The most important reform movement over the last quarter of a century in
public administration has been New Public Management (NPM). NPM constitutes
the transfer of business and market principles and management techniques
from the private into the public sector, symbiotic with and based on a
neo-liberal understanding of state and economy. The goal, therefore, is a slimlined,
minimal state in which any public activity is decreased and, if at all, exercised
according to business principles of efficiency. It is popularly denoted by
concepts such as project management, flat hierarchies, customer orientation,
abolition of career civil service, depolitisation, total quality management, and
outsourcing. Transparency, citizen involvement, and decentralisation are not
part of the original core of NPM, both theoretically – because the NPM focus
on the apolitical rule of the expert makes them more difficult, and because
they do not necessarily contradict previous forms of public administration at all
– and empirically.