1、Peter AucoinDalhousie UniversityHalifax, Canadapeter.aucoindal.caConference on New Public Management and the Quality of Government,SOG and the Quality of Government Institute,University of GothenburgSweden13-15 November 2008A tension between New Public Management (NPM) and good governance, including
2、 good public administration, has long been assumed by those who regard the structures and practices advocated and brought about by NPM as departing from the principles and norms of good governance that underpinned traditional public administration (Savoie 1994). The concern has not abated (Savoie 20
3、08). As this dynamic has played out over the past three decades, however, there emerged an even more significant challenge not only to the traditional structures, practices and values of the professional, non-partisan public service but also to those reforms introduced by NPM that have gained wide,
4、if not universal, acceptance as positive development in public administration. This challenge is what I call New Political Governance (NPG). It is NPG, and not NPM, I argue, that constitutes the principal threat to good governance, including good public administration, and thus the Quality of Govern
5、ment (QoG) as defined by Rothstein and Teorell (2008). It is a threat to the extent that partisans in government, sometimes overtly, mostly covertly, seek to use and override the public service an impartial institution of government to better secure their partisan advantage (Campbell 2007; MacDermot
6、t 2008 a, 2008b). In so doing, these governors engage in a politicization of the public service and its administration of public business that constitutes a form of political corruption that cannot but undermine good governance. NPM is not a cause of this politicization, I argue, but it is an interv
7、ening factor insofar as NPM reforms, among other reforms of the last three decades, have had the effect of publicly exposing the public service in ways that have made it more vulnerable to political pressures on the part of the political executive.I examine this phenomenon by looking primarily at th
8、e case of Canada, but with a number of comparative Westminster references. I consider the phenomenon to be an international one, affecting most, if not all, Western democracies. The pressures outlined below are virtually the same everywhere. The responses vary somewhat because of political leadershi
9、p and the institutional differences between systems, even in the Westminster systems. The phenomenon must also be viewed in the context of time, given both the emergence of the pressures that led to NPM in the first instance, as a new management-focused approach to public administration, and the eme
10、rgence of the different pressures that now contribute to NPG, as a politicized approach to governance with important implications for public administration, and especially for impartiality, performance and accountability.New Public Management in the Canadian Context Since the early 1980s, NPM has ta
11、ken several different forms in various jurisdictions. Adopting private-sector management practices was seen by some as a part, even if a minor part, of the broader neo-conservative/neo-liberal political economy movement that demanded wholesale privatization of government enterprises and public servi
12、ces, extensive deregulation of private enterprises, and significant reductions in public spending rolling back the state, as it was put a at the outset (Hood 1991). By some accounts, almost everything that changed over the past quarter of a century is attributed to NPM. In virtually every jurisdicti
13、on, nonetheless, NPM, as public management reform, was at least originally about achieving greater economy and efficiency in the management of public resources in government operations and in the delivery of public services (Pollitt 1990). The focus, in short, was on management. Achieving greater ec
14、onomy in the use of public resources was at the forefront of concerns, given the fiscal and budgetary situations facing all governments in the 1970s, and managerial efficiency was not far behind, given assumptions about the impoverished quality of management in public services everywhere. By the tur
15、n of the century, moreover, NPM, as improved public management in this limited sense, was well embedded in almost all governments, at least as the norm (although it was not always or everywhere referred to as NPM). This meant increased managerial authority, discretion and flexibility: for managing p
16、ublic resources (financial and human); for managing public-service delivery systems; and, for collaborating with other public-sector agencies as well as with privatesectoragencies in tackling horizontal multi-organizational and/or multisectoral issues.This increased managerial authority, flexibility and discretion was, in some
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