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Summary Public Management and Governance
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Samenvatting Public Management and GovernanceChapter 2: The changing context of public policy
Financial crises: policy-makers have less space to manoeuvre but they also put pressure on
public organisations to become more efficient.
External factors that pressure on governments (with examples):
- Political.
o New political and social movements.
o Rise of populist leaders.
- Economic/financial.
o Less people are “economically active”, this affects household income levels
and government tax revenues.
o Economic recession, a pandemic, war.
- Social.
o Traditional institutions such as the family and social class have changed their
forms.
o Traditional sources of social authority and control are no longer as respected
or influential as formerly.
- Technological.
o More interactive policy-making process and more innovative ways of
delivering services.
o The information society, a higher proportion of the population can use ICT
technology.
- Environmental.
o Increasing concerns with global warming and the impact of climate change.
o Willingness to reduce the use of non-renewable energy and to recycle waste
materials.
- Legal/legislative.
o Increasing influence of supra-national bodies.
o Growing public discontent in some countries about influence of supra-national
or foreign governments on domestic policy.
Internal factors that are driving changes in public policy:
- Advice and consultancy.
- Fraud and corruption.
Public policy at a time of austerity:
Economic issues that exercise strong influence over public opinion and public policy:
- Government spending deficits.
- National debt.
Common assumptions about these issues:
- Don’t run a budget deficit – and, if you have a deficit, you must get it down.
o Governments have to spend money to make economic growth happen and to
make sure there won’t be a crisis.
- Don’t allow national debt to rise above a certain level.
, o The national debt is held by local people so it actually represents their assets.
Changing paradigms of public policy:
New Public Management:
- Emphasis on performance management.
- More flexible and devolved financial management.
- More devolved personnel management with increasing use of performance-related
pay and personalised contracts.
- More responsiveness to users and other customers in public services.
- Greater decentralisation of authority and responsibility from central to lower levels of
government.
- Greater recourse to the use of market-type mechanisms, such as internal markets,
user charges, vouchers, franchising and contracting out.
- Privatisation of market-oriented public enterprises.
Managers were given a much greater role in policy-making than previously in the “old public
administration”, essentially at the expense of politicians and service professionals.
- Led to a vision of the public sector that often seemed peculiarly empty of political
values and political debate.
Concern with the governance dimension of public policy and the governance of public sector
organisations, this emphasised:
- Importance of “wicked problems”, “quality of life” improvements more important
than “quality of service” improvements.
- The need for these “wicked problems” to be tackled cooperatively (not one agency).
- The need for agreed “rules of the game” that stakeholders will stick to in their
interactions with one another to attack the problem together.
- The critical importance of certain principles that should be embedded in all
interactions which stakeholders have with each other (integrity, respect).
Neo-Weberian state: democracies with key “Weberian” characteristics such as the central
role of the state and the preservation of a public service with a distinct status, to which they
add principles such as citizen-orientation and performance management.
Types of public agencies:
- Law-driven, Public Administration (legal, conformity, state hierarchy).
- Service-driven, New Public Management (competitive, market, managerial).
- Citizen-driven, Governance (civil society, networks, political).
Four trajectories for public sector reforms:
- Maintenance of existing administrative structures and processes.
- Modernisation of the system (deregulation and “empowerment” of lower level
managers or citizen participation and performance management).
- Marketisation of the system (competition and performance management).
- Minimisation of the administrative system (privatisation, contracting out).
The politics of public policy:
The role of politics in the public sector has been under pressure from:
, - Professional groupings who tend to believe that they are uniquely well-informed
about policy.
- Managerial cadres who tend to believe that they are uniquely expert in getting the
various professional groupings to work together effectively.
- Citizens and other stakeholders who have been told that they alone know best what
they want, at least in terms of services that directly affect their quality of life.
Politicians can play a number of roles, they differ in different contexts:
- Global politics: security, trade and environment; is played out by heads of state and
ministers.
- National politics: ideologically driven (debating ideas that determine election results
and subsequent legislation).
- Regional politics: allow expression to feelings of separate identity, as well as differing
priorities (significance of regional politicians depends on how strong the region is).
- Local politics: has some ideological flavour, more important are the stances on local
issues. Role: to lead the community towards new goals, to help the locality to
compete against other areas and to represent the community where policies from
other levels of government are not helpful locally.
- Neighbourhood politics: balancing of interests within and between neighbourhoods,
forging coalitions on issues and across interest groups that have little parallel at any
higher level of politics.
Chapter 4: Public sector reforms across OECD countries
Reform in public sector management because of:
- Changing beliefs concerning how to deliver the complex and often hard to measure
products of the public sector (“command and control” hierarchies, markets or
collaborative networks).
- Changing fashions concerning the “foundations” of public sector behaviour and
performance (managers, innovation, engagement of citizens).
- Changing units of analysis (focus on individual public agencies, the public sector as a
whole or global challenges).
Weber: a modern bureaucracy acts as a lasting, impartial, rule-abiding and non-partisan
executor of laws and regulations, which are devised by the political leadership.
Managerialism: belief that institutions perform as well as they were managed, a set of
beliefs and practices that will prove an effective solvent for economic and social ills.
New Public Management: to extend private sector management practices and introduced
the idea of developing quasi-contracts within the public sector in which disaggregated
entities were given budgets to provide specified outputs.
- Not a hierarchy but a set of internal trading operations.
- Contracting out services to the private sector (creating markets).
- Public funds should follow the choices of the consumer and entities whose services
are not in demand are allowed to fail.
- Difficult to standardise and price the highly differentiated needs of individuals.
- Engaging the public to create public value.
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