New Public Management Staggers On: Why NPM Endures

The Unyielding Grip of New Public Management

New Public Management (NPM) has dominated public sector reform for decades. Though stressed, challenged, and often criticised, it remains a prevailing model in many governments.

Why does NPM continue to hold on, despite rising calls for more collaborative, networked, and trust-based forms of governance? This paper explores the reasons behind NPM’s persistence, examines the reform tools pushing for more horizontal and vertical collaboration in public sectors, and proposes actionable recommendations to shift towards more sustainable and effective governance models.

Understanding New Public Management and Its Appeal

What is New Public Management?

New Public Management refers to a set of administrative doctrines that emphasise efficiency, performance measurement, managerialism, decentralisation, competition, and outputs rather than processes. Under NPM, governments often adopt private-sector techniques, use metrics to drive decision-making, and rely on hierarchical structures and contracts.

Why NPM Is Convenient and Persistent

There are multiple reasons governments stick with NPM:

• Simplicity and Clarity: NPM’s structures are relatively clear-cut—set measurable targets, monitor performance, and hold agencies accountable.

• Existing Institutional Inertia: Many legal, bureaucratic and administrative frameworks are built for NPM-style governance. Changing those is costly, complex, and politically risky.

• Perception of Control: NPM provides visible levers of control (budgets, performance indicators, auditing) that politicians can point to.

• Cost-Containment Pressure: In tight fiscal environments, efficiency becomes the immediate goal; NPM is seen as the tool for achieving that.

• Low Risk Path: New models like networked governance are less familiar; pursuing them requires political, management, and cultural shifts which many prefer to avoid.

These factors help explain why NPM continues to “stagger on…”

The Rise of Collaboration Tools Challenging NPM

While NPM remains dominant, there is a growing body of reforms and tools aimed at fostering more collaborative, trust-based governance. These tools are both horizontal (among public actors at the same level) and vertical (across levels of government or between leadership and employees). Below are some of the key reform tools, rephrased and reorganised for clarity.

Tools for Advancing Horizontal Collaboration

Mandated Public Governance Networks

Governments can create legal frameworks or statutes that force or encourage coordination across multiple public organisations to handle specific problems. These frameworks define network purpose, membership, leadership, and procedures. They are particularly useful in sectors where formal networks have not naturally formed, such as health, education, or safety services. However, mere mandates do not ensure collaboration—effort, trust, and management are necessary.

Public Network Management

Once governance networks are mandated or established, there is a role for dedicated network managers who coordinate, maintain, and sustain these collaborative structures. They facilitate shared services, co-ordinated planning, and inter-organisational problem solving. Examples include natural resource management, urban planning, or welfare delivery. Over time, trust becomes a major coordinating mechanism among the actors.

Tools for Advancing Vertical Collaboration

Decentralisation

Transferring powers from central to local governments, or from superior to subordinated agencies, can flatten hierarchies. This can help reduce command-and-control rigidity and enable more equal relationships—thus facilitating collaboration. But decentralisation alone does not guarantee collaboration; supportive structures and incentives are necessary.

Political-Administrative Meta-governance

Meta-governance refers to the oversight and framing role of senior political and administrative bodies: setting agendas, defining premises for discussion, supplying funds, monitoring collaborative efforts. It operates less by direct command and more by shaping the environment and incentives for lower level actors to work together.

Tools for Advancing Horizontal Collaboration Between Individuals

Integrative Public Leadership

Leadership that crosses professional boundaries, assembling multidisciplinary teams and clarifying roles, reduces confusion and helps build commitment. Such leaders foster collaboration by enabling professionals from different fields to work together on shared public problems.

Team Management

Teams made up of employees with diverse backgrounds can bridge gaps in professional norms, tasks, and values. Strong team management fosters shared vision, common values, and norms. It can also leverage public service motivation rather than purely financial incentives, which tend to dominate under NPM.

Tools for Advancing Vertical Collaboration Between Individuals

Distributed Leadership

Distributed leadership spreads responsibility and decision-making across different levels of the organisation. It requires manager-employee dialogue and joint action. It is especially valuable in sectors like healthcare where complex tasks require collaboration at many levels.

Trust-Based Management

Trust-based management assumes benevolence, competence, and reciprocal responsibility between managers and employees. It is built through practices such as coaching, aligned goals, encouraging experimentation and shared risks. Many studies show that the trust eroded by decades of NPM reforms needs rebuilding.

Why NPM Holds On Despite Emerging Alternatives

Institutional and Ideational Constraints

• Deeply Embedded Legal and Regulatory Systems: Laws, regulations and administrative norms are often constructed around NPM‐style assumptions (metrics, accountability, outputs). This makes reform difficult without broader legal change.

• Professional Norms and Values: Many public servants are accustomed to measures, targets, and performance appraisal. Shifting to collaboration, networks and trust can feel vague or risky.

• Political Incentives: Politicians often prefer visibility and simplicity—for example, being able to promise efficiency gains, cuts in spending, or measurable service improvements.

Resource and Capacity Limitations

• Collaboration tools demand time, trust, facilitation, and investment in capacities such as leadership, network management, and relational skills.

• Many public organisations are resource constrained: staff are overloaded, budgets tight, leaving little slack for innovation or experimentation.

Risk Aversion and Accountability Pressures

• Under NPM, accountability often means auditing, performance tables, quantitative targets. Collaborative forms of governance are harder to assess with standard tools.

• Fear of failure, blame culture, or political backlash discourages experimentation or less predictable approaches.

Path Dependency and the “Easy Path” Argument

• Once systems are structured around NPM, switching becomes costly: retraining, redesigning processes, changing legal frameworks, perhaps even shifting power balances.

• For many governments, defaulting to what is known and what has infrastructures in place is just easier than pushing into unfamiliar collaborative territory.

Case Studies of Collaborative Reforms Gaining Traction

To illustrate how the tools outlined are being applied, below are examples (concise, illustrative) of countries/sectors where collaborative reforms (NPG – New Public Governance) are making inroads.

• Health and Education in England and Canada: Mandated public networks assembling hospitals or schools to work together on shared challenges, with network managers facilitating cross‐institutional learning.

• Chronic Care in Italy: Using networks mandated by legislation to connect multiple providers around standardised care pathways.

• Local Government and Safety Services in Wales and Denmark: Employing public network management to coordinate crime prevention across multiple agencies.

• Urban Planning: In Nordic countries, multiple municipalities coordinate urban housing and infrastructure through networks or shared authorities, moving beyond strict city‐region hierarchies.

• Leadership Innovations in the USA: Integrative public leadership with interdisciplinary teams working on broadband access, sewage treatment, schooling policy, bridging professional silos.

These case studies show that with the right combination of tools—mandated networks, network managers, decentralisation, leadership, trust—governments can begin to shift from purely NPM modes towards more collaborative governance.

Key Challenges in Moving Beyond NPM

Hybrid Models and Internal Tension

Many governments attempt “hybrid” models: some features of NPM (performance management, targets, accountability) combined with networked governance, trust, and collaboration. These hybrids often generate internal tension—conflicting logics, competing demands, and ambiguous roles.

Measurement and Evaluation Problems

Collaborative governance and trust‐based systems are harder to measure using traditional KPIs. Finding ways to evaluate public value, collective outcomes, and relational factors is difficult.

Cultural Resistance

Shifting from hierarchical, command‐based management to more distributed, trust-oriented leadership demands cultural change—a slow process requiring shift in mindsets across multiple levels.

Structural and Fiscal Constraints

Even where political leadership supports reform, existing budgetary systems, legal statutes, and administrative structures often lock in NPM features. Decentralisation, for example, may be blocked by centralised budgeting or lack of local capacity.

Recommendations for Governments to Transition Beyond NPM

Below are suggested actions for governments and public leaders who wish to move away from NPM as default and begin building more collaborative, trust-based governance systems.

Recommendation	Description
1. Institutionalise Network Structures	Legislate or decree mandated governance networks with clear membership, purpose, and decision-making procedures. Ensure legal backing to reduce resistance.
2. Invest in Network and Collaborative Management Capacities	Hire or train network managers, develop managerial skills for building relationships, facilitation, conflict resolution, and shared leadership.
3. Promote Trust-Based Leadership Practices	Encourage managerial practices that support employee autonomy, experimentation, coaching, and aligned goals rather than rigid, control-led models.
4. Redesign Accountability and Performance Systems	Broaden performance metrics to include collaborative outcomes, collective public value, qualitative aspects like trust, employee satisfaction, relational outcomes.
5. Decentralise Meaningfully	Transfer real authority, decision-making power, and resources to local government or subordinate public organisations—not just symbolic decentralisation.
6. Encourage Distributed Leadership and Employee Participation	Empower employees across levels to take leadership roles, contribute ideas, and engage actively in policy design and implementation.
7. Phased and Context-Sensitive Reform	Recognise that changing a system requires gradual implementation, experimentations, pilot projects, local adaptations. Avoid one-size-fits-all.
8. Political Commitment and Enabling Governance Culture	Leadership at political and administrative levels must signal support for collaboration; reward risk taken in collaboration; embed collaborative norms in public sector values.

Towards Adaptive and Relational Governance

Although New Public Management remains deeply entrenched, the conceptual terrain of public administration is shifting. Scholars and practitioners increasingly advocate for governance approaches that emphasise adaptability, systems thinking, and relational accountability. These paradigms—sometimes described as New Public Governance (NPG), Public Value Management (PVM), or Trust-Based Governance—reorient attention away from competition and control, toward cooperation and co-creation.

In these emerging models, the public sector is not a machine to be optimised, but an ecosystem of relationships. Success depends less on meeting numeric targets and more on enabling actors to collectively learn, adapt, and innovate. This requires rethinking not only managerial practice, but also how legitimacy and accountability are conceived.

Reimagining Accountability and Public Value

One of the most persistent obstacles to moving beyond NPM lies in the meaning of accountability itself. Under NPM, accountability is transactional: an agency delivers outputs in exchange for funding, and performance is verified through quantitative indicators. In collaborative or trust-based systems, accountability becomes relational—focused on shared responsibility, open dialogue, and mutual learning between actors.

To embed such a shift, governments must broaden their understanding of public value creation. This involves recognising outcomes that are not easily measured: trust between institutions, citizen empowerment, resilience of communities, or the quality of democratic deliberation. Performance frameworks could, therefore, evolve to incorporate qualitative assessments, participatory evaluation, and citizen feedback loops.

The Role of Technology in Reinventing Collaboration

Digital transformation presents both a challenge and an opportunity in the post-NPM era. Technology can easily reinforce NPM logics—through automated reporting, metrics dashboards, and algorithmic oversight—but it can also enable more participatory and networked governance. Platforms for inter-agency data sharing, digital co-production with citizens, and open innovation ecosystems illustrate how technology can bridge silos and foster trust, provided it is guided by inclusive and ethical design principles.

From Control to Capacity: Building Foundations for Change

To escape the unyielding grip of NPM, governments must move from control-based reform to capacity-based reform. Building collaborative capacity involves investing in soft infrastructure—skills, culture, and relationships—alongside formal structures. This means developing:

• Relational competence: the ability of public servants to negotiate, empathise, and build partnerships.

• Learning systems: mechanisms that allow experimentation, failure, and iterative improvement without punitive consequences.

• Civic capacity: engagement mechanisms that involve citizens, communities, and non-state actors in policy design and delivery.

These capacities cannot be built overnight, but they represent the long-term foundation for sustainable governance renewal.

Towards a Post-NPM Equilibrium

It is increasingly clear that NPM will not simply disappear—it will evolve, hybridise, and coexist with newer governance logics. The challenge for contemporary public administration is to manage this coexistence intelligently. Rather than replacing one orthodoxy with another, governments may need to cultivate a post-NPM equilibrium—a balanced configuration in which efficiency is valued but complemented by trust, collaboration, and adaptive learning.

This equilibrium entails recognising that performance measurement and accountability have their place, but must be tempered by flexibility and relational depth. It also acknowledges that collaboration without direction can drift into ambiguity; hence, strong meta-governance remains necessary to provide coherence and purpose.

Beyond the Grip—A Transformative Path Forward

New Public Management’s endurance is not merely a product of institutional inertia; it reflects a broader comfort with control, predictability, and quantification. Yet, as public challenges become more complex—climate change, digital transformation, social inequality—the limits of NPM’s mechanistic logic are increasingly visible. Collaborative, networked, and trust-based governance offers a compelling, though demanding, alternative.

Transitioning beyond NPM requires courage and patience. It calls for political leaders who value long-term relational outcomes over short-term visibility, administrators willing to share control, and public servants who embrace learning as a collective enterprise. Above all, it requires a redefinition of what “good governance” means—not merely efficient service delivery, but the creation of resilient, adaptive, and trusting public institutions capable of navigating uncertainty together.

The unyielding grip of NPM may not be broken overnight, but it can be loosened—through deliberate institutional redesign, cultural renewal, and the slow, persistent work of rebuilding trust in public service. The future of governance lies not in managing from above, but in leading together.