Public Service Innovations, Policy Reform and Governance
Though the term ‘governance’ has gained currency fairly recently, attempts at improving governance are by no means new. As the public bureaucracy has generally attracted increasing criticisms for poor performance and failure on its part to meet the rising expectations of the citizenry, government leaders have always sought to address such situations by devising and introducing innovative policy measures. In this respect, they have also shown growing interests in learning from other contexts and in imitating policy models that have apparently produced better results. Thus administrative innovations and policy learning and/or transfers have been a key feature of drives for upgrading the quality of governance in both developed and developing countries. In recent years, such drives seem to have received fresh impetus especially since the advent of the New Public Management (NPM) as a model of public sector governance
Course Objectives
- Assess changes in public management from a non western perspective.
- Evaluate theoretical arguments that support and reject the adoption of the principles of New Public Management (NPM) and other post-bureaucratic approaches, and assess the advantages and disadvantages to the public sector of pursuing major reform
- Reflect critically on the long-term implications for democratic rule and citizenship of the focus on new methods of public management.