1、New Public Management and the Quality of Government: Coping with the New Political Governance in Canada Peter Aucoin Dalhousie University Halifax, Canada peter.aucoindal.ca Conference on New Public Management and the Quality of Government, SOG and the Quality of Government Institute, University of G
2、othenburg Sweden 13-15 November 2008 A tension between New Public Management (NPM) and good governance, including 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 g
3、overnance that underpinned traditional public administration (Savoie 1994). The concern has not abated (Savoie 2008). 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
4、the professional, non-partisan public service but also to those reforms introduced by NPM that have gained wide, 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 constitu
5、tes the principal threat to good governance, including good public administration, and thus the Quality of Government (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 s
6、ervice an impartial institution of government to better secure their partisan advantage (Campbell 2007； MacDermott 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 t
7、hat cannot but undermine good governance. NPM is not a cause of this politicization, I argue, but it is an intervening 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 t
8、o political pressures on the part of the political executive. I examine this phenomenon by looking primarily at the 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 pres
9、sures outlined below are virtually the same everywhere. The responses vary somewhat because of political leadership 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
10、 that led to NPM in the first instance, as a new management-focused approach to public administration, and the emergence of the different pressures that now contribute to NPG, as a politicized approach to governance with important implications for public administration, and especially for impartiali
11、ty, performance and accountability. New Public Management in the Canadian Context Since the early 1980s, NPM has taken 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-
12、liberal political economy movement that demanded wholesale privatization of government enterprises and public services, 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, al
13、most everything that changed over the past quarter of a century is attributed to NPM. In virtually every jurisdiction, 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
14、and in the delivery of public services (Pollitt 1990). The focus, in short, was on management. Achieving greater economy 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 f
15、ar behind, given assumptions about the impoverished quality of management in public services everywhere. By the turn 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 ev
16、erywhere referred to as NPM). This meant increased managerial authority, discretion and flexibility: for managing public resources (financial and human)； for managing public-service delivery systems； and, for collaborating with other public-sector agencies as well as with privatesector agencies in t
17、ackling horizontal multi-organizational and/or multisectoral issues. This increased managerial authority, flexibility and discretion was, in some jurisdictions, notably the Britain and New Zealand, coupled with increased organizational differentiation, as evidenced by a proliferation of departments
18、and agencies with narrowed mandates, many with a single purpose. “Agencification, however, was not a major focus reform in all jurisdictions, including Canada and Australia where such change, if not on the margins, was clearly secondary to enhanced managerial authority and responsibility (Pollitt an
19、d Talbot 2004). The major NPM innovations quickly led to concerns, especially in those jurisdictions where these developments were most advanced, about a loss of public service coherence and corporate capacity, on the one hand, and a diminished sense of and commitment to public-service ethos, ethics
20、 and values, on the other. Reactions to these concerns produced some retreat, reversals, and re-balancing of the systems in questions (Halligan 2006). Nowhere, however, was there a wholesale rejection of NPM, in theory or practice, and a return to traditional public administration, even if there nec
21、essarily emerged some tension between rhetoric and action (Gregory 2006). The improvements in public management brought about by at least some aspects of NPM were simply too obvious, even if these improvements were modest in comparison to the original claims of NPM proponents. At the same time that NPM became a major force for change in public administration, however, it was accompanied by a companion force that saw political executives seeking to assert greater political control over the administration and
