The Paradigm from Traditional Public Administration to New Public Management System in Bangladesh: What Do Reform Initiatives Stand for?

Abstract

New Public Management (NPM) system has been the dominant paradigm in public administration theory and practice since the last 30 years determining its affinity with markets and private sector management. Like USA, UK, Korea etc. Bangladesh also adopted vivid reform discourses to transform the paradigm of public administration from Weber's traditional bureaucratic system to the New Public Management (NPM) system. Reform efforts at different times towards underpinning the public sector on the principles of downsizing and entrepreneurship, decentralization, performance management, planning and control cycle could seldom bring successes. Due to many reasons, the NPM system was not introduced in all phases of civil administration except the initiative of privatization of some state-owned enterprises; and thereafter, adopting the policy of public-private partnership. This paper focuses on the failures, and explicit and implicit barriers to the introduction of the NPM system in Bangladesh that was aimed at revitalizing the traditional public administration system. The writer extracted relevant literature and bibliographic databases following exclusion criteria of systematic review method and independently reviewed them to rearticulate the failures behind the paradigm shift in Bangladesh.