The New Public Governance?

Emerging Perspectives on the Theory and Practice of Public Governance

Stephen P. Osborne, Stephen P. Osborne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135173265
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

Despite predictions that 'new public management' would establish itself as the new paradigm of Public Administration and Management, recent academic research has highlighted concerns about the intra-organizational focus and limitations of this approach. This book represents a comprehensive analysis of the state of the art of public management, examining and framing the debate in this important area.

The New Public Governance? sets out to explore this emergent field of research and to present a framework with which to understand it. Divided into five parts, the book examines:

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• Theoretical underpinnings of the concept of governance, especially competing perspectives from Europe and the US

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• Governance of inter-organizational partnerships and contractual relationships

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• Governance of policy networks

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• Lessons learned and future directions

Under the steely editorship of Stephen Osborne and with contributions from leading academics including Owen Hughes, John M. Bryson, Don Kettl, Guy Peters and Carsten Greve, this book will be of particular interest to researchers and students of public administration, public management, public policy and public services management.

1
INTRODUCTION

The (New) Public Governance: a suitable case for treatment?¹

Stephen P. Osborne

Introduction

More than a decade has passed since the publication of Christopher Hood’s influential piece that codified the nature of the New Public Management (NPM) paradigm (Hood 1991). At that time it seemed likely, certainly within the Anglo-American research community, that this paradigm would sweep all before it in its triumphal recasting of the nature of our discipline – in theory and in practice. A hundred-odd years of the hegemony of Public Administration (PA) in the public sphere seemingly counted for nothing in this momentous shift. Since then, though, the debate on the impact of the NPM upon the discipline, and indeed about whether it is a paradigm at all (Gow and Dufour 2000), has become more contested.²

This introductory chapter is intended to move this debate forward. It considers, somewhat provocatively, that the NPM has actually been a transitory stage in the evolution from traditional Public Administration to what is here called the New Public Governance.³ A note upon terminology is important here. The term “public policy implementation and public services delivery” is used here to denote the overall field of the design and implementation of public policy and the delivery of public services. Within this, Public Administration, the NPM and the New Public Governance (NPG) are then denoted as policy and implementation regimes within this overall field – thus neatly skirting the above, rather redundant, argument as to whether these regimes are actually paradigms or not.

The argument advanced here is that public policy implementation and public services delivery have passed through three design and delivery regimes: a longer, pre-eminent one of PA, from the late nineteenth century through to the late 1970s/early 1980s; a second one, of the NPM, through to the start of the twenty-first century; and an emergent third one, of the NPG, since then. The time of the NPM has thus in fact been a relatively short-lived and transient one between the statist and bureaucratic tradition of PA and the embryonic plural and pluralist tradition of the NPG. The remainder of this chapter will first expound upon the extant natures of PA and the NPM. It will then explore the nature of public governance and the NPG before considering the new challenges that it poses for both the theory and the practice of public policy implementation and public services delivery.

Inevitably, such a tripartite regime model is a simplification – elements of each regime can and will coexist with each other or overlap. Many network governance systems often operate in the shadow of, or in spite of, the dominant regime of hierarchy – for example, both PA and public governance contain strong, if differentiated, elements of hierarchy (Klijn 2002). The intention here is to tease out three “archetypes”, in the Weberian tradition, that will assist and promote analysis and discussion of the conceptual and practical development of public policy implementation and public services delivery.

It must be emphasized that this book is not meant to propose “the NPG” as a new paradigm of public services delivery. It is neither that normative nor that prescriptive. The question mark in the title is deliberate. Rather, this book is a critical examination of the concept of “public governance”. Offering a range of perspectives, the book questions whether or not public governance is a new paradigm for the delivery of public services in the twenty-first century, and offers a range of critical perspectives upon it – both in theory and in practice.

In entering into this discussion, it is useful to bear in mind a distinction made by Dawson and Dargie (1999) in their work on the NPM. They urge the necessity to differentiate between the NPM as a political ideology, as an academic field of study and as a body of managerial practice. The latter two elements are of especial importance and need to be held distinct. The analysis of the workings and impact of any regime is distinct from the normative assertion of “how best” to manage within it.

The shadow of the past…

Public Administration

The key elements of PA⁴ (Hood 1991) can be defined as

• The dominance of the “rule of law”;

• A focus on administering set rules and guidelines;

• A central role for the bureaucracy in making and implementing policy;

• The “politics–administration” split within public organizations;

• A commitment to incremental budgeting; and

• The hegemony of the professional in public service delivery.

Developing out of the early years of the public sector in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, PA, as an academic field of study, has been a strongly “grounded”, rather than theoretical, discipline in the UK – the classic early statement being Robson 1928 – and at variance with its cousins in mainland Europe and the US, which are more firmly located within administrative theory.

As a field of practice, it reached its high point in the UK in the 1945–79 era of the welfare state, when the state was confidently expected to meet all the social and economic needs of the citizenry, “from the cradle to the grave”. PA was to be the instrument of this brave new world, with a focus on administrative procedures to ensure equality of treatment. Predictably, perhaps, such a vision was doomed to failure – public needs inevitably outstripped the public resources available to meet them. In the latter days of their hegemony both the welfare state and PA came under increasing fire – first from their academic critics (for example, Dunleavy 1985) and eventually from the political elite (see Mischra 1984 for an overview of these critiques). Most damagingly, Chandler (1991) argued that PA had now entered terminal decline as a discipline, whilst Rhodes (1997) asserted that it had become a “bystander” to the practice of public policy implementation and public services delivery. This paved the way for the rise of the NPM.

New Public Management (NPM)

The spread of the NPM, from the late 1970s onward, saw the growth of a new discourse of public policy implementation and public services delivery. In its most extreme form, this asserted the superiority of private-sector managerial techniques over those of PA, with the assumption that the application of such techniques to public services delivery would automatically lead to improvements in the efficiency and effectiveness of these services (Thatcher 1995). The key elements of the NPM can be summarized as:

• 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” organizations where policy implementation was organizationally distanced from the policy-makers (as opposed to the “interpersonal” distancing of the policy– administration split within PA);

• A focus upon entrepreneurial leadership within public service organizations;

• An emphasis on inputs and output control and evaluation, and upon performance management and audit;

• The disaggregation of public services to their most basic units and a focus on their cost management; and

• Within the Anglo-American and Australia/New Zealand regions at least, the growth of use of markets, competition and contracts for resource allocation and service delivery within public services.

In the research community, this led to a focus upon the management of public services and of public service organizations (PSOs) as a distinct field separate from the public policy process – public management as opposed to public administration. At a practical level, it led to the evolution of management as a coherent and legitimized role and function within PSOs, in contrast to (and often in conflict with) the traditional professional groupings within PSOs.

In the years since it first contested the territory of public policy implementation and public services delivery with PA, though, the nature and/or success(es) of the NPM have been questioned on a range of grounds (see McLaughlin et al. 2002 for an overview of these critiques). Critics have argued inter alia that:

• The NPM is not one phenomenon or paradigm, but a cluster of several (Ferlie et al. 1996) – and has a number of distinct personae, dependent upon the audience, including ideological, managerial and research-oriented personae, as discussed by Dawson and Dargie (1999) above;

• The geographic extent of the NPM is limited to the Anglo-American, Australasian and (some) Scandinavian arenas, whilst PA continues to remain dominant elsewhere (Kickert 1997; see also Hood 1995);

• The nature of the NPM itself is also geographically variegated – with, for example, the British and American variants actually being quite distinct from each other in their focus and locus (Borins 2002);

• In reality, the NPM is simply a subschool of PA that has been limited in its impact by the lack of a real theoretical base and conceptual rigor (Frederickson and Smith 2003);

• The benefits of the NPM are at best partial and contested (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2004); and

• That the NPM was a “disaster waiting to happen” (Hood and Jackson 1992) and was a failed paradigm (Farnham and Horton 1996).

Similarly, in the dedicated textbooks on this topic, one will find both advocates of the NPM (Hughes 2002) and critics (Flynn 2002).

The NPM has been criticized most devastatingly for its intraorganizational focus in an increa...