Liberal Digest
Review in "SPOTLIGHT", a national news magazine from Nepal, 1-7th October 2004
On Public Management
The book shows the importance of new public management in achieving good governance.
When the countries around the world have been expressing dissatisfaction over the performance of the public management, the new book explains what is required to bring about the change.
From common citizens to politicians and from members of civil society to the members of administration, all of them are critical about public management system. They complain that the public management is too slow, too expensive and too alienated from the actual needs of the people.
Current debate about good governance promoted by the World Bank, OECD and other institutions is based on negative applications like no corruption, no misuse of public funds and no nepotism. But there are also definitions with a positive objective propounded by Friedrich Naumann Foundation. According to the definition, good governance is a form of governance and public administration, which is able to provide efficiently, i.e. to satisfy the needs of the people. This definition corresponds to what New Public Management is meant to achieve.
"New Public Management is currently the most relevant management sys- tem of public administration worldwide and has been launched in almost all industrial states. Developed in the Anglo-American sphere of influence from the second half of the eighties onwards NPM, has, particularly in New Zealand, already been implemented to a large extent. Public enterprises were privatized, private and public labor markets deregulated," writes Peter Schroeder. "New Public management does not have the same meaning for everybody. For some it is a system of decentralized management with new management ."
Instruments like controlling, benchmarking and lean management. For others it means the maximum possible privatization of public responsibilities."
India's big city Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has already introduced the new management system to cater to the needs of ever growing population of the city. "NPM looks at the internal improvements of the organizations as well as bringing efficiency in delivering services to the customer-base.
The decision of the Bangalore Mahanagar Palika to admit the F-BAS (Fund Based Accounting System) is one of the steps to bring accountability and transparency in the public service," writes Subodh Kumar, executive with the Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung and Raj Cherubal, a liberal activist based in Bangalore.
At a time when Nepal is also trying to improve the public management system, the book could certainly give new ideas…
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