The “new public management” movement of the 1990s in richer countries
shaped the way international development organizations and many reformoriented
public officials in developing countries began to think about what
governments should do and how they should perform. In their book Reinventing
Government, which reflected innovative reforms in the United States and influenced
thinking in other countries during the 1990s, David Osborne and Ted
Gaebler argue that national, state, and local government should be innovative,
market oriented, decentralized, and focused on offering their “customers” the
highest quality services.13 They and advocates of new public management contended
that governments should “steer rather than row” and oversee service provision
rather than deliver it directly; further, governments should encourage
local groups to solve their own problems by deregulating and privatizing those
activities that could be carried out by the private sector or by civil society organizations
more efficiently or effectively than by public agencies.
New public management focused on making government mission driven
rather than rule bound, results oriented, enterprising, anticipatory, and customer
driven. Government agencies should meet the needs of citizens rather than those
of the bureaucracy. At the heart of this approach to government was the notion
that it had to be decentralized in order to achieve all of the other goals; that is, it
would be most effective working through participation and teamwork among
government agencies at different levels and with groups outside of government