The democratic role of Public Management System

There is no denying the fact just before the emergence of Bangladesh in the middle of 1970; the intact Western globe materialize to have moved into the essence of managerial as well as Financial reforms. Moreover, these restructuring policies actually demonstrate to show up certain general features. They all tend to be more or less managerial reforms. The trend in the track of public management reform is perceptible in the United States, Great Britain, and other Western European management, but on the other side of the globe as well, in Australia, New Zealand and other ‘Western’ countries. The style of reports on developments of administrative reforms of the OECD authenticate that most developments point in the same direction, which is the introduction of ideas, models and techniques of public management, that is the adoption of business management techniques, a greater service and client orientation, the preamble of market process and competition in public administrations.

The adoption of the Public Management Reform is linked with the rise of neo-liberalism and its political variants such as ‘Reaganism’ and ‘Thatcherism’. Hood sees its origin as a marriage of two different streams of ideas: the new-fangled institutional finances and business type ‘managerialism’. According to Linda Kaboolian, the preamble of new public management imparts two extra-ordinary chances to the scholars. She promulgates, ‘The Public Management Reform strategy provides scholars of public administration and public management two extra-ordinary opportunities. The first is to see the unfolding of an international reform movement defined by clearly articulated principles. A phenomenon of this magnitude is a natural object of empirical inquiry to scholars. The second opportunity is to engage in theoretically grounded empirical work and theory building that crosses the boundaries of the disciplines that have studied the public sector’.

In developed states, the orthodox welfarist model of improvement has largely been displaced by the new public management revolution, which involves a major rethinking of the state of its relations with the market. The radical critique of the centralized, inefficient, unaccountable, over-extended state has produced a transformative conception, and intensive efforts to run this conception into practice. Later the new public management has been focussed as an ideological system, featured by the introduction of ideas generated in private sector settings within public sector organisations.

In a recent analysis of public management reforms, it is over and done with that despite differences in nature, size and approach to reforms, a common agenda has developed, ‘a new paradigm for public management has emerged, aiming at fostering a performance-oriented culture in a less centralised public sector’. According to the OECD, this new public management paradigm is characterised by the following eight main trends:

1. developing authority, providing flexibility
2. improving the management of human resources
3. ensuring performance, control, accountability
4. optimising information technology
5. developing composition and choice
6. improving the quality of regulation
7. providing responsive service
8. strengthening steering functions at the centre

Hood presented his widely known definition of ‘new public management’ in his inaugural address in London School of Economics, based on the OECD review.

1. Hands on professional management
2. Competition
3. Standards and performance measures
4. Private sector style management
5. Output controls
6. Discipline and parsimony
7. Disaggregating of units

The components of new public management were both structural (disaggregated organisations and greater competition) and managerial (more visible hands-on management, private sector management practices, tighter cost control, explicit measurement and greater emphasis on out put controls). While the justification for the reforms was founded on the need to make the delivery of public services manageable and accountable, to avoid waste and reduce costs, to encourage competition and customer responsiveness, to apply proven private sector practices and to focus on results, it lead to changes away from a uniform and inclusive public sector and from ‘qualitative and implicit standards and norms’ towards an environment of fewer procedural constraints, more discretionary powers, and to performance-related pay and less secure conditions of employment.

After F.W.Taylor’s ‘The principles of scientific Management’, the various management theories and schools have been developed. There is one theory, model and technique of business management. The trend to introduce business like management in government therefore seems not so much inspired by scientific reason as it is by the ideological Zeitgeist. Several authors have examined the phenomenon of managerial reforms in western administrations, and various more or less different typologies have been published. What they all have in common is at least the following three characteristics:

1. business management techniques,

2. service and client orientation,

3. Market-type mechanisms such as competition.

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‘In Britain, PUBLIC MANAGEMENT REFORM has two divergent strands: managerial and the new institutional economics. Managerial refers to introducing private sector management in the public sector. It stresses: hands-on, professional management, explicit standards and measures of performance, managing by results, and value for money and more recently closeness to the customer. It is often synonym for the ‘3Es’. The new institutional economics refers to introducing incentive structures (such as market competition) in to public service provision. It stresses desegregating bureaucracies, greater competition through contracting-out and quasi-markets and consumer choice’

The introduction of businesslike management began in the British civil service when Margaret Thatcher created the Rayner scrutinies. Mr. Rayner came from a private office and presided in the cabinet office over a project group, which had to support the many scrutinies in the various departments. The terms of reference for the scrutiny team which produced the report ‘Improving Management in Government: ‘The Next Steps’ “to identify the progress achieved in improving management in the civil service” and “to identify the institutional, administrative, political and attitudinal obstacles to better management and efficiency that still remain”. This report recommended reducing the civil service to a small “core” of policy makers and “transferring” other officials to work under free standing agency boards. The ‘agencies’ should be established to carry out the executive functions of government within a policy and resources framework set by a department. Next step report was published in 1987 with view to ensure higher efficiency, better quality, and more value for money-by granting more autonomy to the executive service delivery agencies. Germany, the concept of PUBLIC MANAGEMENT REFORM adopted in different name, which is called New Steering Model. It is evident that France does not particularly have an Anglo-Saxon tradition in respect to state, government and civil service.

New public management in Belgium is associated with a more business-oriented style of management, cutting back on public spending and privatisation. The tradition of neo- corporatism, however, is still firmly in place. In the new structures of the Autonomous Public Enterprises, conventional political and interest groups are settling down in the executive boards with a view to controlling the policy of the public organisations. In these circumstances the freedom of action of the PUBLIC MANAGEMENT REFORMs is likely to continue to be limited.

The advent of new public management to Ireland seems to be already changing the climate and culture of public sector organisations, at the same time as there has been no fundamental structural change in the machinery of government; a more results oriented approach is developing. Relations between the new public manager and politics remain unchanged, both sides seeming to be happy with the present situation: the new public manager has continued to be adverse to politics, seeing that area as best left to political adverse, program managers and the private offices of politicians.

The Nordic countries have also tagged along the concept of PUBLIC MANAGEMENT REFORM but they adopt it on the basis of their own administrative requirement. Markku Temmes believed, “The PUBLIC MANAGEMENT REFORM doctrine seems to have become a water shade in the recent administrative policy of the Nordic countries. Denmark has been a pioneer in applying Public Management Reform, and Danish solutions have been quite typical Public Management Reform- type solutions, although the administrative policy followed has been more carefully pursued than in the Anglo- Saxon countries”.

In Finland, the reform of public sector management, which started in the late 1980s, has spread rapidly throughout all levels of government. Public Management Reform was identified within 134 organisations. Most public managers are located in three types of organisations: result-budgeted and net-budgeted agencies; institutions and business action plans; and public enterprises and state owned companies. These are concentrated in industry and trade, communications and training, and public utilities. Finland has been the most coherent and determined applier of Public Management Reform among the Nordic countries. This impression may have been partly created by the fact that Finland’s radical reforms have come within a fairly short period of time, the year’s 1987-95.

After careful pore over the practice of public management system in the western democracies, it obviously focuses that a major transformation has been made in the public sector management through this new concept. It is true that the main thrust for Public Management Reform began when the western democracies felt that existing government machineries are not functioning well with traditional concept of management. The success of Public Management Reform influenced the donors to introduce this concept in developing countries as condition of their loan. Developing countries are heavily suffered with the huge manpower in the public sector though these peoples are not giving proper service because of their inefficiency and traditional system of management. ‘Developing countries seem intent on following new public management as an organising principle for their societies. This is occurring with encouragement from the World Bank and other international agencies as an effort to overcome their endemic problems of development and the failure of earlier model of development economics and development administration’.