Today we discuss about people's participation and community management along with public private partnership especially in developing nations. There need to be a reorientation of development paradigm as the process is evolutionary. This can be either supplementing or developing new management principles that ensures justice and equity.

The approach should be multi-dimensional and more local in terms of its application.

My work on this argues that "new governance" promised a lot and delivered very little. Moreover, in the age of austerity it seems to be a busted flush. We live in a highly authoritarian conjuncture, which is all about the state enforcing the market. The prospects for democratic empowerment seems to depend on resistance far more than participation, even in the heartlands of participatory budgeting. Of course, there are always exceptions but I think that is the pattern.

In some countries, such as in the German speaking Europe, the "new public Management" was part of a "new governance" discussion. The concept of "the guarantor state" is an example for a fundamental new perspective on the role of the state (= governance), which allows for some NPM implementations. There was even a debate among lawyers how the constitution should be interpreted in new ways in order to mirror new societal developments. By the way, in Austria and Switzerland the NPM is called "outcome-oriented public management". If you have it in your library, have a quick look at our book: Kuno Schedler & Isabella Proeller, Outcome-oriented Public Management, 2010, IAP - the first two chapters are dealing with some of this.

NPM not opposite or supplementary to new gov ernance paradigm. While NPM is about an administrative practices, the new governance paradigm captures the larger relationship among government, market and civil society. NPM can be said to be part of new governance paradigm, but not necessarily; there are critiques of NPM within the new governance paradigm also.

NPM is much more than mere individualism and applying private sector methods to the public sector; NPM is also concerning public value by openness, transparency and social responsibility and justice, but focuses primarily on public sector entities. Osborne has captured traditional public administration (TPA), NPM and NPG well, I think. I agree that these are not opposites. Both NPM and NPG require TPA. The big question in practice is getting the balance right between TPA, NPM and NPG. One such 'solution', for example, is the Nordic model, which has been around for 50-60 years. So, we still need a lot of TPA and NPM, as well as NPG, I think, and there will likely be many 'solutions' in different contexts.

Dear Age Johnsen,

I agree with You in many Your answer aspects. But You have not explained Your own Nordic experience. You think that New Public Management is much more sophisticated - I agree with You fully, but I think that Your Nordic model is much more sophisticated than You talk. Dear Age, how to understand Your example of Nordic model during 50-60 years when it has significantly changed in the last 20-30 years? How do You attribute NPM, TPA and NPG to Your model change because there is no any more the distinct Nordic model of the seventies. It is, You know, like to say that Lithuania joined the Western community of the traditional welfare state, while there is no any more Western welfare golden age. What is the difference between golden, silver and may be, bronze ages? I think, with exception of sophisticated Nordic countries in other West are more relevant stages of traditional public administration until nineties (eighties), NPM beginning in the nineties (eighties) and now theoretically at least the necessity of NPG, which had not still materialized in many countries. Of course, You will accuse me of static stages - I do not think about them as static - there were and there are various mixtures, partly what You write, but we have to look to the tendencies. In this case, dear John, after Your explanation of Nordic situation, my understanding is still vanishing and lacking additional content.

Consider that minimising the public costs and maximising the effective public service are two complementary attitudes. Exerce a perpetual tension between the two optimisations.

Never consider the yin without the yang.

The New Public Management contained elements that are opposed to the New Governance - it emphasised contract to increase accountibility of those delivering services, where the New Governance emphasises culture and the ability to shape decisions indirectly. Both have the aim of increasing the accountibility - one by increasing transparency and therefore the potential public 'enforcement mechanisms' (New Governance) the other by increasing the controls and penalties available through formal legal enforcement mechanisms. In this sense, judging the two involves taking a judgement on which enforcement mechanism is more likely to be effective. The NPM also formed part of a wider movement to reduce state institutions or controls (again like the New Governance) and increase use of the market, or where this didn't work introduced 'agencies' that could again deliver contracted services within particular 'hard' enforcement mechanisms. By happy coincidence this also allowed politicians commissioning these agencies to remove themselves from responsibility for the services provided. Overall, I think I prefer the New Governance as it has the advantage the public can, if transparency is maintained, make their own decisions about whether it works.

Dear Readers and Vincent Fitzsimons,

I agree fully with the manner and the arguments of Vincent Fitzsimons. Could someone from the previous answering and the new ones contradict and explain what is wrong in such understanding? Where are mistakes?

Yours truly,

Arvydas Guogis

Vilnius-Paris

My view is that NPG represents an evolution of NPM - just as NPM can be viewed as an evolution of traditional public administration. Tony Blair used to talk about NPG being something which took the best bits from public administration and NPM.

Isn't it also that one is usually trying to solve the problems of the other? For example, NPM tried to overcome the sclerosis of traditional public Administration by introducing competition and market surrogates into the public sector. Public governance, as we see it today, tried to overcome the deficiencies of NPM (for example recognised as a lack of democratic control) by re-establishing discourse and Networks. It seems to me that at the end of the day, they all enclose the Major elements of public Administration while putting different emphasis on the different elements.

Governance is better felt when actions are swift with time and reliable, accurate towards the requirement... this is possible through end user interface through "e-gov' ... Any new system has to be learnt properly for making it yield the intend...https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262676945_LEARNING_IN_GOVERNMENT_ORGANIZATIONS_e-gov_IMPLEMENTATION?ev=prf_pub

Article LEARNING IN GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATIONS "e-gov" IMPLEMENTATION

I agree with Kuno Schedler, NPM deficienceies could be overcome by NPG, this is not a an easy agenda because deepening democracy has also a cost... This is a cultural attitude. The culture of the good governance is organizing a perpetual tension between the strategy of maximising values of public services (considered as the priority) modulo the effectiveness of the hard or soft budgetary constraint is the "must" heroïc attitude. If you forget the maximising attitude, you organise the deconstruction of State and Society.

Very interesting discussion, and highly relevant. NPM and NPG are certainly not opposites, there are some overlaps between both, but there are clearly differences as well. Much relevant input has been provided already, but I generally think that NPG can be considered a response to NPM (= a follow up, not a contradiction), it is a broader movement (considering the welfare state as a whole, not just its actors), less mechanistic than NPM and also more ideological.

I agree. We could imagine another oral teaching and explanation. Traditional Authority, the NPM and NPG are complementary modes of the co-production of public services and of the creation of social acceptability. With the traditional administration, you are "administered and obedient" and "the law of general interest" will be applied. With NPM and performance indicators, managers NGP have a better option to demonstrate the quality of their implementation and convince elected officials and citizens. With the NPG, elected officials and citizens in forums may criticize managers and management and the costs and quality of public services! So we have three actors and three roles in the drama of the public interest!.

Public Management is a bureaucratic process of execution without any subjectivity, It is an implementation of the governance felt by the citizens.......whereas ...New Governance cannot be in any relevance to/away from Public Management.... Governance is an expected unbiased common outcome for the benefit of everyone towards an orderly benevolence of the government measures and controls....Further the subjects under governance namely the citizens submit below law...

Yes, I agree with Thaneshwar that NPM involves the introduction of private sector elements into the public sector, while NPG allows for collaboration between both. Quite recently I have investigated the actual impact of NPM/NPG in higher education. It is interesting to see how these developments have evolved for quite some time now, and that there actual impact is now increasingly visible in various sectors. It is also interesting to see that although NPM concentrates on a shift from process to output control, there is still a lof of bureaucracy involved with the measuring and registration of these outputs.

Article Compliance or Pragmatism: How Do Academics Deal with Manager...

Governance - Quoting Henry David Thoreau - "that government is best which governs the least" The governance paradigm is more towards this phenomenon. 

While NPM - About how the governement can 'manage' its functioning in an effective and efficient manner. 

Hence if the vision is to achieve the state of minimum government and maximum governance through npm it would not prove contradictory.  

One other factor that could quite obviously connected with the raise of the New Public Management is a stronger focus on mid-term planning and control in the public sector.

In traditional public Administration, simple financial one-year Budgets have dominated political control processes. In NPM, we have experienced a shift to performance Budgets, PLUS the introduction of a mid-term perspective, this is: Long-term Performance budgeting. This was not part of traditional thinking.

It remains open whether or not public governance will bring new forms of planning and budgeting.

What do you think? What are your experiences in this field?

As I understand it --

NPM is about 1) shifting the accountability focus from inputs to outputs, implying a heavy focus on performance measurement, e.g. GPRA and PART in the US Federal Government; 2) increasing the width of the span of control among managers, i.e. reducing the supervisor/employee ratio, and, as such, flattening the hierarchy; 3) providing the manager with more autonomy; 4) exposing the manager to market incentives, e.g. contracting, privatization; 5) introducing the concept of customer satisfaction, i.e. re-branding "citizens" as "customers". NPM is heavily influenced by organizational economics, transaction cost economics, the theory of contracts, and principle agent theory.  

Governance on the other hand is a broader concept which includes public, private, and non-profit organizations, etc. as collaborative networks related to policy formulation and implementation. As I see it, governance is a way to explain implementation by decentralized networks of relatively autonomous organizational entities, not restricted to legally public entities. It then involves sociological theories of networks. But, as I have read the literature on governance, it is a broader analytic framework for explaining the emerging system of US policy formulation and implementation in the 1990s up to the present (I am not too familiar with the international literature, so I can't speak to that).

NPM on the other hand is a fairly specific assemblage of theoretical combinations, with a normative/ideological ethos. Lynn (1998) argued over a decade ago that NPM needed to combine its assembly of economic theories, with sociology and psychology to become more than a theme. My question would be, has that happened? 

Finally, my opinion is that the word "new" should not be attached to any theoretical position. Time necessarily moves forward and new becomes old. I would resist calling governance "new" governance, since 1) "new" will inevitably and ironically become inaccurate, and 2) since "new" doesn't add anything conceptually to the description. 

Lynn, L.E. (1998) The New Public Management: How to Transform a Theme Into a Legacy, Public Administration Review. 

These essence of any Governance be "old" or "new" or "being evolved" all lay themselves on the fundamentals....

Policy - Administer - Monitor - Change Identification - Amendment.....

Changes in technology, people thinking, affordability, Time constraints etc., create new version of CONTROLS that need to be deployed into Governance...

Good question. 

dear Krishnan,

there is  a real need to be precise with the semantics. If you insist on "controls", you will have to precise "controls by N+1 in a hierarchy" or "democratic controls"?

The point is the interrrelations between new technologies and new professionnalities  (for reporting of inputs and outputs or for monitoring assisted by software for example).

  Examine the uses of information and knowledge by stakeholders of the public policies and programs. We could have an exclusive use by managers of the programs. Users orientations is necessary for Good governance. That's uses of feedback knowledge - outputs and outcomes data collected by monitoring applications like SEVALPRO for example (sevalpro.fr)- are  not contradictory with internal controls. The proof of good govenance is in the density of uses by every stakeholder (not only manager and his N+1).

.

The question of one paradigm substituting the other appears much debatable. Owing to the complexity and broad nature of public administration; each paradigm [traditional public administration, NPM and NPS or the emerging approaches] are relevant in specific contexts, time and space. None of the paradigms could completely apply in all cases in the public sector. there it should be applicable sector-by-sector and contextually. please see the article below.

Yeboah-Assiamah, E., Asamoah, K., & Kyeremeh, T. A. (2016). Therefore, Is Bureaucracy Dead? Making a Case for Complementarity of Paradigms in Public Administrative Thinking and Discourse. International Journal of Public Administration, 39(5), 382-394.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01900692.2015.1015558

Certainly the timely question is not easy to answer, the traditional Public Administration (TAP) is an obsolete way for today's context paradigm, having change their principles  -  the disappearance of postwesfalian state -; NPM shown dysfunctional in many respects, as well as fragmented and diverse. The neoweberian State (NWS) and the new public Gobernance (NPG) are  appropriate (cfr. Pollitt, C. Bouckaert, G., Public Management Reform A Comparative Analysis-New Public Management, Governance, and the Neo-Weberian State, 2011) also have interestings  works as Derry Ormond and Elke Löffler. New Public Management: What to Take and What to Leave.

And above all we have many very complex problems and a political class that is not up and - ¡¡¡ watch out ¡¡¡ - Science fragmented and dispersed Administration with an absence of a general theory of Public Administration.  ¿What about  the contingency of nations, and  the idea of state in each tradition.

You should go towards an inclusive paradigm of the best of each proposal, if ther were a enough  consensus on how good or bad. To do this, is reference to thinking about,  5th Braibant Lecture within the Congress of IIAS 2006 about the obsolescence of traditional Public Administration and value propositions wrong NPM and the need for a new theory based in a  "respected, responsible and  government" . So, the doctrine replay  that the proposal is more in the search for a new theory of liberal democracy, on the Administration itself. (Cfr. IRAS 73-1.2007).

We need  to think of an administrative theory of democracy or a political theory of modern public administration in which integrate various paradigms, including the goal to recover 'trust in goverment'. In this way NPG offer more integration society-State and  more control  about goverments.

Cheers to all, collegues

NPM is more integrative paradigm that lie b/w government,society, & pub.adm & private entities

Very interesting question! ireland is a useful case study in that its experimentation with NPM happened in the 1990s in parallel with experimentation with innovative approaches to tripartite governance structures and processes (social partnership). While in some respects the tripartism, with its corporatist features constrains neo-liberalism, the experience of Ireland also illustrates how "new social pacts" operate in the context of increased market freedom and supply-side priorities. NPM, insofar as it is associated less with inclusiveness and more with modernising management by utilising market principles and creating greater managerial flexibility, would appear to be more clearcut.

The evidence from our cross-national research on "collaborative governance under austerity" suggests that the practical impact of ideas associated with the "new governance" has been very limited - particularly under austerity.  The logics of new public management remain very strong.  The epitaph of "new governance" might read, "This was wishful thinking". Check out our blog (linked below) and twitter feed at @cura2015. 

http://cura.our.dmu.ac.uk

https://cura.our.dmu.ac.uk/2016/06/03/first-reflections-on-esrc-research-into-collaborative-governance-under-austerity/

Dear all,

Thank You all for explanations and pointing to the useful literature.

I would see New Public Governance not as opposed to New Public Management. For certain types of bureaucratic organizations you can use more tools from business but the bureacracy (the rule or law based organization with a non profit motive with the general public as client) stays the object of study. I would see it more as a supplement of the idea how bureaucracies can be governed.

I believe there are overlaps and in some instances between New Public Governance, New Public Management and classical Weberian Perspectives. Concerning these issues and with a particular individualism I wrote a piece.

Reference and abstract below. I hope you will find it worth reading.

All the best, Lars

Pedersen, K. H. & Johannsen, L. 2018. ‘New Public Governance in the Baltic States: Flexible Administration and Rule Bending, Public Performance and Management Review. 41, 3, s. 648-667

The New Public Governance approach advocates a more flexible

and participatory public administration as means to higher

efficiency and increased legitimacy. Increasing flexibility and

thereby public employees’ discretion, however, may pose a risk

to equality and impartiality, core values in democratic and rule of-

law societies. Using a survey among Baltic public employees,

this article explores this risk. We ask whether public employees’

preferences for flexible rule application go hand in hand with

acceptance of bending the rules, even if it means a breach of

impartiality. We find that this is the case. We also find that contrary

to what the New Public Governance approach expects,

neither citizen participation nor generalized trust works as a

control on rule bending. On a positive note, however, we find

that control mechanisms associated with Weberian Public

Administration lessen acceptance for bending the rules.