New Local Public Management

Abstract

The new public management paradigm and tools emerged in the Spanish local administration in the last quarter of the last century, swiftly adapting to the decentralized state model emanating from the 1978 constitution. At the same time, a welfare state was created and arrived late in Spain and partly took shape in municipal services (social, cultural, and sports). Quality management acted as a lever for modernizing and deploying this management paradigm up till the great recession (2008), thus leading to a new era marked by economic, social, and environmental sustainability. The emergence of the information era and a relational or entrepreneurial model (Mazzucato) shaped new needs, particularly focusing on offering security and well-being to citizens in the face of major environmental uncertainties, such as pandemics or climate change. Given this situation, approaches such as New Local Management need to update and at the same time deploy new values and tools, as well as construct intelligent and collaborative governance for the transformative management demanded by twenty-first-century citizens.