The manifold meanings of ‘post-New Public Management’ – a systematic literature review

Abstract

For more than 30 years, New Public Management has been the most popular label for public sector reform. For more than 15 years, however, New Public Management has also been heavily criticized. There is a growing trend to consider New Public Management as ‘dead’ and claim the evolution of a new reform trend, called post-New Public Management. Like New Public Management, post-New Public Management is an umbrella term that is used to prescribe and/or describe different reform trends. The aim of this article is to give a state of the art of recent post-New Public Management literature by discerning the manifold meanings of this label. For this purpose, a systematic review of 84 articles published in peer-reviewed high-quality journals has been conducted. The article shows that, so far, the post-New Public Management idea has been very influential as an ‘ideational weapon’ to indicate a crisis of the New Public Management model. The use of the post-New Public Management idea as a blueprint for future reform, however, still needs further treatment. Points for practitioners Since the 1980s, New Public Management has served as a toolbox for the reform of public administrations all over the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and beyond. In the course of its ‘pick and choose’ application, New Public Management has become an object of manifold criticism. In order to overcome the New Public Management ‘leftovers’, reformers of public management have reintroduced old concepts or invented new reform tools since the late 1990s. Systematically reviewing both theoretical and empirical academic works on this ‘post-New Public Management’ movement, we – inter alia – shed light on the question of whether ‘post-New Public Management’ can be considered a (new) model for practitioners of public management reform.

Exploiting conditionality: EU and international actors and post-NPM reform in Ireland

“…Future research must consider the 'stickiness' of the wide range of reforms introduced in Ireland during this period, and to assess the degree to which a reform culture can become self-generating arising from attempts to embed it within a dedicated government department. And in line with current discussions on post-NPM (Reiter and Klenk 2018), further research may consider whether or not the Irish case represents part of a new era in public sector reform globally arising from the GFC, or simply a case of reform 'layering' from which older patterns of behaviour will yet emerge. Re-integration of policy advice functions from agencies.…”

Patterns of Policy Integration and Administrative Coordination Reforms: A Comparative Empirical Analysis

“…These reorganizations entail “policy integration,” which is intended to bundle existing policy goals and instruments across policy sectors, or to create them anew, so as to increase the effectiveness and legitimacy of policy programs (Hou and Brewer ; Schaffrin, Sewerin, and Seubert ), for instance, in environmental policy (Jordan and Lenschow ). On the other hand, such reforms also require “administrative coordination” aimed at strengthening the collaboration between public sector organizations (Reiter and Klenk , 18) to tame the downsides of NPM reforms (Richards and Kavanagh ). Although they respond to a similar problem, the policy‐ and organization‐related dimensions are usually treated separately in the research, which is largely based on in‐depth case studies of these types of reforms (Trein, Meyer, and Maggetti ).…”

Using numbers that do not count: how the latent functions of performance indicators explain their success

“…Despite the aforementioned noble intentions, and high hopes, an increasing number of critical voices cite the paradoxical and dysfunctional effects of NPM and performance indicators, calling for a post-NPM reform (Christensen and Fan, 2016;Klenk and Reiter, 2019;Mikuła and Kaczmarek, 2019;Reiter and Klenk, 2018). After more than three decades of performance measurement in public policy, even sympathetic analysts like Hood and Peters (2004) or Dunleavy et al (2005) acknowledge the adverse effect of NPM reforms, especially performance indicators (Pires, 2011).…”