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New Public Management

🏛️ Politics & Public Administration By CampusDown Wiki Editorial Team Last updated
Quick answer: New Public Management is a reform doctrine that brings market mechanisms and private-sector management techniques into government to make administration more efficient through competition, results and customer focus. It took off in the UK and New Zealand amid the fiscal pressures of the 1980s, and Christopher Hood named and summarised it in a 1991 article.
Contents
  1. 1. Background
  2. 2. Hood's seven doctrines
  3. 3. Entrepreneurial government
  4. 4. Main tools
  5. 5. Criticism
  6. 6. References

Background

After the 1970s oil shocks, budget deficits and criticism of "big government" fuelled the view that traditional bureaucracy was inefficient. Public choice theory and new institutional economics (principal-agent theory) supplied the theoretical basis.

Hood's seven doctrines

  • Hands-on professional management
  • Explicit standards and measures of performance
  • Greater emphasis on output controls
  • Disaggregation of units in the public sector
  • Greater competition in the public sector
  • Private-sector styles of management practice
  • Greater discipline and parsimony in resource use

Entrepreneurial government

In Reinventing Government (1992), Osborne and Gaebler urged government to focus on "steering rather than rowing" and proposed ten principles, including competitive, results-oriented and customer-driven government.

Main tools

Typical tools include privatisation and contracting out, executive agencies (the UK Next Steps agencies), performance pay and contracts, block budgets and citizen's charters. Korea adopted similar measures after the 1997 financial crisis: privatising public enterprises, open-competition posts, executive agencies (from 2000) and performance evaluation of public institutions.

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Criticism

  • Treating citizens as "customers" may weaken democratic accountability and the public interest.
  • A fixation on indicators and fragmented organisations can make coordination harder.
  • Denhardt and Denhardt's New Public Service (2000) proposed "serving rather than steering" as an alternative.

References

  1. Hood, C. (1991). A public management for all seasons? Public Administration, 69(1), 3–19.
  2. Osborne, D., & Gaebler, T. (1992). Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit Is Transforming the Public Sector. Addison-Wesley.
  3. Dunleavy, P., & Hood, C. (1994). From old public administration to new public management. Public Money & Management, 14(3), 9–16.
  4. Denhardt, R. B., & Denhardt, J. V. (2000). The new public service: Serving rather than steering. Public Administration Review, 60(6), 549–559.

Reports and materials that use this theory (Korean)

There are no materials dedicated to this theory yet, but you can search related reports in the CampusDown library (Korean).

Find more reports · Search '신공공관리론' on CampusDown →
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This article was last updated on October 15, 2026. It is based on widely recognized original works and textbooks; when citing it in a paper, please check the original sources listed in the references.