New Public Management

New Public Management as an International Reform Movement

NPM-driven reform activity in the public sector is now widely dispersed and has, in many cases, resulted in far-reaching and long-lasting changes that go far beyond the import of a temporary fad or fashion. NPM has become a widely popularized code for a group of loosely coupled ideas that have effectively shaped the discourse on administrative modernization in most Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries and beyond. Since its first appearance on national reform agendas some twenty-five years ago, the NPM message has spanned the globe. Although the political traditions and administrative cultures of the Anglo-Saxon family of nations have proven most susceptible to the market-oriented component of the NPM doctrine, the aftershocks caused by the NPM tremor have also been felt in administrative systems shaped in a more collectivist and state-oriented mold. The first waves of the NPM reform movement swept across classical Westminster systems of government with the United Kingdom and New Zealand as their epicenters. The “modernization movement” has also taken firm root in other Anglo-American countries. For example, NPM-driven reform initiatives have been mushrooming in Australia, the United States (as epitomized, for example, by the “reinventing government” debate), and—to a lesser extent—in Canada. The modernizing trend in the public sectors of those “core reform countries” was quickly heeled by comparable reform agendas in an ever-increasing number of European states. The Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands have most notably been riding the wave of public-sector modernization, while the larger continental European nations such as France and, in particular, Germany have been much more hesitant to embark on sweeping administrative reform projects along the lines of new public management. Although in a moderated fashion, NPM ideas have also spread to Asia, where Japanese [Page 613]and South Korean reformers have presented their plans for administrative modernization in NPM parlance. The proliferation of NPM as a blueprint for reform has come near completion when public-sector change in transitional and developing societies come under its influence through the active support from international organizations, such as the OECD, the World Bank, or the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In spite of the more- or less-uniform rhetoric of administrative modernization, however, the degree of variation across nations, levels of government, and policy sector-specific reform programs should not be underestimated.

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