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Why is New Public Management considered the "gold standard" of public services?
New Public Management (NPM) is an approach to running public service organizations that is widely used in government and public service organizations, whether at the local or national level. This term was first proposed by British and Australian scholars in the 1980s, aiming to make the public service system more "commercial" to improve efficiency and learn from the management model of the private sector.
New Public Management emphasizes citizen-centeredness and aims to treat citizens as customers, while public service workers are regarded as public managers.
In the process of achieving effective policy promotion, NPM reformers explore the use of decentralized service delivery models to allow local agencies to have more autonomy in implementing programs or services. In some cases, in order to reduce costs, some governments try to use the e-government concept to centralize programs or services into a central location.
Under the NPM framework, governments often attempt to create quasi-market structures that allow the public sector to compete with the private sector on certain services, such as the UK's healthcare system. Such a model can promote more efficient resource utilization and improve overall service quality.
The core themes of NPM include "financial control, cost performance, improving efficiency, setting goals and continuous performance monitoring", etc.
NPM proponents argue that this approach effectively achieves the same results. Through incentive compensation systems and setting clear performance targets, public managers can achieve set goals more flexibly, thereby improving the ability to provide public services.
Over time, the evolution of NPM occurred primarily in the United Kingdom, particularly under Prime Minister Thatcher. Thatcher promoted a number of changes in public administration policy, including organizational methods, public spending planning and financial management, while her successor John Major continued to advance this agenda and implemented the Next Step Initiative and many other projects .
Many countries also tried to imitate after seeing the success of NPM, thus forming a trend of NPM on a global scale.
With the process of globalization, NPM inspired reforms in other countries around the world after its introduction in the British and American countries. Although the reform backgrounds of various countries are different and the driving forces are also different, in general, the core purpose is to improve the efficiency of public management and services.
For example, in Germany, NPM reforms are more about internal management improvements, while in South Africa and Zambia, they focus on improving transparency and accountability.
NPM, as the "gold standard of administrative reform", achieved considerable influence in the 1990s. Compared with the traditional bureaucratic model, it advocates a more flexible and innovative business management style, believing that this can improve the efficiency of public services.
NPM advocates a change from bureaucratic management to business-style professional management, and is regarded as an effective method to solve management problems in education and health care reforms.
Although NPM has made significant achievements in promoting public sector efficiency, it has also encountered a lot of criticism. Many question whether the introduction of market competition into the public sector will actually be effective in meeting the needs of citizens. After the implementation of NPM, the selectivity of public services is often limited by a variety of factors, and the public and public interests may be affected.
Some scholars believe that there has been a disconnect between NPM and citizen needs, especially in developing countries where its application is still being gradually advanced. Therefore, more and more people are beginning to explore new management models such as Digital Era Governance (DEG) in order to cope with the current complex challenges. This new approach focuses on the application of information technology and emphasizes rebuilding the relationship between citizens and government.
Ultimately, although NPM was once widely recognized as the gold standard for public service reform, how will the current social environment and technological advancement change our understanding of the public management model?
