What Is the New Public Management?

Abstract

After more than a decade of spirited debate, neither its supporters nor its critics can quite get a handle on what the new publi management is-and in particular on what is new about it-let alone on whether, taken as a whole, it is a good thing. True, there is a defined (if unwieldly) set of ideas that usually gets conjured up whenever NPM is the topic of discussion: compe-tition between public and private service providers; decentralization and delayering of government bureaus; more choice for citizens; benchmarking and output measurements; performance contracts an other financial incentives for public servants; creation of inter-nal markets; and assimilation; within the public sector, of private-secto management techniques including better risk-management. Yet despite this emergent consensus on NPM's specific content, several scholars have concluded that NPM embodies "radically different,