Public Sector Reforms: Changing Contours on an NPM Landscape

Previous studies suggest that public-sector accounting has moved from Public Administration (PA) to New Public Management (NPM) ideas and, more recently, towards a New Public Governance (NPG) approach. These systems are presented as mutually exclusive and competing. Focusing on accounting changes in the UK central government, this paper explores whether movements towards NPG ideas can be identified at the level of political debate. No evidence is found that NPM is a transitory state. Rather, the findings demonstrate that political debate continues to utilise predominantly NPM arguments, with the three systems viewed as containing complementary, rather than competing, schemes.

Institutional Hybridity in Public Sector Reform: Replacement, Blending, or Layering of Administrative Paradigms

Despite an abundance of studies on hybridization and hybrid forms of organizing, scholarly work has failed to distinguish consistently between specific types of hybridity. As a consequence, the analytical category has become blurred and lacks conceptual clarity. Our paper discusses hybridity as the simultaneous appearance of institutional logics in organizational contexts, and differentiates the parallel co-existence of logics from transitional combinations (eventually leading to the replacement of a logic) and more robust combinations in the form of layering and blending. While blending refers to hybridity as an ‘amalgamate’ with original components that are no longer discernible, the notion of layering conceptualizes hybridity in a way that the various elements, or clusters thereof, are added on top of, or alongside, each other, similar to sediment layers in geology. We illustrate and substantiate such conceptual differentiation with an empirical study of the dynamics of public sector reform. In more detail, we examine the parliamentary discourse around two major reforms of the Austrian Federal Budget Law in 1986 and in 2007/2009 in order to trace administrative (reform) paradigms. Each of the three identified paradigms manifests a specific field-level logic with implications for the state and its administration: bureaucracy in Weberian-style Public Administration, market-capitalism in New Public Management, and democracy in New Public Governance. We find no indication of a parallel co-existence or transitional combination of logics, but hybridity in the form of robust combinations. We explore how new ideas fundamentally build on – and are made resonant with – the central bureaucratic logic in a way that suggests layering rather than blending. The conceptual findings presented in our article have implications for the literature on institutional analysis and institutional hybridity.

Das New Public Management als Grundlage für eine effiziente und effektive Verwaltung, untersucht am Beispiel der Verwaltung von Hoima, Uganda

In der Dissertation wird die Möglichkeit untersucht, die deutschen Erfahrungen mit dem New Public Management (NPM) für die Entwicklung der Verwaltung in Uganda nutzbar zu machen. Inhaltlich betrifft die Arbeit 3 Hauptkomponenten: Das NPM als Konzept für die öffentliche Verwaltung, die Erfahrungen mit dem NPM in Deutschland, die Transfermöglichkeit des NPM und insbesondere der deutschen Erfahrungen mit dem NPM nach Uganda, wobei auch die deutschen Erfahrungen mit der Verwaltungshilfe nach dem 1990 erfolgten Beitritt des ehemals sozialistisch verwalteten Gebiets zur Bundesrepublik Deutschland einbezogen werden. Es wird zunächst anhand von Dokumenten ein Vergleich der Verwaltungen in Uganda und in Deutschland vorgenommen, wobei insbesondere auf die in der deutschen Kommunalverwaltung mittlerweile implementierte Variante des NPM eingegangen wird. In diesem Vergleich werden gravierend erscheinende Unterschiede identifiziert. Aus einer Gegenüberstellung der hauptsächlichen Probleme der Verwaltung in Uganda und der hauptsächlichen Stärken des NPM nach den deutschen Erfahrungen wird ein Tableau mit wichtigen Diskrepanzen entwickelt. Zu diesen Diskrepanzen und zu möglichen strategischen Handlungsalternativen werden in Uganda und in Deutschland jeweils 5 hochrangige Verwaltungsexperten in jeweils etwa 1-stündigen Interviews befragt. Die Antworten werden miteinander verglichen und auf markante Gemeinsamkeiten bzw. Unterschiede geprüft. Nach Auswertung der Interviews wird in Verbindung mit den persönlichen Erfahrungen des Verfassers ein strategisches Konzept entwickelt, das aus sieben Einzelschritten besteht. Konkretisiert wird dieses Konzept durch den Vorschlag, eine situationsangemessene Übertragung ausgewählter NPM-Elemente und ausgewählter deutscher Erfahrungen zunächst in Pilotprojekten zu erproben. In einem weiteren zukünftigen Prozess könnten die Erfahrungen aus diesen Pilotprojekten in andere Regionen und auf andere Ebenen der Verwaltung in Uganda transferiert werden.

Aplicabilidad del modelo de nueva administración pública (New Public managment) al sistema de contratación estatal colombiano, a la luz de las estrategias asumidas por el poder político, durante el período 2001 - 2004

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Sustainable agricultural intensification or Jevons paradox? The role of public governance in tropical South America

The process of global deforestation calls for urgent attention, particularly in South America where deforestation rates have failed to decline over the past 20 years. The main direct cause of deforestation is land conversion to agriculture. We combine data from the FAO and the World Bank for six tropical Southern American countries over the period 1970–2006, estimate a panel data model accounting for various determinants of agricultural land expansion and derive elasticities to quantify the effect of the different independent variables. We investigate whether agricultural intensification, in conjunction with governance factors, has been promoting agricultural expansion, leading to a ‘‘Jevons paradox’’. The paradox occurs if an increase in the productivity of one factor (here agricultural land) leads to its increased, rather than decreased, utilization. We find that for high values of our governance indicators a Jevons paradox exists even for moderate levels of agricultural productivity, leading to an overall expansion of agricultural area. Agricultural expansion is also positively related to the level of service on external debt and population growth, while its association with agricultural exports is only moderate. Finally, we find no evidence of an environmental Kuznets curve, as agricultural area is ultimately positively correlated to per-capita income levels.

New community governance in small rural towns: the Australian experience

State and federal governments in Australia have developed a range of policy instruments for rural areas in Australia that are infused with a new sense of ‘community’, employing leading concepts like social capital, social enterprise, community development, partnerships and community building. This has encouraged local people and organisations to play a greater role in the provision of their local services and has led to the development of a variety of ‘community’ organisations aimed at stemming social and economic decline. In Victoria, local decision-making, before municipal amalgamations, gave small towns some sense of autonomy and some discretion over their affairs. However, following municipal amalgamations these small towns lost many of the resources—legal, financial, political, informational and organisational—associated with their former municipal status. This left a vacuum in these communities and the outcome was the emergence of local development groups. Some of these groups are new but many of them are organisations that have been reconstituted as groups with a broader community focus. The outcomes have varied from place to place but overall there has been a significant shift in governance processes at community level. This paper looks at the processes of ‘community governance’ and how it applies in a number of case studies in Victoria.

Organizational change in the public sector: augmenting the demand control model to predict employee outcomes under New Public Management

This study identifies the environmental and personal characteristics that predict employee outcomes within an Australian public sector organization that had, under New Public Management (NPM), implemented a variety of practices traditionally found in the private sector. These are more results-oriented, and their adoption can be accompanied by increased strain for employees. The current investigation was guided by two complementary theories, the Demand Control Support (DCS) model and Conservation of Resources (COR) theory, and sought to examine the benefits of building on the DCS to include both situation-specific stressors and internal coping resources. Survey responses from 1,155 employees were analysed. The hierarchical regression analyses indicated that both external and employee-centred variables made significant contributions to variations in psychological health, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment. The external resources, work based support and, to a lesser extent, job control, predicted relatively large proportions of the variance in the target variables. The situation-specific stressors, particularly those involving harmful management practices (e.g., insufficient time to do job as well as you would like, lack of recognition for good work), made significant contributions to the outcome measures and generally supported the process of augmenting the generic components of the DCS with more situation-specific variables. In terms of internal resources, problem and emotion-based coping improved the capacity of the model to predict psychological health. The results suggest that the impact of NPM can be ameliorated by incorporating the dimensions of the augmented DCS and coping resources into the change programme.

Cost information in the new public sector environment : cost accounting change in a state-owned hospital

This paper reports on a case study of the utilisation and users of cost information in a state-owned teaching and research hospital in Australia. The findings indicate that the current utilisation of the cost information resides primarily at higher executive and managerial levels of the organisation. Organisational change, particularly pressure for improved productivity and competitiveness driven by public-sector reforms in Australia, is significantly filtering down throughout the subject hospital. Various productive and unproductive ways that cost information is used, and impediments to the use of costing information in the hospital setting, are identified.