New Public Management

The New Public Management is a new perspective which evolve in early 1980s, which seeks to merge the core values of business administration in the domain of public administration.   The term New Public Management was used for the first time by Christopher Hood in 1981 in his research paper titled “A New Public Management for All Seasons” which was published in a journal called “Public Administration”.

As a doctrine, the NPM, points to the failures and inadequacies of public sector performance over time and locates the problem in the nature and processes of public sector activity and public administration.   Centralized bureaucracies, waste and inefficiency in resource use, inadequate mechanisms of accountability and redress are all problems which the NPM sought to address.

In its application, the term New Public Management has come to identify a series of themes aimed at reforming the organization and procedures of the public sector in order to make it more competitive and efficient in resource use and service delivery.   In a very real sense, the new public management is concerned with the commercializtaion, as far as possible, of the state's role in providing services to its citizens and of the state's relationship to its citizens.

NPM basically derives its management techniques and practices from the private sector. Its focus is shifted from traditional public administration to public management, which puts emphasis on decentralized management within public services, increased use of markets and competitions in the provision of public services and increased emphasis on performance, outputs and customer orientation.
While NPM is said to be an umbrella term and thus encompasses a wide range of meanings, management scholars have basically agreed on its guiding principles, namely:
  an emphasis on hands-on professional management skills for active, visible, discretionary control of organizations (freedom to manage)
  explicit standards and measures of...