The new public administration (NPA) is a perspective in public administration that emerged in the late 20th century, focusing on a more collaborative and citizen-centric approach. It emphasizes responsiveness to public needs, community involvement, and the integration of management and social science principles in public sector decision-making. NPA advocates for a shift from traditional bureaucratic models to more flexible and participatory governance structures.

History

Public administration is the term traditionally used to define the formal arrangements under which public organizations serve a government, ostensibly in the public interest. The development of the public administration model dating from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s was influenced primarily by Weber's theory of bureaucracy, Northcote and Trevelyan's recommendations relating to the establishment of a professional civil service in Britain, and Woodrow Wilson's ideas in the United States for the separation of policy from administration (Hughes, 1994). Other managerial theories and concepts over the years have been relevant including Taylor's scientific management and Simon's rational decision-making. Since the 1980s, the traditional model of public administration has been largely rejected by governments in favor of a more focused managerialist model based on private-sector practice, within the context of a market-based economic model of public organization. In more recent years, there have been attempts to balance the economic focus with a renewed emphasis on public organization creating public value. This contribution will first examine the traditional model of public administration including the conceptual and theoretical bases and how this affected organizational aspects. Second, it will explore how and why there has been a paradigm shift from public administration to public management. Third, it will consider future trends. Public administration is the term used to define the formal procedural and organizational arrangements under which public employees serve a government, by implementing and advising on policy, and managing resources. Organizational aspects refer to both the overall structures as well as the relationships that occur within public administrations. This could include: The organizations that make up a civil service, sometimes referred to as the machinery of government; internal organizational arrangements; and organizational behavior. Thus, organizational aspects can be studied in a broad sense or within several defined fields. This contribution covers organizational aspects, widely interpreted. Beyond public administration as a discrete body of knowledge, organizational aspects can be examined through other theories and practices relating to, for example, political science, public policy, sociology, economics, and management. In this sense, each area of study has its own theories and concepts. Furthermore, each state has its own history, organizational form, and approach. However, there are many universal, common elements, which have developed through the international transfer of ideas. New governments, formal review processes, focused research, and events have often stimulated notable change. Therefore, the area of public administration is a difficult area to research, and over the years studies have been largely descriptive rather than empirical. New public administration theory deals with the following issues: First, a "new" theory should start with the ideal of democratic citizenship. The public service derives its true meaning from its mandate to serve citizens to advance the public good. This is the raison d'être of the institution, the source of motivation and pride of all those who choose to make it their life, whether for a season or for an entire career.

Main features

These are:

Themes

NPA provides solutions for achieving these goals, popularly called the 4 Ds: decentralization, debureaucratization, delegation and democratization.

Criticism

Though new public administration brought public administration closer to political science, it was criticized as anti-theoretic and anti-management. Robert T. Golembiewski describes it as radicalism in words and status quo in skills and technologies. Further, it must be counted as only a cruel reminder of the gap in the field between aspiration and performance. Golembiewski considers it as a temporary and transitional phenomena. In other words, the solutions for achieving the goals and anti-goals were not provided by the NPA scholars explicitly. Secondly, how much should one decentralize or delegate or debureaucratize or democratize in order to achieve the goals? On this front NPA is totally silent. As said in A New Synthesis of Public Administration, governments have always been called upon to make difficult decisions, undertake complicated initiatives and face complex problems characteristical of the period. This is not in dispute. Nonetheless, the current circumstances are to determine what can be handled in the traditional way and what must be done differently. Governments have always been called upon to face difficult problems. Setting priorities and making choices have always been difficult. For example, eliminating a sizable deficit is "merely" a difficult problem, although it is hard to believe when one is in the middle of such a heart-wrenching exercise. This entails making choices among equally deserving public purposes and making tough decisions about what should be preserved for the future. It requires reconciling future needs with what could garner a sufficient degree of public support in the short term to move forward. Academic public administration has lagged considerably behind practicing public administration. Improved curricula and a refocusing of emphasis upon the policy dynamics of government administration will be important factors in enticing more students to the study of Public Administration. It is more important to increase the number and improving the geographic spread of universities with public affairs programs, integrating public affairs components into the curricula of other graduate and professional programs, developing many more in-service, mid-career educational programs for public servants, and utilizing existing resources to strengthen public affairs programs. The motives behind the promotion of New Public Administration is also in question in the case of Hong Kong. As Anthony Cheung argues, officials often employed the rhetoric of New Public Administration to roll back public expenditure and decrease welfare provision in the 1990s. Governors at that time used the excuse of administrative efficiency to curtail the power of the bureaucracy.

Significance

Felix and Lloyd Nigro observe that New Public Administration has seriously jolted the traditional concepts and outlook of the discipline and enriched the subject by imparting a wider perspective by linking it closely to the society. The overall focus in NPA movement seems to be to make administration less "generic" and more "public", less "descriptive" and more "prescriptive", less "institution-oriented" and more "client-oriented", less "neutral" and more "normative" but should be no less scientific all the same.

Discipline of public administration