Features New Public Administration (NPM)
The basic feature of features of New Public Administration (NPM) is to ‘Let Public Managers manage’. The main features New Public Administration are:-
1. NPM aims at management and no policy. It views public administration from the managerial angle and applied management solutions to problem, concerns and issues of public administration.
2. It deals with converting public bureaucracies into agencies which deal with each other on a user pay basis.
3.Re-adjusting the role of the government: It uses quasi-market and contracting out to foster competition between public sector and private sector.
4.Performance Improvement: It emphasizes on output and providing monetary incentives for increased performance. It demands quick corrective measures, and rewards both organizational and individual performance. This can be done by performance contracting. Both UK and New Zealand are moving from a tenure system of fixed-term contracts. In financial management, public agencies are changing, from cash to accrual accounting, thus making them more cost-conscious and resources-saving.
5.Client focus: It emphasizes the role of public managers in providing high-quality services that citizenry value. The consumers are re-conceptualized as active customers and not just passive recipients. Public sector organizations, as in UK, Singapore and some other nations are setting performance targets, measuring performance and publicizing results for the wider public. The most dramatic is UK’s citizen’s charter, a global statement of the government’s service quality commitments, launched by PM John Major in 1991. Singapore has set up a service improvement Unit in PM office to keep a watch on departmental efforts.
6.Greater devolution and decentralization: To achieve better performance, the manager need increased autonomy, NPM allows it. In UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore a distinct trend is noticeable toward shifting operating responsibilities from the central departments to specific agencies with clear performance targets and increased autonomy.
7.Flexibility: Greater flexibility in working conditions such as contractual appointment, work place bargaining etc. is being permitted to make use of more expertise, employee creativity and allowing exploration of more cost effective delivery systems.
8. In NPM, organizational structures are simplified and hierarchies flattened to create conditions for more positive and productive managerial leadership.
9.It recognized the importance of providing the human and technological resources that manager needs to meet their performance targets. In the area of human resource management, recruitment policy has to be directed towards drawing the best available talent from the market and constantly exposing them to skill-improving training programmes. Australia is using competency-based training that starts by defining competencies relevant to a given organizational level. UK and Mauritius are tailoring training to the job-needs of rank. Equity initiatives are being taken up in some countries. For instance, Australia has drawn up a strategic plan targeted women, disabled, aboriginal and those with non-English backgrounds. This is expected to expand the pool of talent available to the government.
10.Creating competitive environment: The Public Organizations are made to work in competitive and market like environment. Their costs may be compared with the market costs and the costs of other Public Organizations. NPM synergizes relationship between public sector private sector, NGOs, voluntary organizations, and civil society. Non-government organizations are taking up projects in many countries in the social sector (especially health education, nutrition). In Bangladesh, the role of the Grameen Bank is providing micro-credit to the rural poor, particularly women, has attracted international attention.
FOCUS OF NPM
It is well established that efficiency is not a function of ownership but of management system and methodology. Hence there is a need to change the management, system of public organizations.
Thus NPM focuses on:
1.Achieving three essentials: Efficiency, Economy and Effectiveness– a triangle with three essential on each pillar.
2.It focuses on management, not on administration, because administration connoted certain degree of superiority, hierarchy, control etc. while management is more participative in nature. Thus there should be public Management and not Public Administration.
3.Consumers interests, stakeholders interest, quality of service.
4.Entrepreneurial role
5.Converting inward looking organizations to outward looking organizations.
6.Synergizing relationship between public sector, private sector, NGOs, voluntary organizations, civil society etc.
ANTI-GOALS
NPM rejects the various concepts and principles of traditional public administration. These are:
1)Politics-administration dichotomy
2)Hierarchy ridden organisation
3)Over-centralisation
4)Supremacy of rules in administration
5)Rationality in decision making
6)Impersonal nature
7)Rigidity in administrative process
8)Inward-looking