NPM reconsidered: towards the study of enduring forms of NPM

ABSTRACT

In this introduction to the special issue ‘The New Public Management: Dead or still alive and co-existing? State of play at 40+’ we suggest that we are witnessing two principal developments when it comes to NPM: its endurance in practice and reconsideration in theory. Building on recent research, we argue that NPM ideas and practices continue to be adopted, used, and tailored to meet reform requirements and preferences, resulting in enduring forms of NPM. Given its lasting influence on administrative practice, we propose the need for a reconsideration of the NPM paradigm within public administration scholarship. We conclude that NPM is a remarkable case of how management and governance ideas endure, leading to important implications for the conceptualization, research, and assessment of administrative movements and governance paradigms as they develop over time.

KEYWORDS:

• New Public Management
• public management reforms
• public administration movements
• Governance paradigms
• future of public administration

Introduction

We initiated this special issue, entitled The New Public Management: Dead or still alive and co-existing? State of play at 40+, to understand the status of the New Public Management (NPM) reform paradigm in administrative theory and practice. We challenge the assumption that NPM is an unfortunate movement in the history of administrative thought and conclude that NPM is a reform trajectory that requires reconsideration based on recent research.

Considering the findings of the seven articles included in this special issue, we suggest that we are witnessing two primary developments when it comes to NPM. The first concerns a continuation in the adoption, utilization, and tailoring of established and novel NPM-inspired ideas and practices. The second refers to the need for a reconsideration of NPM within public administration scholarship. We conclude that these two observations have important implications for how we conceptualize, research and assess governance movements and administrative paradigms as they develop over time. As NPM ideas and practices have clearly endured and remained influential, this paper calls into question the sustainability of the claims made over the years within the literature which argued that new ideas and approaches had superseded NPM.

In this editorial essay, we first outline several critiques of NPM. We then move on to discuss the two main developments. We propose that the endurance of NPM can be explained by theoretical and policy developments that have contributed to a tailoring process of how NPM-inspired concepts are developed and applied. We show that NPM is continuing but requires regular analysis to assess whether its enduring forms effectively address reform requirements and stakeholder preferences.

The critiques of NPM

The public administration reform scholarship has documented several critiques of NPM and its components over the past decades (Christensen and Lægreid 2022; Dunleavy et al. 2006; Elston 2024; Funck and Karlsson 2020; Lapsley and Miller 2024; O’Flynn 2007; Osborne 2010; Pollitt and Bouckaert 2017; Stoker 2006; Torfing et al. 2020). These critiques can be classified in a taxonomy of their own, given how much has been written on NPM from a critical standpoint. We identified four different types of critiques of NPM: conceptual, value-based, expectations-results disconnect and reform-type specific.

Conceptual critiques

Two early key texts were Christopher Pollitt’s (1990) ‘Managerialism and the Public Services: The Anglo-American Experience’ and Christopher Hood’s (1991) formulation of the term in his foundational article ‘A public management for all seasons?’ Interestingly, however, little has been theorized on the relation between these two highly influential government reform trajectories: Pollitt’s managerialism and Hood’s NPM. Pollitt defined managerialism as ‘an ideology which positions management as transformative’ and noted that NPM is ‘one prominent manifestation’ of managerialism, which is a ‘broader concept than NPM, and contains the latter within itself’ (Pollitt 2016, 431). Hood (1991), however, observed that NPM resulted from the combination of two sets of theoretical streams: new institutional economics and business-type managerialism in the public sector. Thus, it is not evident which is the encompassing concept. Hood saw managerialism as one of the two key components of NPM whereas Pollitt observed that NPM is just one facet of managerialism.

NPM emerged in a neo-liberal political context characterized by public spending control and was framed as a reform trajectory that was observed in practice rather than developed as a theoretical construct (Hood 1991). At its origins, NPM can be understood as a post-hoc rationalization of various policies that subsequently attracted a wide-ranging scholarly interest within public administration and policy studies. NPM research, however, is conceptually inconsistent because the ideas that fed into NPM had different theoretical origins, pointing to differing NPM sub-models (Hood and Peters 2004). Each of the ‘seven doctrines’ of NPM (Hood 1991, 4–5) or the ‘bundle of five NPM techniques and practices’ distinguished by Pollitt (2003, 27–8) is general and includes several loosely coupled reform approaches. When combined, the degree of complexity increases significantly, making it difficult for researchers to assess the impacts of NPM in its entirety (Pollitt and Dan 2013). The reform content of NPM points, on the one hand, to a hard, economic, anti-government NPM variant, based on new institutional economics (‘make the managers manage’). On the other hand, it encompasses a soft, managerial sub-model (Pollitt 2003). This soft version of ‘letting the managers manage’ is less prescriptive and more adaptable than the economic variant and emphasizes the active role of professional managers and empowered leaders who can drive organizational change forward and achieve required public sector improvements (Aucoin 2017; Dan 2024).

As NPM is a flexible concept at most, it takes different forms. It can do this as it had no clear-cut shape to start with. This poses conceptual challenges for research, but, importantly, it has the policy and managerial advantage of being highly adaptable to reflect different politico-administrative and organizational arrangements. The conceptual ambiguity of reform paradigms calls into question their usefulness as analytical frameworks to study and understand public management reform (Elston 2024). However, in our view, the conceptual flexibility combined with the policy and managerial adaptability of NPM offer a valuable explanation for its endurance over time and continual influence to this day.

Value-based critiques

A third set of critiques relates to the emphasis within NPM on the instrumental measures of economy, efficiency, and effectiveness and on measurable outputs instead of societal and democratic outcomes (Christensen and Lægreid 2022; Dan and Andrews 2016; O’Flynn 2007; Torfing 2023). The business orientation embedded in NPM favours quantifiable measures while paying less attention to a broad understanding of public value and value creation processes (Osborne et al. 2022; Osborne, Nasi, and Powell 2021). This critique, however, requires qualification to the extent that NPM departed from bureaucratic, inward-focused, and process-oriented organizational behaviour. NPM promoted an emphasis on measurable outputs and the treatment of citizens and service users as customers. Although controversial, the customer orientation stimulated service delivery organizations to change operations and look outward to understand and respond proactively to the external environment and the demands of service users (Ivana, Dan, and Popovici 2019). In this sense, it emphasized public values that reflected user input, and thus it was not limited to the values of economy and efficiency alone (Dan 2024). Yet, despite its participatory stance and the opening of bureaucracy to the public, value-based critiques argued that reforms lead to a narrowly defined understanding of the public interest that undermines trust and the public nature of governmental action (Christensen and Lægreid 2002; Osborne et al. 2022; Stoker 2006).

Expectations-results disconnect critiques

A second type of critique concerns the disconnect between the ambitious agenda of NPM enthusiasts and the results of reforms. Although governance reforms underdeliver and disappoint in general due to insufficient attention to reform design (Elston 2024), particularly in the case of NPM it became apparent that there was a significant contradiction between the transformative potential of NPM, as articulated by its supporters, and what it delivered on the ground (Hood and Dixon 2015; Lapsley and Miller 2024; Lapuente and Van de Walle 2020; Pollitt and Dan 2013). Nevertheless, we note that NPM has rarely been evaluated as a set of different approaches and sub-models. Practices such as performance-based budgeting, quality improvement schemes, and customer focus in public service delivery are part of the NPM arsenal, as originally understood, but taken individually they constitute only one part of NPM. However, general claims are often made about NPM as a distinct reform paradigm although what is assessed is only specific practices.

Reform-type specific critiques

Lastly, scholars underlined the paradoxical nature of specific types of NPM ideas and practices. They range across the spectrum of NPM reforms. For example, NPM prescribed a clear dividing line between policymaking and formulation on the one hand, and policy implementation on the other hand, giving rise to challenges in connecting the stages of the policy process (Christensen and Lægreid 2022; Patashnik 2009). NPM promoted structural, functional, and territorial disaggregation and decentralization, but at the same time it aimed to strengthen central steering and coordination through various mechanisms and instruments. This type of NPM reform stimulated a significant stream of research on the whole of government and on joined-up government that aimed to improve coordination and integration across government levels, policy areas, and societal actors (Christensen and Lægreid 2016; Dan 2017; Hood 2005). Systemic approaches to policymaking and complexity thinking (Eppel and Rhodes 2017; Geyer and Cairney 2015) further proposed whole-of-government and whole-of-society perspectives that are at odds with the disaggregating and decentralizing elements of NPM.

The continuation of NPM in administrative practice

The literature documented how NPM emerged and developed over time (Funck and Karlsson 2020; Lapsley and Miller 2024). If the 1980s and 1990s were the two decades when NPM was the dominant reform model, that was no longer the case starting with the 2000s when other reform paradigms emerged that apparently displaced NPM. This culminated in heralding the age of post-NPM, characterized by digital-era governance (Dunleavy et al. 2006), the neo-Weberian state (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011), new public governance (Osborne 2010), public value management (Stoker 2006), the whole of government (Christensen and Lægreid 2007), and joined-up government (Hood 2005).

In view of the critiques of NPM, the expectation was that NPM reforms would be a thing of the past. However, as many of the articles included in this special issue found, this is not the case. Established and novel forms of NPM-inspired practices continue to be adopted and used across different institutional settings and policy areas. Rather than being displaced, as was expected 15 or 20 years ago, NPM is continuing in different forms as fluid constellations of administrative reform arrangements (Alkaabi et al. 2024; Bezes 2018; Dan and Pollitt 2015; Karlsson 2024; Lapsley and Miller 2024). This can be observed in public administration reform programmes developed and implemented across different national administrations (Alkaabi et al. 2024; Plaček et al. 2020; Špaček 2018). Some countries, other than the original Anglophone NPM enthusiasts, started to implement NPM reforms later due to administrative legacies and the slow development of the field of public administration (Dan 2015; Nemec et al. 2012; Pevcin, Špaček, and Klimovský 2019; Špaček 2015, 2018). NPM ideas and techniques still co-exist, are layered upon, and compete with other reform trajectories and framings (Torfing et al. 2020). The layering effect stems from the observation that a shift from one reform trajectory to another is not linear and complete (Lodge and Gill 2011; Pollitt and Bouckaert 2017). While new governance ideas and practices have emerged, we do not observe a clear-cut convergence from an old NPM way of managing to a new, post-NPM way of governing (Torfing 2023).

The NPM problem: explaining the enduring influence of NPM

We refer to the enduring influence of NPM as the NPM problem and see it, first, as the critical assessment of NPM, particularly in academic communities, that positions it as a main cause of the administrative challenges facing public administrations and governance systems across the world today. The critical assessment of NPM varies, but a main trend has been the dismissal of NPM and its practices. Second, the NPM problem involves making sense of the current validity of the paradigm within our scholarship, given its scholarly critiques on the one hand and its continuation in administrative practice on the other. These two developments raise important questions about the relevance of public administration research. If policymakers and managers are still using NPM, but we ignore researching it, then the relevance of our research diminishes. Moreover, if our research finds that NPM is part of the problem, rather than part of the solution, but civil servants and public administrators still use NPM, then the impact of our research is significantly limited.

Recent arguments have suggested that NPM continues due to its ability to take on different configurations and adapt to organizational requirements and preferences (Lapsley and Miller 2024). While we agree with this line of thought, we suggest four additional explanations. First, NPM has gained acceptance and become institutionalized in political and administrative contexts, and as a result it is difficult for institutional actors to uproot it and replace it with novel arrangements (Christensen, Lægreid, and Røvik 2020). Second, policy actors and public managers have played an active role in legitimizing NPM and safeguarding its continual acceptance. To the extent that policy preferences and public management methods have aligned with NPM ideas and approaches, policymakers and managers have continued to use NPM. The underlying assumption of this explanation is that actors actively reshape NPM to address their reform goals, resulting in organizational benefits that preserve the legitimacy of NPM (Dan and Pollitt 2015). Organizations are assumed to learn and develop expertise as they implement reforms and have the capacity and know-how to use them to advance their strategies and objectives (Dan and Pollitt 2015). Third, as a highly flexible and adaptable set of ideas and practices, NPM serves multiple political and administrative purposes, such as public expenditure control, organizational performance, accountability for results, competition in the public sector, flexibility in public service employment, adoption of private sector styles of management and responding to citizens’ expectations using dynamic public service delivery models. To the extent that these purposes align with policy preferences and reform goals, actors resort to NPM to achieve them. Fourth, the alternative models proposed over the years have not been convincing enough for policy actors and civil servants that they would lead to the uprooting of NPM (Reiter and Klenk 2019). It was argued that these alternative models would not only displace NPM, but also solve the problems that had been caused by it (Dunleavy et al. 2006; O’Flynn 2007; Osborne 2010; Stoker 2006; Torfing 2023). However, these models were only alternative in theory. In practice, organizations adopt, use, and continually reshape different sets of ideas and techniques, regardless of their theoretical origin and conceptualization (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2017; Torfing et al. 2020). Policy actors and managers employ NPM day in, day out without calling it as such.

Reconsidering NPM: the need to study enduring forms of NPM

Understanding the enduring influence of NPM, 40 years later, is one of the big questions for public administration scholarship and practice today. We suggest that this understanding requires further scrutiny from within our field. In proposing new concepts, which claimed to supersede and resolve the inadequacies of NPM, our scholarship reified NPM and labelled it as a problem. By reducing NPM and viewing it as a problem, our research failed to capture what, in our opinion, are the two main attributes of NPM: its conceptual flexibility and policy and managerial adaptability. Scholarship disconsidered that policymakers and public administrators have the capacity to reshape NPM in a beneficial way and use those NPM elements that prove useful for improving governance arrangements and services and advancing legitimate goals. Therefore, to our mind, addressing the NPM problem requires both normative and positive grounds. NPM may be considered a faulty way of reforming the public sector, yet the variety of post-NPM paradigms proposed over the years have not nullified the relevance of NPM. The question, therefore, is whether what public administrators still use today is NPM. An assessment of the fidelity to the original framing of NPM needs to consider the concept’s initial theoretical flexibility and the different ways in which policy makers and public managers have shaped and reshaped NPM ideas in different institutional settings globally. A resolution to the NPM problem may entail conceptual clarity and the assessment of several NPM sub-models as they have been developed and shaped across time and space. Eliminating NPM from the administrative reform repertoire of policymakers and civil servants across the globe is equally challenging given its continual policy appeal and influence.

NPM remains a highly controversial and paradoxical reform paradigm that is viewed and assessed differently. Scholarly disagreements on public administration movements are not new, nor are the contradictory assessments of different reform stakeholders who are experiencing the effects of reforms in different ways. The scholarly assessment of NPM reflects its different critiques. However, the critiques do not explain why NPM continues to be influential and find acceptance in supportive political and administrative contexts. For these reasons, NPM represents a remarkable case of how management and governance ideas can be designed and fashioned in such a way that they travel across space and endure over time.

The continuous policy interest in reshaping NPM to achieve reform goals raises important questions about the research required to advance understanding on the enduring influence of NPM and governance reform more generally. We propose several research questions as part of a research agenda on the future of NPM and public management reform. What enduring forms of NPM are apparent across different national and administrative contexts and how do NPM forms relate with other governance paradigms? As generations change, will process-oriented administrative approaches prevail over output-oriented models? Under what circumstances and why are enduring forms of NPM developing? Why do policymakers and public administrators continue to resort to NPM ideas and practices despite sustained scholarly critiques? What is the relation between practitioner knowledge and accumulated experience with NPM and its continuous influence? What does the enduring influence of NPM mean for public administration theory and practice in the future? Will there be greater conceptual clarity on what NPM is and is not? Will we continue to see the development of new forms and types of NPM or will NPM, instead, be relabelled and cast in history, given its many permutations?

The special issue articles

The seven articles included in this special issue address the theme of the special issue in different politico-administrative contexts and policy areas, using different methodologies and theoretical perspectives.

Using comparative case studies, Goldfinch and Halligan (2024) analyse the reform agendas in central government in Australia and New Zealand, two early NPM adopters. They distinguish between an internal management version of NPM and an external type focused on marketization and competition and find complex processes of discontinuity, hybridization, and revival. Change in governmental agendas influences what elements of NPM are retained. The authors note that the type of NPM being analysed is a critical factor in understanding the current relevance of NPM. Radical variants of NPM are more likely to lead to counter agendas and a higher degree of discontinuity. The authors discuss the idea of multiple patterns and variants of reforms that contain not only different types of NPM elements, but also different degrees of how well reforms reflect NPM principles. The paper concludes that the soft, managerial version of NPM is still alive and co-exists with traditional administrative values while policymakers and managers make sense of the paradoxical nature of NPM-inspired reforms and practices.

Bel and Casula (2024) compare the reform trajectories in public service delivery in Italy and Spain and show how policymakers combine and adapt NPM and post-NPM practices to meet policy preferences. They note that the process of identification and adjustment of a suitable mix of reform techniques is key to understanding the continuity and hybridity of NPM. The article concludes that what we observe today is a more mature and softer version of NPM that involves a reconsideration of the reform approaches based on privatization, corporatization, performance, and efficiency. They suggest that these practices and concepts are adapted and softened in a way that may contribute to their acceptance within and beyond the administrative state. This softening of the original anti-government NPM stance can lead to maturing forms of NPM.

Using a configurated logic of action, Chen et al. (2023) document a longitudinal case study of contracting out sanitation service in China. Tracing the development and implementation of reform over time, they find processes of layering, displacement, and hybridization. Emphasizing the role of power dynamics in authoritarian regimes, they conclude that NPM acted as a transitionary phase between traditional public administration and hybrid governance. The authors note that NPM-inspired concepts and practices remain influential and relevant today as part of a broad set of hybrid governance arrangements.

Zahra and Bouckaert (2024) trace the trajectory of public administration reform in Pakistan over time using a hierarchy-market-networks framework. By examining the creation of state organizations over the long run in a large developing nation, the study finds evidence of layering and the co-existence of hierarchical, network, and NPM elements. They note that public managers may intently use their expertise and accumulated reform experience to decide on the reforms that best fit their environment while analysing different reform options. NPM practices were still found to be relevant as part of a larger set of governance reforms.

Using comparative case studies, Plaček et al. (2023) provide an analysis of performance-based budgeting in financing higher education research in Czech Republic and Slovakia. They find that performance funding is still relevant and influential today and provide empirical evidence of its paradoxical nature. They further note that the effects of performance funding are complex and difficult to attribute to the reform alone and conclude that adapting NPM reforms to reflect organizational requirements and preferences may lead to incremental improvements to the extent that reform paradoxes and trade-offs are managed effectively. Thus, a maturing version of NPM requires a solid understanding of contextual requirements and organizational preferences.

Using a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, Hajer and Chen (2024) examine the uptake of social impact bonds, a privately financed, performance-based commissioning model for public social service delivery, across 18 OECD countries. The study finds two distinct configurations consistent with a high use of this model: a core group of NPM countries and a second continental European group of Neo-Weberian State (NWS) modernizers. The study documents several low-utilization configurations that include NWS countries classified as modernizers and maintainers. The authors find that the differing utilization rates can be explained by different national administrative cultures and suggest that NPM inspired tools remain relevant across a wide spectrum of administrative traditions.

Finally, Funck and Karlsson (2023) use the concept of social imaginaries to reflect on the current status of post-NPM and its positioning with reference to NPM. They observe that ‘the main legitimacy for post-NPM lies in demonizing NPM’. They further argue that a more fruitful approach to understanding the NPM problem is to recognize that NPM has remained influential, whether we in the scholarly community like it or not, as part of a varied set of governance approaches. They conclude that the current hybrid governance arrangements that have become increasingly popular are neither ‘unlikely to replace NPM, nor to expunge the enduring ramifications of decades long NPM governance’.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).