The New Public Service (NPS) approach is perhaps the most
coherent of these approaches. It starts with the premise that
the focus of public management should be citizens, community
and civil society. In this conception the primary role of public
servants is to help citizens articulate and meet their shared
interests rather than to control or steer society (Denhardt and
Denhardt, 2000). This is in sharp contrast to the philosophical
premise of the NPM approach in which transactions between
public managers and customers reflect individual self-interest
and are framed by market principles. It is also distinct from the
old public administration approach where citizens related to
the bureaucracy as clients or constituents and were treated
as passive recipients of top-down policy making and service
delivery mechanisms (Bourgon, 2007). Control and hierarchy
rather than plurality and engagement characterized these