders.
• Public programs are best administered through hierarchical
organizations, with managers largely exercising control from the top
of the organization.
• The primary values of public organizations are efficiency and
rationality.
• Public organizations operate most efficiently as closed systems; thus
citizen involvement is limited.
• The role of the public administrator is largely defined as planning,
organizing, staffing, directing, coordinating, reporting, and
budgeting. (Robert Denhardt and Jenet Denhardt (2007). New Public Service, pp,11-12.

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Reinventing Government as NPM
1. Catalytic Government, Steering Rather than Rowing;
2. Community-Owned Government, Empowering Rather than Serving;
3. Competitive Government, Injecting Competition into Service Delivery;
4. Mission-Driven Government, Transforming Rule-Driven Organizations;
5. Results-Oriented Government, Funding outcomes, Not Inputs;
6. Customer-Driven Government, Meeting the Needs of the Customer, Not the
Bureaucracy;
7. Enterprising Government, Earning Rather than Spending;
8. Anticipatory Government, Prevention Rather than Cure;
9. Decentralized Government, from Hierarchy to Participation and Teamwork;
10. Market-Oriented Government, Leveraging Change Through the Market.
(David Osborne and Ted Gaebler, 1992, Reinventing Government, pp.280-282)

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